US Highway 75 | ||||
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Route information | ||||
Maintained by TxDOT | ||||
Length: | 76.158 mi (122.564 km) | |||
Existed: | 1927 – present | |||
Major junctions | ||||
South end: | I-345 / Spur 366 in Dallas | |||
I-635 Pres. George Bush Tpk. in Richardson US 380 in McKinney US 82 in Sherman US 69 in Denison |
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North end: | US-75 / US-69 near Denison | |||
Highway system | ||||
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In the U.S. state of Texas, U.S. Highway 75 (US 75) is a U.S. Highway that begins in Dallas and heads north to the Oklahoma state line.
In the initial assignment of state highways in 1917, Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston were connected by a branch of State Highway 2 (the Meridian Highway), which ran via Waco and Bryan and continued on to Galveston. The more direct route followed by US 75 was not initially part of the system between Richland (connected to Dallas by SH 14) and Huntsville (connected to Houston by SH 19). This Richland-Huntsville cutoff was added by 1919 as SH 32, and US 75 was assigned to the alignment, as well as SH 6 north of Dallas, in 1926. The branch of SH 2, which US 75 followed between Houston and Galveston, eventually became part of SH 6, and these numbers were dropped in the 1939 renumbering.
Prior to the coming of the Interstate Highway System in the late 1950s, the only improvements to US 75 in Texas beyond building a two-lane paved roadway were in the Houston and Dallas areas. However, the highways in and near these cities included some of the first freeways in the state: the Gulf Freeway (Houston, opened to traffic on October 1, 1948) and the Central Expressway (Dallas). When Interstate 45 was built in the 1960s, its alignment bypassed many of the towns and built-up areas between downtown Dallas and Houston. The bypassed routes retained the US 75 designation until the designation was truncated to downtown Dallas in 1987. Many of the original alignments continue to exist under other designations.