9 Forgotten American Highways Cities Quietly Demolished

America has been abandoning finished highways for a hundred years, and it does not remove them. Pull off almost any interstate in this country, walk two hundred yards into the trees, and there is a decent chance you are standing on somebody's finished highway. Not a survey stake or a plan. Finished pavement, poured and painted and driven on, with lane markings still faintly there under the leaves. Nine of them, in order. Every stretch here was a genuine through route carrying real traffic, with a documented date on which the last vehicle legally used it, and every one is backed by something you can look up: a state highway department record, a council vote, a demolition contract, a landslide report, a road a government physically buried. Where there is a named official on the record, the film names them. The one at number one was abandoned twice. Once as a railroad in the 1880s before a single train ever ran on it, and once again as a highway eighty years later. The tunnels are still down there in the dark. Covered: Devil's Slide, the Ridge Route, the Ramps to Nowhere, the Somerset Freeway, the Embarcadero Freeway, Boston's Elevated Central Artery, Interstate 170 in Baltimore, Route 61 at Centralia, and the Abandoned Pennsylvania Turnpike. CHAPTERS 0:00 Cold open 1:54 · Devil's Slide 3:08 · The Ridge Route 4:27 · Ramps to Nowhere 5:45 · The Somerset Freeway 7:15 · The Embarcadero 8:38 · The Central Artery 10:03 · Highway to Nowhere 11:28 · Route 61, Centralia 12:59 · The Abandoned Turnpike 15:43 What the ground keeps MEDIA Archive photography in this film is public domain unless credited on screen. #AbandonedHighways #RoadHistory #Interstate #UrbanExploration #AmericanRoads #Overpass