Curious about the reason for the two-hour traffic jam on the I-5?

I never wonder why there’s 2 hours of traffic on I-5. It’s I-5.

Depends on what section of I-5 you’re on. 5 in LA? Just LA things. 5 in Sacramento? If it’s not rush hour traffic, you should be able to get from Elk Grove to the airport in 15-20 minutes.

I grew up just north of LA. The 5 would take 2 hours for about 5 miles when i was a kid. Still does down there. It’s nice how some things never change.

I live on the complete opposite end of the country. Never heard of the I-5. The fact that OP called it THE I-5 just told me that traffic is expected on it.

If you live on the opposite side of the country, you **should ** know what I5 is. You probably know what I95 is. There are many interstate highways, but from west coast I5, to east coast I95, there are interstate highways I5, I15, I25, and so on that all run north/south. The I10, I20, I30, and so on are major interstates running east/west starting down south. There isn’t actually I50 and I 60, though, but there are US highways where they may have been.

> There isn’t actually I50 and I 60, but there are US highways where they may have been. You’re close, but in fact those numbers were \*intentionally\* omitted; two things contributed to the decision. 1) They didn’t think they needed **9** east-west highways to service 3 major Left Coast population centers — 6½ were enough. (Look at [I-30](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_30); also note I-70 ends in Utah and I-20 also never makes it out of Texas.) 2) Because the US Highways number from N–>S, and the Interstates number S–>N, there was going to be an area where having both I-50 and US50 — two variants of “Highway 50” — would be excessively confusing. So 50 and 60 are the numbers that got skipped on the way North.

That’s interesting. I assume it happened a little later on but I-95, I-195, and I-295 all converge (or very nearly converge) outside of Trenton, NJ, and trying to give people directions through that mess in the days before reliable GPS was maddening.

I wonder what the I-5 is, and why everyone is acting as though it’s common knowledge for the whole world.

I-5 is an interstate highway that runs the entirety of the west coast of the USA, from Canada to Mexico.

Who is acting like it’s common knowledge for the whole world?

If you hadn’t noticed, Reddit is overwhelmingly US oriented.

Tends to happen when half of the sites traffic is from the same country

Not really relevant. Interstate 5 only goes through 3 states. California, Oregon and Washington. Most people in the US never heard of it either.

But we all know it’s an interstate. There’s dozens of interstates that most Americans have no idea where they are. Not knowing where I-5 is has no effect on understanding this post. Really this whole thing is stupid. If this post was about the M5 it makes zero difference and you don’t need to have any familiarity with it at all.

And largely, the interstate system is set up in a way that North/South interstates are odd numbered increasing from West to East, and East/West are even numbered increasing from South to North. Furthermore junctions are usually 3 digits, and if the first digit is even it connects to 2 interstates. If the junction number is odd, it only connects to 1 interstate.

Around me we have I 64, I 264, I 65, and I 265 needless to say people do get them confused.

If you drive a car in the US you should have a basic familiarity with the interstate system. The primary highways make up a grid where there are even numbers divisible by 5 that travel east-west and odd numbers divisible by 5 that run north-south. The east-west routes are numbered from south to north with I-10 being the southernmost and increasing by ten until you get to I-90 which is the northernmost (and longest interstate in the US). The north-south routes are numbered from west to east with I-5 being the westernmost and also increase by ten until you get to I-95 which is the easternmost highway of those main roads. There are other interstate roads that have different numbering and rules about them, but those basic properties should be common knowledge for American drivers even if you’ve never driven on most of those roads.

It’s really only common knowledge for people who drive I-5. Other people in the US don’t know either

One clue is that if the title/reference says **”the”** I-5, instead of just the actual road number, I-5, it’s in California, it’s just a thing they do.

Yeah, using “the” before the interstate number always hits my ears wrong since I’m from the east coast.

It’s because we already had a highway system in place before the National Highway Act. So, “The Santa Monica Freeway”was numbered I-10, but the “The” persists as part of the set nomenclature. Many of our other great that got redesignated to numbers still go by their names to locals, but that’s why we often say “The “.

In Boston we still refer to “the southeast expressway” “the central artery” and such names for parts of the Eisenhower system, but nobody would ever say “the 93” or “the 90” (that one’s “the pike” for Massachusetts turnpike) for the highways here. So while that might be related to how it became the way to refer to highways there it’s not causation or we’d be doing the same thing here.

That’s why we do it, and persistence of course. You guys just caught on late.

It’s *the* I-5.

*The 5

Finally some culture in this thread

Up in the PNW its just “I-5”. Never “the”. So we find this an acceptable compromise with you Californians!

The “fuck this” 5

I like to say “the parking lot previously known as I-5”

Extremely underrated comment. In California, we respect our highway overlord by designating them with THE