Portal:Michigan highways/Selected article/October 2015

US 27 is a part of the US Highway System that now runs from Miami, Florida, to Fort Wayne, Indiana. In Michigan, it previously entered the state south of Kinderhook and ended south of Grayling. Its route consisted of a freeway concurrency with I-69 from the state line north to the Lansing area before it followed its own freeway facility northward to St. Johns. From there north to Ithaca, US 27 was an expressway before continuing as a freeway to the Grayling area. Created with the rest of the US Highway System on November 11, 1926, US 27 replaced a pair of state highways between the state line and the Cheboygan area. For a time, US 27 even extended from Cheboygan to St. Ignace over the Mackinac Bridge. The highway was converted into a series of freeways starting in the late 1950s. The northernmost section between Grayling and Mackinaw City, bypassing Cheboygan, became part of I-75, and US 27 was truncated to Grayling. Starting in the 1960s, the southern sections were included in I-69. The last section of Interstate in Michigan was completed in 1992 when I-69/US 27 opened southwest of Lansing. In the 1990s, a bypass of St. Johns north of Lansing was built, the last freeway segment of US 27 to open under that designation. On April 16, 1999, the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) approved the removal of the US 27 designation from the state of Michigan; this change was put into place when the highway number was removed from signage in 2002. Former segments of US 27 from its pre-freeway configuration are still state highways in the form of M-27 between Indian River and Cheboygan or the various business routes in the state that previously bore Business US 27 (Bus. US 27) designations. (more...)

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