California roadways: What is the difference between a freeway, highway and interstate?

Freeways and highways each have unique qualities. Characteristics for either type of road can vary from design, speed limits and funding. It’s not hard to deny that the technicality in the road names can sometimes get confusing.

What do the variation in names really mean?

The Sacramento Bee spoke with transportation journalist Rob Sanders, better known as Road Guy Rob on YouTube, to discuss the differences on California’s critical ribbons of concrete and asphalt.

This interview has been edited for brevity.

What is a freeway?

It’s in the name: Free. But it’s not about the money.

Sanders: A freeway, even though it has the name free in it ... it has nothing to do with the price to use the road.

It has to do with it being free of conflict. Conflict is any place where there’s a driveway or a cross street, someplace where a car can turn in and out.

A freeway is a grade-separated highway. There are bridges where you go over the cross street or under the cross street. Anytime somebody enters, it’s on a really smooth ramp.

On and off. It’s never a hard right turn.

What distinguishes a highway?

Essentially, conflict. As a driver, you now have obstacles — maybe cross sections or stoplights. There are obstructions.

Sanders: All roads have to serve two purposes and they conflict with each other.

One of them is access. People want to be able to enter the road and exit the road.

Then the second purpose is to get from point A to point B as straight and efficiently as possible. That’s mobility.

A highway is a road that sacrifices access for mobility. The goal is to move people quickly and efficiently, sometimes at the expense of allowing people to enter or exit the road.

A highway can be anything that focuses on distance. It could be rural county roads, just one lane in each direction with a yellow line down the middle. It can be a multi-lane divided highway. It could be a freeway. It could be an interstate. All of those roads are highways, they’re all focused on getting you from point A to point B ... as fast as you can.

Highway is more of an umbrella term — it gets more precise as you go into the term.

How are interstates different?

Interstate highways aren’t altogether different than state highways, Sanders said, but they are designed to a higher set of standards mandated by the federal government. Those standards are meant to facilitate transportation and commerce within and between states.

Sanders: Interstate is a network of highways that, in the 1950s, the federal government planned and helped pay for 90% of the original construction. But states own them.

(To qualify for federal funding) they have to be freeways. They have to have two lanes in each direction. And they have some very strict rules about how wide the lanes have to be.

Because it’s part of the interstate system it automatically is eligible for some federal gas tax money to help maintain it, because its part of the national network. And that’s a big deal on some states like Wyoming where there’s almost no population, but they have hundreds of miles of interstate highway they rely almost exclusively on federal money to maintain that highway.

An official interstate highway designation has to come from the American Association of State Highway Transportation Officials — an affiliation of Caltrans-type people from all 50 states — and approved by the U.S. Federal Highway Administration.

What about U.S. Highways, like Highway 50?

It’s a legacy, carried over from the first highway network created nearly a century ago. Highway 50, officially known as U.S. Route 50, is a main east-west highway running more than 3,000 miles between Sacramento and Ocean City, Maryland.

Western segments of it were part of the original 1913 Lincoln Highway, the first transcontinental road. Its primary purpose in Northern California was superseded by Interstate 80. Despite the name, it’s maintained by Caltrans.

Most of Highway 50 in the capital region, from El Dorado Hills to the terminus with I-80 in West Sacramento, are built to interstate standards. The latter portion — known as the west portion of the Capital City Freeway from West Sacramento to the interchange with Highway 99 — were federally constructed under the unsigned designation of Interstate 305.

Sanders: The U.S. Numbered Highway System came about in the late 1920s. Outside of railroads, cities in America only had dirt trails connecting them. They weren’t much better than the covered wagon routes pioneers used in the 1800s.

The Federal Aid Road Acts of 1916 and 1921 began charging a federal fuel tax. This gave Congress a source of revenue to help stays pay to build a network of “interstate” highways that were made out of concrete or asphalt. These were simple routes, generally one lane in each direction, with few bridges.

When the big Interstate highways were built in the 1950s (with much stricter freeway standards), old U.S. highways fell into a few categories:

1. Some were superseded by an interstate along the same route (e.g., I-40 replaced US-66 through rural California and Arizona)

2. Some were bypassed. In towns and cities, many businesses were directly along the old U.S. highway. To reduce disruption, the new interstate took a new route around the town (e.g., the plot of the Disney film “Cars”).

3. Some never became interstates. The U.S. highway network is far more extensive than the interstate highway network ever can be. An interstate is expensive and tends to connect major metropolitan centers. But U.S. highways tend to connect small towns, too.

Road Guy Rob, videos in which Sanders focuses on transportation issues and the ways people move in California and across the nation, are available at youtube.com/RoadGuyRob.

This story was originally published March 18, 2023 at 5:00 AM.