July was not a normal update: It was phase 1 of the site refresh, also known as the “Mapping Project Phase.” In this phase, maps illustrating each route were added to the pages. Future phases in this project will include:
- Adding maps to the county highways, and conversion of the county pages away from the “table” format.
- Potentially adding some more historical maps for the pre-1964 routes, although Tom Fearer/Max Rockatansky/Challenger 66 may be doing this on some of his blogs, and I may just point there.
- Reworking of the site to have one highway per page, instead of the present eight per page.
- Adapting the site for responsive design.
Folks, the short description above may not give what was done sufficient weight. Basically, for every numbered state route, a map was added showing where the route currently runs, or where the route did run when it existed. For some of the routes, there are additional maps and insets providing more history and annotation. The Caltrans postmile tool was of great help here, as was the archive of state highway maps in the David Rumsey collection (linked here). Comments and corrections are welcome, but note the emphasis is not on showing all the historical routings. The primary goal was to give the site user a sense of where the route is or was in relation to the overall state, so that it is more than just a number.
You can see the route pages, with the updated maps, by starting here.
