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US 400: its number is not the only error

4/11/2018

The easternmost of US 400's many overlaps with other US routes.

On a recent roadtrip along US 400, my son asked me, "Isn't 400 kind of a weird number for a highway?" Apparently even non-roadgeeks sense that there is something wrong with the US 400 designation. But it goes beyond that. This post examines all of the things that are wrong with US 400: not only its number, but also its purpose, its implementation, its intra-state nature, its collateral damage, and its amount of concurrent mileage with other US routes. But I'm getting ahead of myself; let's start from the beginning...

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Why and how the Four Corners area US routes should be renumbered (again)

2/22/2017

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It is always instructive to begin by looking at the history of highways in the area, in order to understand how and why the current situation came to be.

To this day, vast tracts of land in northern Arizona and southern Utah are miles away from any kind of paved road. But the remoteness of this area was even more pronounced back in the late 1920s, when the US routes were first commissioned. At the time, there was no road worth showing on maps between Green River and Salina UT (along today's I-70 corridor). Nor between Cortez CO and Tuba City AZ (the path of modern US 160). Nor to the south from Monticello UT (along today's US 191):

c. 1927, Rand McNally

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Why and how US 96 should be renumbered

1/11/2017

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(most recently updated 1/26/2024)
US 96 is one of the worst numbering violations in the US route system, because it is wrong on several levels:

Itseven number implies an east-west route, but US 96 actually runs north-south.
Its two-digit number suggests a longer route, but US 96 is only165 miles in length.
It is an intra-state US route, meaningUS 96 does not cross a state boundary (it exists only in Texas).
In 1937, AASHO (now AASHTO) adopted a policy stating that "No new U. S. route located wholly in one State shall be established." Yet just two years later, the US 96 designation was applied to a route located wholly in Texas.

How did all of this happen? When theUS 59 designation was first commissioned in 1934, it did not turn west from Tenaha (through Timpson and Nacogdoches, as it does today). Instead, it continued south from Tenaha, through Center and San Augustine: