Headlines and Related Material About California Highways - July 2018

Another month has come to an end. I’ve been preoccupied this month with the “Mapping Project”; more on that in a subsequent post. But until then, here are some headlines and related material about California Highways that I’ve collected over the month:

• Custom Highway Shields – OpenStreetMap Wiki. A good source for blank shields for those drawing maps. In particular, it provides a good US blank shield for California sign usage, vs. what comes up from Shields Up.
• June 23, 1907: Auto Club Begins Posting Road Signs Along Future Route 66.  June 23, 1907. The Auto Club of Southern California has begun posting white enamel signs with blue lettering along Foothill Boulevard between Los Angeles and Riverside.Spending about half a day, auto club President George Allen Hancock and Charles Fuller Gates, who is in charge of the county’s signage, staked the route through Highland Park, South Pasadena and Pasadena, Lamanda Park, Baldwin’s ranch, Monrovia, Azusa, Glendora, Claremont, Uplands, Cucamonga, Etiwanda, Stalder (34.0119/117.3125 to folks with GPS) to West Riverside.
• Highway 395 widening project to begin later this year.  Significant progress is being made in addressing one of the High Desert’s biggest transportation priorities — the widening of US Highway 395 from Victorville to Adelanto. Later this year, work will begin on nearly $60 million in improvements to the busy stretch of highway — a major freight traffic route and passenger corridor that connects economic centers, recreation areas, cities and rural communities.
• Caltrans Last Chance Grade Expert Based Risk Assessment (PDF). This report presents the methodology and findings of the expert-based risk assessment BGC Engineering conducted for the Last Chance Grade portion of US 101 in Del Norte County. The drawings attached to the report were developed as part of this process and were instrumental in the expert panel review. The other content reviewed by the panel has been published previously and is not duplicated here.
• Truckee bridge construction taking off in Tahoe City.  Since the beginning of May, road blocks and orange cones have lined the edges of California Route 89 leading into Tahoe City, marking the beginning of a major construction project that is expected to run through Oct. 15. The project, originally conceptualized in the 1994 Tahoe City Community Plan, is a new Truckee River bridge — a rebuild of Fanny Bridge.

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Changes to the California Highways Web Pages - July 2018

July was not a normal update: It was phase 1 of the site refresh, also known as the “Mapping Project Phase.” In this phase, maps illustrating each route were added to the pages. Future phases in this project will include:

• Adding maps to the county highways, and conversion of the county pages away from the “table” format.
• Potentially adding some more historical maps for the pre-1964 routes, although Tom Fearer​/​Max Rockatansky/Challenger 66 may be doing this on some of his blogs, and I may just point there.
• Reworking of the site to have one highway per page, instead of the present eight per page.
• Adapting the site for responsite design.

Folks, the short description above may not give what was done sufficient weight. Basically, for every numbered state route, a map was added showing where the route currently runs, or where the route did run when it existed. For some of the routes, there are additional maps and insets providing more history and annotation. The Caltrans postmile tool was of great help here, as was the archive of state highway maps in the David Rumsey collection (linked here). Comments and corrections are welcome, but note the emphasis is not on showing all the historical routings. The primary goal was to give the site user a sense of where the route is or was in relation to the overall state, so that it is more than just a number.

You can see the route pages, with the updated maps, by starting here.

This entry was originally posted on Observations Along the Road as Changes to the California Highways Web Pages - July 2018 by cahwyguy. Although you can comment on DW, please make comments on original post at the Wordpress blog using the link to the left. You can sign in with your LJ, DW, FB, or a myriad of other accounts. Note: Subsequent changes made to the post on the blog are not propagated by the SNAP Crossposter; please visit the original post to see the latest version. P.S.: If you see share buttons above, note that they do not work outside of the Wordpress blog.