Old Highway 395, Part 12: US 395 Expwy/Interstate 15 in Temecula (1949-1969) and US 395 Expwy/Interstate 215, Temecula to Riverside (1953-1969)

After awhile it became clear no one was happy with the zigzag routing in western Riverside county, just as suboptimal as the Fallbrook routing to the south in San Diego county (Part 6), and just like New Highway 395 (now Old Highway 395, Part 8) replaced the Fallbrook routing, a new and direct eastern routing to Perris via Menifee Valley was constructed instead.

What became the new US 395 in southern Riverside county was built up in several phases, as shown in the large 1954 Inland Empire planning map at left (click for a 99K enlargement in a new window). US 395 north of Perris to Riverside had always run on the same basic routing, but was expanded in 1942 to service March Air Force Base in Moreno Valley north to Riverside and US 60, which was an active military post during World War II and continued to service as a Strategic Air Command base during the Cold War. (More about the history of March AFB and modern March Air Reserve Base when we get there.) Nevertheless, this was the extent of the highway as it stood after World War II, as during the War little upgrades were done to any highway save those of military import due to the wartime economy.

After World War II, the California Division of Highways resumed their interest in improving routes to and from the growing Inland Empire, making US 395 their chief objective as it was the only major north-south artery at that time (recall that US 91 still ended in Barstow in those days and was not extended to Long Beach, its longest routing, until 1947). The first of the improvements to US 395 started in the south with the 1949 Temecula bypass, shown at right; this bypass avoided the chaotic and narrow Rainbow Canyon Road alignment (Part 9) and constructed a divided highway with two lanes per direction down the grade into the Temecula Valley around the town (see Part 10). Denizens of modern Interstate 15 will recognize the picture as the Temecula grade north of the Border Patrol checkpoint; most of this is now either buried or was repurposed as I-15's northbound roadbed. In 1951, this bypass was extended up to Murrieta and is also part of the modern Interstate's northbound lanes.

To reduce the amount of new alignment construction, the old Antelope Road through the southern Menifee Valley (refer again to the 1933 map, reproduced for your convenience at left [111K]) was adopted as part of the routing, but no road existed directly between Temecula and Menifee to use it and this first connecting piece was constructed in 1952 (now under I-15 and I-215). Antelope Road itself was upgraded for the new traffic but was kept one lane per direction due to its lower traffic counts, with right-of-way reserved for future upgrades (do tell).

As with Temecula to the south, no direct route connected Antelope Rd to Perris either and so two alternatives presented themselves: either route west and north along Newport and Murrietta Rds [sic] towards CA 74, or cross the hills near Romoland and join CA 74 there. Rather than introduce yet another dogleg to be bypassed later, the decision was to go ahead and build the more direct hill crossing alignment now, but reduce the grade with blasting to make it easier for cars and heavier traffic. Thus was the 1952 Big Cut born, which is the characteristic divot in the hills still seen today when crossing into Sun City along Interstate 215 (shown below). We will see the modern Big Cut in a moment after it was widened for the Interstate in 1979.

Parallel to the US 395 construction south of Big Cut was not only the 1952 connection to CA 74, but a new 1953 expressway alignment bypassing the old CA 74 and CA 740 roadbed (today Case Rd) to the north into northern Perris where it connected to the former US 395 alignment, and additional expressway from there to the 1942 March Air Force Base alignment up to US 60 in Moreno Valley; this divided highway was incorporated virtually whole cloth into the modern Interstate, with later grade separations added at the interchanges, some of which was done under the auspices of US 395 in the early 1960s. All of this became part of a rerouted LRN 78 designated by the legislature in 1951, and the construction was fully completed in 1953 and made US 395 shortly thereafter.

After the 1964 Great Renumbering, US 395 remained alone on this alignment, with I-15 only reaching San Bernardino (more about that and surviving signage in Part 17) and US 395 continuing from there to San Diego as we mentioned in Part 8. However, the 1968 Federal Aid Highway Act that provided funding for an Interstate corridor from Colton (next door to San Bernardino) to San Diego eventually only used part of US 395 as its skeleton, although I-15's initial routing south of Hesperia as defined in 1969 used practically all of it. CA 103 was transferred to the new route, leaving CA 163 as the stub of the US 395 freeway in San Diego (Part 3), but the rest became I-15, including through Riverside up to what was already defined as I-15 starting at Interstate 10 in Colton-San Bernardino.

In 1974, Caltrans and the state legislature selected a new routing for Interstate 15 over CA 71 and the unconstructed portion of CA 31 between Temecula and Devore through Corona (see Part 10, and Part 11 on Collier Avenue) in a clever and fairly thinly disguised way of getting more federal dollars to construct a completely new freeway rather than fewer dollars to upgrade an older existing expressway. Old US 395 between Temecula and Devore via San Bernardino, then, was numbered as its spur Interstate 15E, an unusual case of the designated parent route actually being the bypass routing (no longer the case due to new construction in the Corona-Ontario region, but not so in those days), and the portions that were not Interstate standard were called TEMP I-15E, which explains the RTE TEMP 15E sign we saw in Perris (Part 11).

Click the thumbnail at right to open a new window with a scrolling map showing Riverside and San Bernardino in 1947, 1957, 1963, 1969, 1974, 1977, 1984 and 1999.

As shown in the map sequence at right, the new Interstate 15E had a fairly convoluted numbering history during the 1970s and 1980s. Since Caltrans had and still does have an administrative constraint on internal route numbers having letters, it actually carried a completely different internal number as Route 194 (and at least one remnant of CA 194 still survives in the field, in Part 17); when AASHTO started ordering the redesignation of suffixed national routes in the close of the 1970s, I-15E was one of the last holdouts and was not renumbered until 1982 (leaving only I-35W and I-35E which still persist today) to Interstate 215, finally dropping the internal Route 194 designator. Instead of calling the still-yet-to-be-upgraded portions TEMP I-215, however, Caltrans opted for a curious directional dichotomy: northbound traffic rode along "TO I-215" -- signed with a TO banner instead of a TEMP banner -- but southbound traffic was signed along CA 215 with a state shield (the portions that were already Interstate grade were, of course, given a regular Interstate shield in the same fashion as other dual sign routes such as I-110/CA 110), and this dual signage system persisted until the last of the at-grade intersections along the old US 395 expressway were converted or bypassed. Although the section from Temecula to the Big Cut was nearly completely upgraded by 1979 (with the Big Cut widened for the new dual carriageway), the Sun City-Ethanac stretch was not fully upgraded until 1992, and the last of the at-grade junctions along the old expressway between Nuevo Rd and March ARB persisted until 1994 (as my memory serves me). There are still remnants of both designators today, but the CA 215 shields persisted along the road until as late as 2002 when they were finally completely removed (I remember one at McCall Blvd in Sun City that was particularly long-lived).

Route 15E does still survive in the Caltrans bridge logs -- under 08-RIV-215 there is a curious notation JCT RTE 15 SIGNED IN ITS ENTIRETY AS RTE 15E. This has a consequence for the way the postmiles are generated which will probably always remain, and we will look at the anomaly when we get to the I-15/I-215 split.

Interstate 215 is a route slated for significant future expansion virtually demanded by the explosion of housing and commercial business along its corridor: what was formerly a sleepy two-lane-per-direction highway just a decade ago is now a busy, frequently congested artery in a region of inexorable economic growth even in the present quasi-recession (as of this writing). In 2006, Governor Arnold Schwarzeneggar proposed widening of Interstate 215 between CA 60 and I-15, presumably initially meaning up to Nuevo Rd in Perris as the highway is already three lanes per direction north of there. The current plan appears to be to use the ample median for an extra lane, and K-rail has since been erected in the median as a apparent trial balloon, but construction on the project is not likely to start until the middle of the next decade pending environmental planning and engineering design. In total the project is expected to cost over $400 million, but the ultimate width is not decided, and the final goal may be conversion of the entire route to four lanes per direction all the way to CA 60. The 2005 SAFETEA-LU funding act also funded $2.4 million to upgrade the Los Alamos Rd interchange and the CA 74 interchange; the former appears to have been completed in 2008, with the latter still in design and approvals stage as of this writing.