🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <2ofc8e$dh9@agate.berkeley.edu>,
Chris Chan <chrchan@soda.berkeley.edu> wrote:

[...]

>One thing I notice about people in SoCal is that they
>often refer to the freeways by geography, as in the
>"Harbor Freeway", "Orange Crush", "San Bernadino
>Freeway", etc.  I always thought this was done to
>throw off visitors, tourists, and non-natives.  Kind
>of a "locals-only, if you're not familiar with the area
>then too bad" mentality.  Oh yeah, I was born in Torrance,
>spent the past three years in Berkeley, but now live
>in Pasadena.

California began its major freeway building program right after World
War Two, mostly in SoCal. At that time there was no Interstate Highway
program, and the freeways got names instead of route numbers. The names
were mostly geographical. The San Diego Freeway went toward San Diego,
the Harbor Freeway went to San Pedro, etc. Made perfect sense, as long
as you were from the area. And you gotta call 'em something.

For some reason, NoCal went in for freeways named after people. Totally
useless. Although when I first moved here some ten years ago the radio
traffic reports still referred to the Nimitz and the Bayshore
(geographical!). Of course, they also used "17" for the Nimitz, until
it was changed to "880"

Anyway, once the Interstate Highway program was passed, it eventually
became advantageous to incorporate the freeways into the Interstate
system, and they got numbers. Even the non-Interstate freeways have
numbers now. And some freeways, like the upgraded 99 in the San
Jouaquin Valley, don't seem to have a name at all.

Question for old-timers: did the original freeways, like the Harbor,
originally also have numbers (state highway numbers, I would assume).

-- 
    ********** DAVE HATUNEN (hatunen@netcom.com) **********
    *                Daly City California:                *
    *       where San Francisco meets The Peninsula       *
    *       and the San Andreas Fault meets the Sea       *
    *******************************************************