🚀 go-pugleaf

Jeff Peacock writes -- quite accurately:

>In Northern California people use numbers (to identify roads. in Southern 
>California they use names.

He adds

>Often a single freeway
>in So Cal will be referred to by half a dozen different names depending
>on what stretch of it is being talked about...

Actually, the names came *before* the numbers in many cases.  Caltrans or 
its precessor, the state Highway Commission), assigned numbers to named 
freeways as the network developed.  Don't forget that the Los Angeles 
Freeway system began before the national Interstate system.

The Los Angeles' freeway naming convention is by and large to name the 
freeway after whichever destination it has furthest from downtown Los 
Angeles.  Thus, the Ventura Freeway goes to Ventura, the Long Beach 
Freeway to Long Beach.  It's really simple if you think of it that way.

As the freeway system evolved, Caltrans assigned a sometimes changing set 
of numbers to the named routes.  When the Golden State Freeway (once U.S. 
99) and the Santa Ana Freeway (once U.S. 101) became part of the 
Interstate system, they were given the number 5.  But you have to go 
through a major intersection or two to get between them.

    -- Carl Neiburger ( carln@netcom.com)
       a native Angeleno living in San Jose