Highway designations are determined by direction, latitute, longitude. Mostly, anyway.
It’s insane simple to find your way around the United States. You can simply enter an address in your smartphone’s GPS, or into your car’s phone’s mobile device and a voice-generated voice will guide you through each turn. Before satellite tracking, travelers relied on road maps and a map to keep them on the right track. However, there is a simple code that is found in many US highway designations and can be used to guide travelers, though it’s very basic.
This is probably something older readers already know, but it’s important to remember that the US Numbered Highway System provided a framework for naming highways. It’s more than a random sequence of numbers. Roads running east and west are even-numbered with north-south roads being strange. If you get lost and end up on Interstate 70, it is possible to take some comfort knowing that you are either heading towards the East Coast or West Coast. If you’re on Interstate 75 either cool northern or warm southern states will be coming your way.
still has plenty of room to cover, but the numbering system addresses both direction and location. Even numbers are east-west highways. However, the farther you travel, the lower the number. Interstate 10 runs in the south, while Interstate 90 runs from the Northern Plains to Seattle. This is also true for north-south routes, which start with low numbers in west. Interstate 5 runs along the West Coast of Canada from Mexico to Mexico. Interstate 95 crosses the Atlantic Ocean between Canada and Miami.
The video at the top of this article is CGP Gray. It offers an amusing view at the naming structure. There are, however, some exceptions to the rule. Although we only briefly discussed interstate highways as established by the Federal Aid Highway Act 1956, you will often see the same structure in state and county roads. It’s not difficult to find a road that runs west of California Route 1 in the United States. North Dakota Highway 5 runs east-west, but it is almost in Canada. The system isn’t perfect.
It’s still nice to see patterns in chaos.