The Drive 🤝 your inbox. Every weekday
The Daily Brief wraps up the biggest stories and our exclusive reporting on the auto industry and car culture.
Route 66 is America’s most iconic road, and it’s turning 100 this year. A centennial road trip might be a tempting idea, but because Route 66 was bypassed by the Interstate system decades ago, large stretches have been abandoned, along with the roadside attractions and services that once made it worth driving. So one very dedicated fan mapped the entirety of Route 66 as it exists today to aid those who plan to motor west the old fashioned way.
Jake Boyles is the developer of the Pit Stop: Road Trip Exit Guide app, which shows restaurants and other points of interest located near highway exits. He spent this past summer mapping Route 66 to create a version of the app specifically for the historic highway. It lets you scroll through all 2,199 miles, showing elevation changes and places to stop along the way. You can even choose a car in an appropriately 1950s shade of turquoise or a white roadster that recalls the Corvettes used in the 1960s Route 66 TV show.
Pit Stop
Route 66 starts in downtown Chicago just a few blocks from Lake Michigan and ends at the Santa Monica Pier, as far as you can go without driving into the Pacific. It’s no longer the main thoroughfare between the Midwest and California, but the miles in between still offer plenty of sites. If you’re an Eagles fan (not the football kind), you can drive to Winslow, Arizona, on Route 66 and stand on a corner. Then you can check out Meteor Crater, where NASA astronauts trained for the for the Apollo missions, just a few miles down the road. It’s all here in this app.
Also included are essentials like gas stations, food, and motels. In a Reddit post, Boyles says he mapped about 2,400 places to eat and 1,300 motels in the 280 towns along the route. That’s vital information for any road trip, but particularly here because the mostly out-of-the-way route means you’re less likely to happen upon a highway travel center or other development on some of the more rural stretches.
Ford
Route 66 was established on November 11, 1926 as part of the original U.S. highway system. It’s loomed large in pop culture ever since, being declared the “Mother Road” by John Steinbeck in the seminal novel Grapes of Wrath, and becoming the poster child for road trip culture and all the kooky roadside attractions that entailed. Most of its traffic was diverted to the Eisenhower-era Interstates in the 1950s and 1960s, and Route 66 was removed from the federal highway system altogether in 1985. Parts of it are more off-road trail than highway today, but there’s still plenty to explore.
Expect plenty of Route 66 nostalgia for the road’s centennial year. It recalls a time when roads meant possibility, not stifling traffic. Today, if somebody bothers to mention a highway by name, it’s probably to complain (we’re looking at you, 405 and BQE). No wonder this obsolete highway is still capturing people’s imaginations 40 years after its official demise.
Stephen has always been passionate about cars, and managed to turn that passion into a career as a freelance automotive journalist. When he’s not handling weekend coverage for The Drive, you can find him looking for a new book to read.
