This site is your official unofficial source of information on roads and highways in Utah. Here you'll find information on the various numbered state routes, including lengths and history, exit lists for all of the freeways, photos of Utah signage and other highway related information from the Beehive State. You'll also find information about Utah's license plates and motorist laws, and if you read deeper, you may even discover some tidbits regarding the state's history and geography and some other quirky facts!

Why a Site About Roads?

I have always been interested by roads. By itself, a road is nothing more than a line of pavement. But in context, it's much more than that: the line of pavement leads somewhere, and it is connected to other lines of pavements that also lead to more places. Driving along that line of pavement are vehicles, some of them occupied by people who are my neighbors, and others occupied by people from other places - - perhaps even from across the country or from another country.

To some people, all interstates look the same: homogenized twin-ribbons of asphalt punctuated with the same fueling stations and fast food chains at every junction. But I see differences in every state in which I travel. Differences in signing practices, in bridge architecture, and differences in interchange designs. Of our current highways, some were built brand new, on new alignments, while others are the result of several modifications and upgrades to an older highway and they leave a record of those changes for anyone willing to examine and interpret it.

Some people collect and record information on railroads; the routes, the lines, the equipment, and even the signals. In the same manner, I am interested in roads: where they go, why they go there, the differences in signing and marking among the various states, and other ancilliary information. I hooked up with others who suffer a similar affliction on the usenet newsgroup misc.transport.road, and ultimately was convinced to create this site chronicling the roads in the state I now call home.

My first major in college was geography. So, on a more highbrow level, roads and other transportation modes have, on one hand, prescribed man's patterns of settlement on the planet, and on the other, provide a detailed record of the history and progress of that settlement. Early man built cities on coastlines and rivers, because water provided the primary form of transportation. In the 19th Century, they built cities which were connected with the rest of civilization by railroads, and, more recently, in places which are neither along navigable waterways nor railways, but which can be reached solely via automobile.

The pattern of roads on the land and the history of its development, if studied, can yield interesting insights. How did its location help St. Louis prosper? Why does Interstate 80 follow such a circuitous route across Northern Nevada? Why was Interstate 95 never completed in New Jersey? The answers to these and other questions can be found in a study of transportation patterns, and yield great insights, not just in geography, but in the history and politics of the United States.

When I first undertook this project in November 1997, I had no idea how much work it would take! In fact, at the time I did not even know how to code HTML, but the process of creating these pages has forced me to learn. I do not use any WYSIWYG editors; all of my code is written on a text editor, and then tested on Netscape, Internet Explorer, and AOL.

I wish we had had the internet back when I was younger and had more time on my hands, but, even though I'm in my late 30s, it's never too late to learn. I work on this site in my spare time, so I hope the reader will forgive the pace at which content is being added.

Documenting the actual conditions along the roads is another story. As I noted above, I grew up in California, and, as a matter of fact, I have been living in Utah only since late 1995. Part of this project has been for me to learn about Utah's roads myself. My kids probably get tired of piling into the car so I can drive to some road on which I never been and see what it's like, and my wife doesn't like it when I stop to take pictures of road signs!

The information here is by no means complete, but I do have at least basic information for all of Utah's ~300 numbered routes. The rest are, as we are so accustomed to here in Salt Lake City, under construction.

For now, let's get on with the links!