It seems to me I heard somewhere that Hatunen wrote in article
:

On Thu, 21 Jan 2010 11:23:38 -0800, Don Kirkman
wrote:

It seems to me I heard somewhere that Hatunen wrote in article
:

On Tue, 19 Jan 2010 16:19:02 -0800, SMS
wrote:

Mark Brader wrote:
Steven Scharf:
Can anyone explain why in northern California, if you tell someone how
to get somewhere it's along the lines of "take 280 south to 85 south to
101 south," but in southern California it's "take _the 5_ to _the_ 210
to _the_ 134?

I suspect it's because in southern California they had freeways with
names first, so people got used to saying "the Harbor Freeway" and
so on, and the "the" usage got extended to other roads.

Well the freeways up here have names too, "the Nimitz," "the Bayshore,"
and "the James Lick," but when you use the number of the road you drop
the "the."

Actually even the freeways that are commonly referred to by numbers all
have names that are rarely used. I'd like to see some traffic announcer
decide to use only names one day, "the Luther Gibson has no delays."

Wehn I lived near San Francisco I used to hear traffic reports
about the James Lick Freeway...

. . . aka the Bayshore farther south of SF, and the Eastshore Freeway
through Oakland and Berkeley,

Huh? The Eastshore Freeway isn't an exention of the James Lick
Freeway.

Parsing error: ""the James Lick Freeway . . .|. . . aka the Bayshore
farther south . . .

.. . . and the Eastshore Freeway through Oakland, etc.

And the James Lick doesn't exist south of, I believe,

Right; south of the James Lick is the Bayshore.

the I-280 cutoff to Pacifica. although Wikipedia claims US-101
remains the James Lick inside SF city limits.

and later the Cypress and Nimitz and
others. For me, again the late forties through the fifties.

I don't believe the Cypress was a freeway, but rather a structure
on the Nimitz Freeway (which still clung to the route CA-17
designation when I first moved there, named for the surface
street it paralleled. But I could be wrong.

I won't arbitrate between you and my Kwiki source on the Cypress. :-)
And I'm not clear on the surface streets, but CA 17 was one I traveled
quite a bit between Santa Cruz/Monterey area up into SF, both as a
student at Berkeley and later as a trainee at Fort Ord. Ah, those
were the days. :-)
--
Don Kirkman