Калифорнияның SR 46 тас жолы

Highway in California

Once it enters the San Joaquin Valley, SR 46, known as the Paso Robles Highway, follows an almost perfectly straight eastward alignment, crossing SR 33 at Blackwells Corner, passing through the Lost Hills Oil Field, and intersecting I 5 about past Lost Hills and the crossing of the California Aqueduct. SR 46 then passes through the Semitropic Oil Field about west of Wasco. SR 46 and SR 43 overlap for a short distance in the city of Wasco, and then SR 46 passes over Calloway Canal and Friant Canal before it ends at SR 99 in Famoso. The county maintained Famoso Road continues east across SR 65 and into the Sierra Nevada foothills. and east of US 101 is part of the National Highway System, a network of highways that are considered essential to the country's economy, defense, and mobility by the Federal Highway Administration. The highway from SR 1 to SR 41 near Cholame is an eligible State Scenic Highway, but it is not officially designated as a scenic highway by the California Department of Transportation.

As part of the second state highway bond issue, approved by the state's voters in 1916, Route 33 was created, linking the San Joaquin Valley trunk (Route 4, now SR 99) near Bakersfield with the coast trunk (Route 2, now US 101 in Paso Robles, passing through the Coast Ranges via Cholame Pass. The road was not yet built in 1919 when the Automobile Blue Book recommended only the county maintained "very poor road" (now SR 58) via Simmler as a connection between the valley and Central Coast. By 1925, the Cholame Pass highway had been improved, and paving was completed in December 1930. An extension west to Route 56 (now SR 1) near Cambria was added in 1933; however, it ran along Santa Rosa Creek Road, north of today's alignment. However, Route 125 had still not been paved between Cholame and Atascadero by the 1950s and so US 466 was moved to the longer but better quality Route 33 via Paso Robles, replacing SR 41 to Paso Robles and overlapping US 101 to Atascadero. As SR 41 had not been signed over the unpaved road west of Paso Robles, it was truncated to Cholame. US 466 was eliminated in the 1964 renumbering, becoming SR 46 east from Paso Robles. However, instead of going south and west to Morro Bay, SR 46 continued west to Cambria and the road via Creston and Atascadero to Morro Bay (which had since been paved) became part of SR 41. A new two lane expressway carrying SR 46 west from Paso Robles was built in the mid 1970s, replacing Santa Rosa Creek Road. Between 1994 and 1999, there were 206 accidents along the corridor, resulting in 17 deaths, The intersection between SR 46 and SR 41, known locally as the Wye, was more accident prone than the statewide average. The California State Legislature dedicated that intersection as the James Dean Memorial Junction on September 30, 2005, for the 50th anniversary of the actor's death in a car crash near that site. The California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) carried out an interim safety project west of Cholame in December 1995, mandating daytime headlights and installing thermoplastic striping, a concrete barrier and rumble strips. In 2006, Caltrans identified SR 46 as a "critical east west corridor connecting the Central Coast and Central Valley areas of California", in an environmental impact statement that approved the road's expansion. In 2010, the first stretch of newly widened road opened in Paso Robles, utilizing funds from a 2006 statewide ballot proposition. A series of additional projects and progressed eastward over the next decade. In March 2022, construction began on the section near Cholame that led to the Wye. On April 25, 2023, workers broke ground on constructing a new grade separated interchange at the James Dean Memorial Junction, which is scheduled to be completed in 2026. The 3.6 mile (6 km) portion of SR 46 leading to Kern County, known as the Antelope Grade Section, is scheduled to begin construction in 2026.