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The 405 is the San Diego Freeway, the 5 the Golden State Freeway and the 101 is the Ventura Freeway, but the names aren't used like they used to be. There are also the Hollywood and Pasadena Freeways as well as the Ronald Reagan Freeway cutting across the north San Fernando Valley to Simi Valley where the presidential library is. I've lived in the IE for many years and don't know what the names are for the 91, 60 (Pomona maybe), 215 and 15. Nor the 10, which runs coast to coast.

And getting deeper into the weeds, some are interstates, some are freeways and some are technically routes. But we in SoCal call most every wide expanse of highway a freeway.

 

Weirdest one to me was hearing native North Carolinians refer to their roads as "64 Highway" or my favorite, "Fitty Highway" instead of Highway 64 or Highway 50, if you couldn't figure that one out.

 

There was one drive through there during a fairly serious storm that if I didn't drive a vehicular version of a mountain goat, I probably would have been collected two or three different times in Duval County.

I-95 does far too much winding considering how flat the area is and how much space is available ... not exactly the sort of metropolitan area where everyone has to build up because there's not enough room to build out.

 

There is a very specific sliver of exurban Birmingham that has that naming convention, complete with green blade signs reading “31 Highway” or better still “31 Hi-Way.” Warrior, Ala., is the land time forgot.

 

The 10 definitely is the Santa Monica Freeway when it starts at the McClure Tunnel and goes east to downtown L.A.
Once in L.A., it resumes being the 10. I've never heard it called the San Bernardino Freeway, or anything else, except the Santa Monica Freeway for 13 or so miles.
If you go the other way through the McClure Tunnel, you're on the 1, also known at Pacific Coast Highway. You're still in Santa Monica for a few miles, then briefly in Pacific Palisades, then Malibu and up through Point Mugu, Oxnard, Ventura and Santa Barbara. One of the best drives in the world.

 

The weird thing is - traffic reporters north of LA just say Highway 580, 680, 24 etc. I imagine some early local traffic reporter started it in LA and it became a thing.

 

I always wanted to go to the Slauson cutoff, just to see someone cut off his Slauson.

 

It started because, as pointed out above, the LA area freeways were referred to as named routes instead of numbered routes. So it was The Pacific Coast Highway (CA-1). When the numbers took over, LA never stopped using the definite article. It wasn’t the same in Northern California because we just used numbers. And frankly Nor Cal has it right.

 

When did people start using area codes (complete with preceding article) to refer to locations?

"I'm moving to the 305," meaning Miami.

 

It was the 90s, when cell phones really started spreading. It got under way in the 80s when caller ID became more than a high-tech oddity. But ordinary mortals started thinking in terms of area codes when cell phones with digital display became common, and then universal.

 

Would that be a hip hop thing? It’s the first context I heard that in

 

Sounds logical to me. Not my area of expertise.