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The first United States automobile highway system originated in the 1910s with a series of named highways, known collectively as National Auto Trails. The major routes were named for American Presidents; for example the Lincoln Highway ran from New York City on the Atlantic coast to San Francisco on the Pacific; the Jefferson Highway from New Orleans north to Winnipeg, Manitoba, CanadaCanada historically the Dominion of Canada is the second-largest, and northernmost, country in the world. It is a decentralized federation of 10 provinces and 3 territories, governed as a constitutional monarchy, and formed in 1867 through an act of Confe. A major exception to the presidential names was the Dixie Highway, running from Miami, FloridaThis article is about the city in Florida. for other meanings, see Miami (disambiguation . Miami is a city located in southeast Florida in Miami-Dade County on the Miami River, between the Florida Everglades and the Atlantic Ocean, in the United States. to Sault Ste. Marie, MichiganSault Ste. Marie is a city located in Chippewa County in the U. state of Michigan. As of the 2000 census, the city had a total population of 16,542. It is the county seat of Chippewa County 6. It is on the Canadian border, separated by the St. Marys River. Such obsolete highway names survive only in scattered locations in the United States, mostly on old highway routes that have been bypassed by later larger highways and now are used mostly by local traffic. The old named highways were marked with horizontal bands of color on telephone & telegraph poles and posts beside their routes, sometimes suplimented by letters (eg; a red, a white and a blue stripe with an "L" indicated the Lincoln Highway; two blue stripes with "JH" indicated the Jefferson Highway; two white and one red stripe with "DH" showed the Dixie Highway).
Discussion about the form of the proposed United States Numbered Highway system began in 1924Centuries: 19th century 20th century 21st century Decades: 1870s 1880s 1890s 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s Years: 1919 1920 1921 1922 1923 1924 1925 1926 1927 1928 1929 See also 1924 in aviation 1924 in film 1924 in literature 1924 in mu, a preliminary list was ready by the next year. The final list was approved on November 11, 1926. During 1927, the named highways began to be replaced with numbers. US numbered highways do not have a minimum design standard, unlike the later Interstate highwayThe Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways commonly called the interstate highway system is a network in the United States of interstate highways or simply interstates . Nearly every interstate highway is a controlled-acce system. Roads on the United States highway system are not usually controlled-access (stoplight free) roads. Many are the main streets of the cities and towns they run through. The United States Highways are state highwayA state highway in the United States is a numbered highway primarily administered by a state government. These are generally a mixture of primary and secondary roads, although some freeways double as state highways (for example, Route 128 in Massachusettss, funded just like any other state highway.
Numbering of US highways is not controlled by the Federal government. The American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) collectively agrees on the routes to be signed.
On maps and the road, a US highway is indicated by a number on a white sign in a shape of a shield with six points, five above, one below. Until the 1980s, the regulations which describe the sign did not explicitly state that they should be white, leading the state of Florida to use different colors for different roads from the 1956 until 1994 - http://www.us-highways.com/.
The numbering system consists of a one, two, or three digit number. For routes 1 through 101, odd numbers represent north-south highways and even numbers represent east-west. Major North-South US routes were designated by ending in 1. Major East-West US routes ended in zero. The numbers increase moving east to west and north to south. In contrast, the modern Interstate reverse the grid. Route numbers greater than 101 are spur or secondary routes given a number consisting of a single digit prefixed to the number of the "parent" route; for example, US highway 331 is the third secondary route that branches off US 31.
Further defining the system, suffixes have been used. Equal splits in a route were designated E and W for East / West and N and S for North / South. Existing examples include US 31E, US 31W, US 70N and US 70S. This sort of equally split route is not as common as it used to be.
Additional loop and spur routes are defined as Alternate routes (A routes) Bypass and Business Routes (B routes).
The Interstate highway system of limited access highways was begun in the 1950s as the National Defense Highway System. These new highways were to supplement the existing United States highway system, not to replace the US highway system, although in some areas an interstate did replace an older US highway.