U.S. Highway 466

United States Highway 466 was an east-west United States highway. Though it reached a length of around 500 miles, the route was co-signed with other US routes for much of its length. When California decommissioned most of its US highways in the mid-1960s, including US 466 in 1965, there was no longer a need for the designation.

The general route from Kingman to Barstow is now served by I-40.

Table of contents

1 Historic termini
2 States traversed
3 Related US Routes
4 Sources and external links

Historic termini

In an early 1925 plan, US 466 was proposed to run from U.S. Highway 66 at Los Lunas, New Mexico (south of Albuquerque) to El Paso, Texas. This north-south route was never signed in the field; instead, the route was designated as part of border-to-border U.S. Highway 85. This proposed routing is often referred to as "US 466 (I)".
The first US 466 signed in the field, sometimes called "US 466 (II)", was commissioned in 1935. It extended from U.S. Highway 66 in Kingman, Arizona to the Pacific Ocean at Morro Bay, California. Between Las Vegas, Nevada and Barstow, California, the route was co-signed with U.S. Highway 91.
In 1951, the U.S. Highway 93 designation was extended to include the section of US 466 from its eastern terminus at Kingman, Arizona to the US 91 junction in Las Vegas, Nevada. This left the California segment as the only section of the route not co-signed with another route.
Finally, in 1965, California decommissioned the US 466 designation. Arizona eliminated the designation in 1969. When Nevada followed suit in 1971, the route ceased to exist.
In 1955, actor James Dean was driving from Los Angeles to the Laguna Seca Raceway near Salinas. Dean was a few miles east of the western terminus of 466 where it met present-day California State Highway 41 when the Porsche Spyder he was driving crashed into a full-sized Ford sedan, killing him. That stretch between Barstow and Paso Robles is signed today as California State Highway 58.