I would need to doublecheck, but I’m pretty sure that Oxnard is the biggest city in Ventura County. Thousand Oaks may be a bit bigger.
Oxnard has 180,000 residents approximately. Santa Barbara and Ventura are smaller.
I believe Oxnard is the biggest city along the Central California Coast section of US 101 (between LA and San Jose).
Let’s make this topic more interesting . . . what is the largest city in the US or Canada that is not within 10 miles of a LIMITED ACCESS HIGHWAY, interstate or not?
Last I heard, route 7 ends at Haines, about 75 miles north of Juneau. To get to Juneau from there you have to take the ferry (the so-called Alaska Marine Highway).
Speaking of Alaska, Anchorage may be the second-biggest city in the U.S. without a nearby Interstate Highway. (It is the 65th biggest city in the U.S.)
According to my handy Route Log and Finder List of the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways , Highways A-1, A-3, and A-4 all serve Anchorage.
There isn’t a limited access highway on Vancouver Island as far as I can tell, so Victoria, BC would be a candidate.
There also seem to be no limited access highways near Winnipeg and I don’t believe the Trans-Canada Highway in Newfoundland is limited access either.
I’ll be darned. I didn’t realize Alaska had Interstate Highways. There are four, but they are marked as state routes, not as Interstate Highways. They are two-lane roads for most of their lengths, but there are some four-lane stretches around Anchorage. See http://www.alaskaroads.com/Interstate-ends.htm
You are mistaken, but it is understandable. While segments of Hwy 7 pass through both Haines and Juneau, it is not contiguous. You can’t drive from Juneau to Haines, or anywhere else for that matter.
I want to thank everyone for an intriguing excursion into the sort of trivia I find interesting – I would never have thought of California in coming up with an answer!
One thought, however, to kniz’s comment above, particularly the italicized part: While I am in no way opposing the idea that Birmingham and Memphis deserve connection by interstate highway (and have a number of other observations on where additional interstates ought to be built), I’d have to disagree with the conclusion in the italicized sentence. If one takes I-75 northwest from Atlanta to Chattanooga and picks up I-40, this will take you directly to Memphis with connections to St. Louis, or from Natchez to St. Joe, wherever the four winds blow… 
I can’t speak for Canada but as for the lower 48, I recall hearing somewhere that Dubuque, Iowa (approximate population 60,000) is the largest city that’s not near either an interstate or limited access highway. I also think the fast-growing city of Bend, Oregon (aprox. population 53,000) may be a close second.
Any other candidates?
As I remember it, The highway leading North out of the San Fernando Valley was US 99 (not a state route, because it goes through California, Oregon and Washington) until the Interstate Highway system was adopted and I-5 was built. Then 99 and I-5 were the same until you got north of the Tejon Pass (called “the Grapevine” by most Californians). You can still see portions of the old road from I-5 on the pass. The split-off is just north of Gorman.
There was one under construction last time i was there in the early nineties. It may just have been a bypass around Parksville and Nanaimo though.
What’s the largest city in Delaware? Dover? Delaware, like Alaska, is interstate-free.
Delaware has I-95, I-295, and I-495 all passing through it.
Last post completely wrong. I-95, 495 go through Wilmington.
over the wire by two minutes… preview! preview!
No limited access highways anywhere in Manitoba, as far as I know, and I live there.
Well, you can go to Chattanooga, but you’re not going to pick up I-40 there. In Chattanooga, you pick up I-24 to Nashville, and only pick up I-40 there. You can also pick up TN 96 in Murfreesboro and take it across through…Franklin, TN, I believe, and come out a little East of Jackson, TN. The 75 to 24 to 40 route is definitely the long way around to go from Atlanta to Memphis.
But the only other realistic way to go from Atlanta to Memphis is I-20 to Birmingham, then US 78 to Tupelo. From there you can take US 45 north to Corinth, MS (I believe) and US 72 West. I’ve never driven direct Memphis to Tupelo - I’ve always had to go through Corinth because of work, so I’m not sure if US 78 runs all the way to Memphis or if you have to pick up US 72 or I-55. For the record, I may have mixed up US 72 and US 78 - I’m doing this from memory and can’t lay hands on my atlas at the moment. But an interstate would be most helpful.
For some reason the state of NC was very slow in building interstate highways. I-40 did not get completed around Raleigh until 1983. I-40 was supposed to end in Raleigh but it was later extended to the coast at Wilmington.
Most places in Alaska are only accessable via airplane (or maybe snowmobile or dogsled) To get to Whittier by car which is on the coast you used to have to load your car on a train. Now you can drive there. Whittier is also the town where almost everyone lives in 1 10 story building.
Not to mention H-3, which I thought they had completed by now - they were working on it when I visited Hawaii for the first and only time, in 1995-96.
We might want to change the question to largest metro area without a limited access highway. There are suburbs all over the US with larger populations than Dubuque (even mine, which has I-84 run through it), and because they’re so new don’t have limited access highways. I’m guessing places outside Las Vegas and Phoenix, the two fastest growing metro areas in the 90s, grew faster than the speed of highway building and candidates for the title could come from there.
It opened a few years ago after working on it for … 30 years.