San Bernardino Freeway

San Bernardino Freeway

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San Bernardino Freeway

The San Bernardino Freeway is the name of an approximately 60-mile (95 km) long segment of Interstate 10 (I-10) in Southern California between the cities of Los Angeles and San Bernardino. It is one of the principal development axes of Greater Los Angeles, with numerous suburban communities along its route. The name officially turns north near Colton onto I-215 to Highland Avenue (former SR 30) north of downtown San Bernardino, where the Barstow Freeway continues northwest,^[1]^[2]^[3]^[4] but this segment of freeway is not commonly known by that name.

Route description
History and features
Legal definition
Exit list
References

Route description

Starting at the Santa Ana Freeway, it travels east through the San Gabriel Valley and the Pomona Valley. It then crosses the Los Angeles/San Bernardino county line and enters the Inland Empire. At the Interstate 215 interchange located in San Bernardino this segment of Interstate 10 ceases to be the "San Bernardino Freeway". Beyond this interchange, I-10 continues eastward through the communities of Redlands and Loma Linda and leads southeast into Riverside County. Following its traverse of the San Gorgonio Pass it continues eastward to the California/Arizona stateline.

Major alternate east-west routes are the Foothill Freeway (I-210), the Pomona Freeway (SR 60), and the Riverside Freeway (SR 91).

History and features

The San Bernardino Freeway near the interchange with the Ontario Freeway (I-15).

Aerial photo of the 10 freeway intersecting with Garfield Avenue in Monterey Park

The precursor to the San Bernardino Freeway, the Ramona Expressway, was built in 1944 to connect the then-new Kaiser Steel mill in Fontana to war industries in downtown Los Angeles. The road was so named because it replaced Ramona Boulevard through the western San Gabriel Valley. The relatively primitive nature of the road can be seen in the architecture of the onramps and offramps to roads in the western San Gabriel Valley, which require sharp, dangerous turns at low speed in order to enter or exit the freeway. In the Eastern San Gabriel and Pomona Valleys, many of the older ramps were replaced over the years, because land was still readily available. The entire freeway opened up in 1957 which was originally signed as US 60 and 99. The city of San Bernardino changed out the green plates with Interstate 10 in 1964.

The massive volume of commuters traveling between Los Angeles and its eastern suburbs, and the heavy commercial truck traffic transporting goods/materials between the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach and the railroad yards and warehouses in the Inland Empire, make the San Bernardino Freeway one of the busiest freeway corridors in the United States. In response to severe congestion in the early 1970s, the California Department of Transportation, otherwise known as Caltrans, renovated the freeway segment between the downtown Los Angeles and El Monte to incorporate one of the earliest examples of high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) or "carpool" lanes, the El Monte Busway.

The San Bernardino Line of the Metrolink runs in the freeway's center median between El Monte and I-710, then travels along the north side of the freeway to the East Los Angeles Interchange.

Beginning in the 1990s, additional HOV lanes have been added (one lane per direction) to the freeway segment between the Kellogg interchange complex in Pomona and the interchange with the Ontario Freeway, Interstate 15 (I-15) in Ontario.

Legal definition

The San Bernardino Freeway is Route 10 from Route 101 to Route 215, as named by the State Highway Commission on November 18 1954.^[5]

Exit list

Note: Except where prefixed with a letter, postmiles were measured in 1964, based on the alignment as it existed at that time, and do not necessarily reflect current mileage. The numbers reset at county lines; the start and end postmiles in each county are given in the county column.

County	Location	Postmile ^[6]^[7]^[8]	#^[9]	Destinations	Notes
Los Angeles LA S0.00-S0.66 18.39-48.27	Los Angeles	S0.00	19B		Westbound exit and eastbound entrance
		San Bernardino
			10 R24.24 215 4.05	72 40		No exit number westbound; east end of I-10 overlap; south end of I-215 overlap
			San Bernardino
				8.60	45A	, Mountain Resorts	Northbound exit and southbound entrance
	9.03			45B	Muscupiabe Drive	Northbound exit only
	9.36			46A		Southbound exit is via exit 46B
	9.72			46B	Mt. Vernon Avenue, 27th Street
	9.72				Continuation beyond Highland Avenue