Decommissioned highway
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A decommissioned highway is a highway whose status is downgraded. 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 1986 in favor of faster, more direct Interstate highways. Some state highways may be partly decommissioned, such as M-21 in Michigan or wholly (the older Arizona State Highway 79) decommissioned in favor of newer Interstate routes. Another example would be U.S. 61 - the portion of the route north of the Twin Cities to the Canadian border was downgraded to a state highway.
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. At times the highway that the superhighway supplants may be demolished so that it cannot be used for such illicit purposes as impromptu drag racing or as an airstrip for drug traffickers, particularly in the thinly-populated areas of the western United States in which the resources of law enforcement might be pointlessly overstretched. The highway may be demolished for the purpose of allowing the old roadbed to revert to a more natural state.
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; they find the designation of the route useful even if the fiction that the highway remains a long-distance route to Cincinnati, Ohio and beyond is no longer a necessity.
Intrastate U.S. highways, such as old U.S. Highway 230 between Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and Lancaster, Pennsylvania are often reduced to state highways.
Superhighways, although generally much safer and easier to drive, necessitate a more decisive manner of driving than do the older highways on which motorists generally stop at the intersections of numbered highways; at higher speeds and without the possibility of stopping at the junction, motorists must decide earlier that they wish to exit the superhighway. Multiple designations for the same highway, whether on the superhighway itself or on the intersecting road, often contribute to severe accidents due to the confusion that they might impose upon an unwary motorist. The extreme violations of this principle, as in the unusual multiplexes, each defunct, of US 60/70/80/89/AZ-93 through Phoenix, Arizona, US 66/91/395 near San Bernardino, California, especially where it met US 70/99, or even US 60/70/99 through California's Coachella Valley, permissible for political reasons in the era of surface highways, would be hazards at superhighway speeds.
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 will decommission state highways to county road status. 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. Many of these roads were spurs into small towns and state parks.
[edit] Outside the United States
The phenomenon also exists in the Canadian province of Québec, where Autoroutes similar to American Interstate Highways, supplant old through routes, and in Germany, 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).
