I understand that using “the” before a freeway name or number is a Southern California-specific regionalism. (“Take the 10 West to the 5 north, get off at Hollywood Way…”)
My question is, why do we do it that way? When did it start? Or, why does the rest of the world not use the definite article when talking about numbered/named roads?
Anyone know anything about the history of this linguistic quirk?
People in other places don’t usually use ‘The’ before the numbered road name but they do use it in other cases. 1-90 in Massachusetts is ‘The Mass Pike’ for example. We would never say The I-90 though. That’s just dumb. I know that doesn’t answer your question exactly but there are other road name quirks in other places as well.
And that sort of summarizes my hypothesis. It’s very common in LA to refer to freeways by their names (Santa Monica, etc.), and so “the” just carried over to the numbers, too.
But we really don’t know the answer, and the OP should do a search and see where we’ve done this topic before in this forum.
You understand wrong. In the UK we do it all the time, for all numbered roads.
In Chicago it’s common to say “Take the Edens,” or “the Stevenson,” but not as much for numbered roads. I might say something about 294 or 90, but don’t say the. But for named expressways, it’s common.
And the usage is common in Southern Ontario as well, for freeways. We say “Highway 401” or “the 401”. We sometimes use names as well: “the McDonald-Cartier Freeway” or “the Highway of Heroes”. (All four of these refer to the same highway*, though “the Highway of Heroes” refers only to the part of the 401 between Trenton and the 404, along which fallen soldiers are conveyed from Trenton air base to downtown Toronto.)
Strangely, we don’t usually say “the <number>” for a highway which is not a primarily a freeway.
[sub]*A highway which I refer to as “the Evil Death Highway of Doom”, but that’s another issue.[/sub]
I have always felt that it was because the word “freeway” was implied. I grew up in SoCal and it’s weird to me that they don’t say “the” in front of the highway number out here on the East Coast.
Until the late 70s, Southlanders called their freeways by names: the Hollywood Freeway, the Long Beach Freeway, the Santa Monica Freeway. But the introduction of unfamiliar or unwieldy new names for freeways (Richard Nixon Freeway, San Gabriel River Freeway) caused first radio traffic reporters and then the general public to begin using numbers in some instances, but using the old language pattern: the 605 freeway. This was quickly shortened to the form “the 605.”
David Brodsly’s 1981 book, L.A. Freeway: An Appreciative Essay, makes no use of the numerical argot. Perhaps a Doper with access to the Los Angeles Times online archives could check to see when the terms “the 405” or “the 10” first appeared in print.
But no-one in Southern California says “The I-405” or “The I-5” either.
The “I” is dropped, and it becomes simply “The 405” and “The 5”.
I’m pretty sure this is why. It’s really no different than saying, “The Jersey Turnpike,” etc., it’s just that so many freeways sprang up that it seemed to be easier to identify the name.
But that was only at first. Now, traffic reporters use the names just as much if not more. What happened is that as drivers got more used to driving longer distances on so many freeways, and got more used to listening to traffic reports, it made sense to go back to the names (as opposed to numbers only). Think about it: You need to remember that the names don’t refer to the whole length of the freeway number now. If you’re trying to negotiate and plan a route, and you hear a traffic report that’s talking about several accidents/problems—maybe up to five or more—you need to know the specific place. If the reporter says, “There’s an accident on the northbound Five at Colorado,” you have to think longer to know exactly where that is and whether it’s going to affect your drive, and Interstate 5 is really long. But if he says, “There’s an accident on the northbound Golden State Freeway,” etc., you get an immediate idea of where it is. “The Golden State Freeway” specifically refers to the part that’s north of downtown (not all the other parts of Interstate 5 which have different names).
So while your friends still call it “The Five” everywhere, the reporters will say “The Golden State” or whatever part they’re talking about so it can more clearly identify which portion the problem is at.
And yet, it helps when you hear someone on national media talking about freeways, because you immediate know which side of the country they’re talking about.
Yes, but when people do say the full word (“Interstate”) they drop “the” just as people on the East Coast do.
Exactly. This is in fact what people in So Cal say, and if you drop the I you need the the. It would be absurd and confusing to just say the number. (If someone just told me to “take 5,” I would think they were talking about Dave Brubeck). Perhaps the question should be why do people in other parts of America insist on saying the I instead of using the (if, in fact, they do).
In my So Cal experience, by the way, although the media have a tendency to use freeway names (at least for stretches of freeway where the names are reasonably well known), regular people mostly use the numbers. The names, have a confusing tendency to change along what are sometimes relatively short stretches of the same road, and some of the official names for some bits of them are actually quite obscure.
In Britain we use both article and letter, and say “the M4,” “the M25,” “the A1,” etc. (M for “motorway” being our equivalent of America’s I for interstate).
I grew up using the convention so it’s natural to me, but after hearing other people using ‘I-[whatever]’ I thought about it and this is the answer I came up with. We use ‘the’ because we don’t use ‘I’ – and ‘freeway’ is implied.
I moved to SoCal from Missouri, and I thought the “The” sounded funny, but found it impossible to resist after awhile. I just accepted that Interstate 5 is “The 5” and Interstate 70 is “I-70” and tried not to say “The 70” when in the back in the midwest.
I remember for awhile that freeway signs on 110 downtown directed you to Golden State and Santa Ana freeways, but didn’t say whether you would be going North or South on the 5. It has since been fixed (was that what the vigilante road sign artist was correcting?)
This phenomenon results in some interesting film and TV goofs, when characters who should have no reason whatever to use the California way of talking about highways do so anyway. There’s at least one egregious example from The X-Files which I just don’t seem able to put my finger on at the moment.
Artist’s rendering of a well known story about *the Van Wyck *in NYC.
That’s the Southern California way. Maybe even only LA.
People in Northern California will commonly use bare anarthrous numbers for interstates (no ‘I’ in front). Numbered highways (federal or state) might be called the same way but are almost as likely to be called “highway ##”. Using the names of freeways is largely out of fashion but sometimes you hear it.
Exceptions:
‘I-5’ is accepted; much more than ‘I-880’, for example.
‘Highway 1’ is almost always used instead of ‘1’. (As an aside: people referring to all, or the wrong part, of Highway 1 as the PCH is one of the biggest annoyances I have with respect to highway names. See section 635.c if you want to know the official label)
Toronto, Ontario here and we say “The 401, The 427” etc.
Alas, if that were only true. The SoCal “the” has been creeping into many NorCal folks that I know of late.
And of course we don’t say I-880. It’s 17. 
When I was a kid I mostly didn’t hear numbers. It was more like “Take the Hollywood to the Harbor” or somesuch. I don’t know when the numbers started getting dropped in instead of names, but I do remember that 1 was always 1, or Highway 1, not “the 1” or “the highway one.” So it seems like I-10 is just the new name for what used to be called the PCH or the Santa Monica.
I dunno, makes as much sense to me as “the Bronx.”
As a tourist in the US I would always have (up to now) referred to “the I-95”, not realising it sounded dumb. Where I come from it’s normal to say “the M11”, “the N17”, etc., and I didn’t realise this wasn’t done in the US.