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Interstate 90 is the longest interstate highway in the United States. It begins in Seattle, Washington at Atlantic Street and 4th Avenue S. next to Safeco Field and ends in Boston, Massachusetts at Logan International Airport.
3112.82 miles (5009.60 km)
One of the most peculiar and hazardous stretches of Interstate 90 is the section of highway passing through downtown Cleveland, Ohio, known locally as "Dead Man's Curve". Here, the road takes a nearly 90-degree turn. While there are plenty of large signs and flashing lights alerting motorists to this turn, there have still been a large number of accidents due to inattentive motorists.
In 2003, the Seattle terminus was re-engineered to better accommodate traffic from the two nearby sports stadiums. I-90 still ends at its previous location next to Qwest Field, but begins about 1/4 mile south at Atlantic Street near the roof shed of Safeco Field.
The New York portion of the road is a toll road, the major east-west portion of the New York State Thruway, operated by the New York State Thruway Authority. It was originally constructed as part of the Thruway project in the middle 1950s and received its current designation as Interstate 90 in 1958. The Massachusetts stretch, also a toll road built in the mid-1950s, is known as the Massachusetts Turnpike.
I-90 incorporates two of the longest floating bridges in the world, the Lacey V. Murrow Memorial Bridge and the Third Lake Washington Bridge, which cross Lake Washington from Seattle to Mercer Island, Washington. They are the second and fourth longest such bridges, respectively.
I-90 terminated at Interstate 93 in Boston until it was connected through to the Ted Williams Tunnel in January 2003 as part of the Big Dig, extending I-90 to Boston's Logan International Airport, an additional 1.3 miles beyond the 3111.52 miles already paved.
Until 1995 in Montana right by the Idaho border, I-90 was not a divided highway for a few stretches. Until 1999, the speed limit in Montana was "reasonable and prudent"; it is now 75 mph.
Not only is the I-90 section of the NYS Thruway marked backwards, with mile numbers going down as you go east, but there were two metric only signs going westbound. They were around Syracuse, which is about 100 miles from Canada. The NYS Thruway administration decided to test metric signage (which I am told included [briefly] an 88 km/h speed limit sign) on the Thruway. As legend has it, when one of the metric pushes was on, the state representative from that district was deadset against it. The Thruway chose his district (Liverpool, next to the former GE plant) as the test site.
I-990 is the highest number given to an Interstate.
To add to the quirks about the longest interstate, it also has the longest distance twinned with another interstate (I-80 in Ohio and Indiana, I-94 in Illinois and Wisconsin) in the most states 4 (Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin.) It also intersects the same interstate six times (I-94 near Michigan City IN, Chicago (southside), Chicago (northside), Madison WI, Tomah WI, and Billings MT).
It has been said that technically I-90 is not a complete "Interstate" as the Chicago Skyway did not meet the current interstate standards, making I-80 the longest "true/no interrupted" interstate without any gaps between the endpoints.
Between LaPorte, Indiana and Toledo, Ohio, with Interstate 80, it is nowhere more than ten miles from the Michigan state line.
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