Decommissioned highway

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A decommissioned highway is a highway that has been removed from service, shut down or has had its authorization as a federal or state highway removed. Decommissioning can include the complete or partial demolition or abandonment of an old highway structure because the old roadway has lost its utility, but such is not always the norm. Where the old highway has continuing value, it likely remains as a local road offering access to properties denied access to the new road or for use by slow vehicles such as farm equipment and horse-drawn vehicles denied use of the newer highway.

Decommissioning can also include the removal of one or more of the multiple designations of a single segment of highway. As an example, what remains as U.S. Route 60 between Wickenberg, Arizona and Phoenix, Arizona carried the routes of three US highways (U.S. Route 60, U.S. Route 70, U.S. Route 89) and one state highway (Arizona State Route 93).[1] The highway remains a federal highway, but with fewer designations.

Decommissioned highways are most common in the United States of America, as the states build freeways as a new classification of highways, the state may strip the old highway of its old designation as a numbered highway or downgrade it to a 'lesser' status. For example, U.S. Route 66, which connected Chicago and Los Angeles from 1926 until 1972, lost its designation as a U.S. Highway in stages until it disappeared altogether in 1985 in favor of faster, more direct Interstate highways. Some state highways may be partly decommissioned, such as M-21 in Michigan or wholly (Texas State Highway 9) decommissioned^[1] in favor of newer Interstate routes. Another example would be U.S. 61, which became Minnesota 61 - the portion of the route north of Duluth, Minnesota to the Canadian border.

At times the road itself is incorporated into the newer route. Interstate 44 between Springfield, Missouri and the western suburbs of St. Louis, Missouri assumed much of the old divided surface highway of Route 66 as it was upgraded to full freeway. Segments of the old surface road through a town may be redesignated as business routes of the newer highway, highways of a "lower" classification (as in Arizona State Highway 66) or as unnumbered local roads. The highway may be demolished for the purpose of allowing the old roadbed to revert to a more natural state where the road loses its economic usefulness to agriculture and roadside businesses. Such is visible from parts of Interstate 80 in Nevada; the former U.S. Highway 40 is in good repair for a short distance -- paved and marked -- as an access road for abutting ranches, but not far away the road is at first poorly maintained (pavement has deteriorated) and then impassable; vestiges of the abandoned roadbed and culverts are visible from the newer freeway.

Where superhighways supplant all but a terminal section of a highway in one state, that short segment may itself be reduced in status. M-25, originally part of the older U.S. Highway 25 illustrates this tendency. M-25 remains quite useful for those people who travel through the shoreline communities along Lake Huron.

Intrastate U.S. Highways such as old U.S. Highway 230 between Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and Lancaster, Pennsylvania are often reduced to state highways.

At the extreme, a highway is, like California State Highway 480, not only decommissioned but demolished. The highway, once intended as a loop around San Francisco, was never completed as first designed and was often seen as a blight upon the neighborhood (Chinatown) that it traversed. Once part of the Interstate Highway System, it required retrofitting to remain in service after the Loma Prieta Earthquake of 1989 to remain in use, and the highway was demolished within two years. [2]

In some metropolitan areas, all surface routes are decommissioned on the city side of some designated loop highway.^{[citation needed]} In Indianapolis, all surface highways have lost their US or state highway designations 'inside' Interstate 465 (Interstate 65 and Interstate 70 are exempt from that decertification inside Indianapolis). Likewise, all surface streets "inside" a loop that consists of Interstate 65 and Alabama State Route 152 in greater Montgomery, Alabama, including the northernmost segment of U.S. Highway 331 have lost any State highway designations. The old routes are either truncated or diverted onto the loop highway. The old State and US routes remain as surface streets, but they are not designated as suitable routes for long-distance travel through greater Indianapolis or Montgomery.

Even as superhighways supplant older surface routes as through routes, some historical highways get attention from those with antiquarian (and commercial) interests in the continued recognition of such routes. Route 66 in the midwestern and southwestern United States is a prime example of such efforts; "Historic Route US 66" markers, completely unofficial, designate most of the old surface road, some of which has literary significance (as in John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath).

Also, states decommission state highways to county road status.^{[citation needed]} One example is on July 1, 2003, the state of Iowa decommissioned approximately 700 miles of highways, which were transferred to various counties throughout Iowa.^{[citation needed]} Many of these roads were spurs into small towns and state parks.

A highway that leads from one road to a town may be decommissioned should the town lose its economic reason for existence. The short Arizona State Highway 62 that connected the town of Chloride, Arizona to U.S. Highway 93 went from state to local maintenance after the mine that the highway served went out of business.

[edit] Outside the United States

The phenomenon also exists in the Canadian province of Québec,^{[citation needed]} where Autoroutes similar to American Interstate Highways supplant old through routes, and in Germany,^{[citation needed]} where Autobahns supplant an older through route, as in Bundesstraße 60 (best translated as Federal Highway 60), which disappeared as the A40 Autobahn supplanted it. In the Republic of Ireland, National Primary Routes are often realigned after the construction of new motorway sections, dual carriageways or bypasses. The old route thus loses its national route status and is usually redesignated as a Regional Road (or if the old route is unimportant, a local road).