Skip to main content

North Carolina's two new future Interstates 42 and 87 - one signed, one not yet

It hasn't taken North Carolina long to start putting up signs announcing the new Interstate Highways Corridors in the Eastern half of the state.  Future Interstate 42 signs are already up along US 70 from Clayton to New Bern.  Two weeks ago, I grabbed this shot on US 70 East at the start of the Clayton Bypass once you get on the highway from Interstate 40.


Signs for Future Interstate 87 aren't just ready yet.  For the past three weeks - these sign posts stand tall and alone on US 64 just east of Interstate 95 in Rocky Mount.

Now, this delay may be because NCDOT is wanting to erect the new signs and update the Future Interstate 495 signs at the same time; or who knows maybe a write-in campaign to protest the I-87 designation to the FHWA worked!

Comments

Steve Sobol said…
People seriously are complaining about the I-87 designation?
Bob Malme said…
Mostly the Roadgeek community due to either the duplication of the number, that it's more an east-west route than north-south, or both. The hold up on installing the I-87 signs may be due to the existence of I-495/Future I-495 along the corridor from Raleigh to I-95 and the need to get the FHWA and AASHTO to sign off on the decommissioning of that route before any other route number can be put up.
Anonymous said…
Yo interstate 87 end in Harlem nyc how gping have that in nc they need look for another number

Popular posts from this blog

Paper Highways: The Unbuilt New Orleans Bypass (Proposed I-410)

  There are many examples around the United States of proposed freeway corridors in urban areas that never saw the light of day for one reason or another. They all fall somewhere in between the little-known and the infamous and from the mundane to the spectacular. One of the more obscure and interesting examples of such a project is the short-lived idea to construct a southern beltway for the New Orleans metropolitan area in the 1960s and 70s. Greater New Orleans and its surrounding area grew rapidly in the years after World War II, as suburban sprawl encroached on the historically rural downriver parishes around the city. In response to the development of the region’s Westbank and the emergence of communities in St. Charles and St. John the Baptist Parishes as viable suburban communities during this period, regional planners began to consider concepts for new infrastructure projects to serve this growing population.  The idea for a circular freeway around the southern perimeter of t

Hernando de Soto Bridge (Memphis, TN)

The newest of the bridges that span the lower Mississippi River at Memphis, the Hernando de Soto Bridge was completed in 1973 and carries Interstate 40 between downtown Memphis and West Memphis, AR. The bridge’s signature M-shaped superstructure makes it an instantly recognizable landmark in the city and one of the most visually unique bridges on the Mississippi River. As early as 1953, Memphis city planners recommended the construction of a second highway bridge across the Mississippi River to connect the city with West Memphis, AR. The Memphis & Arkansas Bridge had been completed only four years earlier a couple miles downriver from downtown, however it was expected that long-term growth in the metro area would warrant the construction of an additional bridge, the fourth crossing of the Mississippi River to be built at Memphis, in the not-too-distant future. Unlike the previous three Mississippi River bridges to be built the city, the location chosen for this bridge was about two

Memphis & Arkansas Bridge (Memphis, TN)

  Like the expansion of the railroads the previous century, the modernization of the country’s highway infrastructure in the early and mid 20th Century required the construction of new landmark bridges along the lower Mississippi River (and nation-wide for that matter) that would facilitate the expected growth in overall traffic demand in ensuing decades. While this new movement had been anticipated to some extent in the Memphis area with the design of the Harahan Bridge, neither it nor its neighbor the older Frisco Bridge were capable of accommodating the sharp rise in the popularity and demand of the automobile as a mode of cross-river transportation during the Great Depression. As was the case 30 years prior, the solution in the 1940s was to construct a new bridge in the same general location as its predecessors, only this time the bridge would be the first built exclusively for vehicle traffic. This bridge, the Memphis & Arkansas Bridge, was completed in 1949 and was the third