[ale] Ot: exits on 400

Lightner, Jeff JLightner at dsservices.com
Mon Jul 27 14:35:31 EDT 2015


I don't recall ever having seen the opposite direction numbering mentioned below.   At this point I've driven to all 49 continental states and have never seen that on interstates.    Numbering does get interesting on loops like I 285 in Atlanta metro and I 610 in Houston Metro but so does "direction" naming.   In Houston they had roads labeled as "North Loop West" and "West Loop North" and all the various permutations of the 4 directions at the start and end which was a bit confusing.   Another interesting thing is that there can be more than one I 285 loop off of I 85 - each state starts numbering with 2## then the next loop will be 4## and the next 6## etc...

It was odd though that for so long Georgia (and Pennsylvania) did sequential numbering rather than mile marker.   I recall when they changed in Georgia (for interstates) a few years ago - I think they were renumbering with every county (or possibly metro area) before the change.  Delk Road in Cobb county was exit 11 before the change and became exit 261 after the change.  Delk was most assuredly NOT just the 11th exit either North to South or South to North on I-75 in Georgia.   By the way - mile marker numbering does NOT eliminate the "A", "B", "C" designations - you'll see those often especially near downtown or other congested areas where there are multiple exits within the same mile.

Years ago before I realized they did number by mile marker in West Virginia I worked at a hotel and gave someone directions in which I told them to get on I-70 "here at exit 11" and go to "the next exit, exit 5".   They questioned me why the next exit would be 5 if this one was 11 and I had to say I didn't know why but knew that it was so.    It was later I found out that PA did NOT number by mile marker and their confusion was caused by the fact we were at the WV/PA border (and my ignorance at the time).


-----Original Message-----
From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of Alex Carver
Sent: Monday, July 27, 2015 1:29 PM
To: ale at ale.org
Subject: Re: [ale] Ot: exits on 400

That's a really odd one.  Federal regulations required mile markers on federal highways to increase west to east and south to north for a great many years (since at least the inception of the Interstate Highway System in the early 1940's and the Federal-Aid Highway act of 1956) so for any of them to be backwards like that would be really unusual.

On 2015-07-27 08:30, Jim Lynch wrote:
> Another thing they appear to have done is enforce the direction the 
> numbers go.  I remember before 2000 going from one state to another, 
> the last number in the state you were leaving might be 1 and the new 
> state mile marker was also 1.  I think that's been fixed too.
> 
> Jim




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