Portal:U.S. roads/Selected article/August 2015

The Delaware State Route System consists of roads in the U.S. state of Delaware that are maintained by the Delaware Department of Transportation (DelDOT). The system includes the portions of the Interstate Highway System and United States Numbered Highways system located in the state along with state routes and other roads maintained by DelDOT. All roads maintained by the state are assigned an internal maintenance road number. DelDOT maintains a total of 5386.14 mi of roads, comprising 89 percent of the roads within the state. Some large bridges in the state are maintained by other agencies including the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Delaware River and Bay Authority. Roads in the system include multilane freeways, multilane surface divided highways, and two-lane undivided roads serving urban, suburban, and rural areas. Some of the roads maintained by DelDOT are toll roads. The first roads in Delaware were Native American trails and unpaved roads laid out by colonial Swedish and English settlers. From this time, counties were responsible for roads. In the 19th century, private companies operated several turnpikes radiating from Wilmington. Thomas Coleman DuPont proposed a modern road in 1908 to run the north-south length of the state; this road evolved into the DuPont Highway that was completed in 1923. The Delaware State Highway Department was formed on April 2, 1917 to construct a state highway system in Delaware. Numbered routes came with the creation of the U.S. Highway System in 1926; state route numbers appeared 10 years later. In 1935, the state took over the remaining county roads. In the middle part of the 20th century, several major roads were widened into divided highways. The creation of the Interstate Highway System in 1956 led to the construction of 40 mi of freeway in northern New Castle County, including the tolled Delaware Turnpike. The Delaware Route 1 limited-access toll road between Dover and Wilmington was fully completed in 2003.

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