Skip to main content

Interstate 540 Opening

Well, it's been covered in detail by many. But another nine miles or so of I-540 opened in Raleigh on Tuesday the 16th. I finally checked it out this afternoon. the new highway is nothing out of the ordinary, although it does a lot for traffic flow in Northeast Raleigh and Eastern Wake County.

With my company's office now off of I-540, the new highway would have been a blessing for me at my former apartment off of US 401. There is one 'roadgeek' surprise on the new highway. Between US 64 Business and the US 64/264 freeway in Knightdale, there are a set of Interstate 540 North Carolina shields. (One in each direction.) So here it is.

Comments

Jon Lebowitz said…
Wow, nice find! Especially since the state named interstate shields are very rare there, i think i spotted maybe like 2 on 77, 3 on 85, and 1 i saw on 95 when ive drivin thru NC.
Welcome back south and great find on the new I-540 section.

One of these days, I gotta just make a roadtrip up there to do some "clinching" (if for no other reason).

Georgia never seems to be consistent when putting up new Interstate shields. Some will be "neutered" and others will have the state name on it.

BTW, Florida and Virginia also seem to have been going back to using the state names on theirs (at least in some places). Could this be a trend?
Billy said…
I'd like to check I-540 out sometime, but I'm rarely in the Raleigh area.

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