Why Does Highways That travel North and South Have Odd numbers? Why do East and West has Even Numbers?

Question

Why Does Highways That travel North and South Have Odd numbers? Why do East and West has Even Numbers?

Answer 1

awesome question - no idea so i googled it and came up with this

http://www.snopes.com/autos/law/highways...

and this

http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/programadmin/int... (about halfway down to interestate numbering heading)

after having read of all of that i am however still unable to answer the question of *why*

Answer 2

Go to this link http://www.snopes.com/autos/law/highways... and it will explain it all to you. That was by far one of the most intriging questions I have ever come across, so I looked it up. It was WAY too much and WAY too confusing for me to put anything down so I just put the link in.

Answer 3

Actually, that goes back to the early days of Railroads in the U.S. when routes north and west had odd numbers and routes going east and south had even numbers.... it continued on with the modern highway system with the obvious change of North/South being odd and East/West being even..

Answer 4

i think one is an interstate highway and one is just a highway

Answer 5

Interesting... the interaction between the Interstate Highway and State Highway systems...

I'm not sure WHY that numbering system WAS chosen, but it was because a simple grid was set up...  Also note that the highway numbers grow from West to East, and South to North.

Initial federal planning for a nationwide highway system began in 1921 when the Bureau of Public Roads asked the Army to provide a list of roads it considered necessary for national defense, resulting in the Pershing Map. Later that decade, highways such as the New York parkway system had been built as part of local or state highway systems. As automobile traffic increased, planners saw a need for such an interconnected national system to supplement the existing, largely non-freeway, United States Numbered Highway system. By the late 1930s, planning had expanded to a system of new superhighways. In 1938, President Franklin D. Roosevelt gave BPR chief Thomas MacDonald a hand-drawn map of the U.S. marked with eight superhighway corridors for study.

Answer 6

That was the convention that was used when assigning numbers to interstate highways, and the states followed the same for state highways.