State Route 58 in California

By | December 15, 2022

 

SR-58
Get started Santa Margarita
End barstow
Length 241 mi
Length 388 km
Route
  • Santa Margarita
  • McKittrick
  • Buttonwillow
  • Rosedale
  • Westside Parkway
  • Stockdale Highway
  • Allen Road
  • Calloway Drive
  • Coffee Road
  • Mohawk Street
  • Truxtun Avenue
  • Rosa Parks Highway
  • Chester Avenue
  • Union Avenue
  • Cottonwood Road
  • Mount Vernon Avenue
  • Oswell Street
  • Fairfax Road
  • Weedpatch Highway
  • Edison
  • Comanche Drive
  • Tower Line Road
  • General Beale Road
  • Arvin
  • Keene
  • Broome Road
  • Golden Hills
  • Tehachapic
  • East Tehachapic
  • Monolith
  • Cameron
  • Mojave
  • Mojave
  • North Edwards
  • Twenty Mule Team Road
  • Desert Lake
  • Boron
  • Kramer Junction
  • Hinkley
  • Bartow (North)
  • Lenwood

According to allcitycodes, State Route 58 or SR-58 is a state route in the U.S. state of California. The road runs from Santa Margarita on US 101 to Barstow on Interstate 15. The section between Barstow and Bakersfield can be used for east-west traffic to bypass Los Angeles. Parts of the route have been developed as a freeway. State Route 58 is 388 kilometers long.

Travel directions

State Route 58 in the Cameron Canyon between Mojave and Tehachapi.

State Route 58 begins in Santa Margarita, where the highway exits from US 101, which runs from Los Angeles to San Francisco. It passes through the mountains of the Coast Ranges to the east and the road is quite remote, with no places of interest within 100 miles of Santa Margarita and Bakersfield. One passes through deserts and mountains before reaching the San Joaquin Valley, where much farming takes place. At Buttonwillow, one crosses Interstate 5, which runs from Los Angeles to Sacramento. One then reaches the larger town of Bakersfield. To the west of Bakersfield, State Route 58 is a short freeway, the Westside Parkway.

You then reach State Route 99, the highway that leads to Fresno and Sacramento to the north and Los Angeles to the south. SR-58 then forms a highway in itself, running east from SR-99 through the south of Bakersfield. Here are 2×2 lanes available. There are quite a few exits and after 15 kilometers you leave the city. Then you enter the mountainous area again, with Mediterranean vegetation. Desertification takes place here. The view is nice, but in some places there is serious horizon pollution from huge wind farms. This part of California is dotted with thousands of wind turbines.

One then reaches the Mojave Desert, where some distant Los Angeles suburbs are located. Here one crosses State Route 14, which leads to Los Angeles. Military installations, including Edwards Air Force Base, are located in this area. At the hamlet of Kramer Junction, you cross US 395, the main road through eastern California. One then reaches Barstow, where State Route 58 ends at Interstate 15, the Los Angeles – Las Vegas freeway. You can also continue on Interstate 40 east to Arizona.

History

Originally, the route was numbered US 466, but this number, like almost all US Highways in California, was dropped in 1964. Between 1974 and 1976, State Route 58 was constructed as a freeway east of SR-99 in southern Bakersfield and opened to traffic on September 3, 1976. Circa 1997, SR-58 opened as a freeway at Barstow. In September 2003 the Mojave bypass opened as a freeway and in 2017 the Hinkley bypass opened as a freeway. On October 25, 2019, the Kramer Junction bypass opened, which included approximately 12 kilometers of new freeway. The remainder of the route between Bakersfield and Mojave opened as a freeway as early as the 1980s or earlier.

Westside Parkway

Between 2011 and 2013, a 9-kilometer stretch of freeway was built in western Bakersfield. This section, running from SR-99 to Allen Road, is called the Westside Parkway and opened to traffic on August 2, 2013. This was the first new highway in Bakersfield since 1976. On April 15, 2015, an additional 4 miles of the Westside Parkway opened up further to Stockdale Road in western Bakersfield.

Widening

In the 1990s, State Route 58 in east Bakersfield was widened to 2×3 lanes between Cottonwood Road and Morning Drive. For a long time there was a 2×2 lane bottleneck between SR-99 and Cottonwood Road of 5 kilometers, right through Bakersfield. This section was widened to 2×3 lanes in 2015. The extra lanes have been added here in the central reservation.

Future

Interstate 40

California has been planning for years to extend Interstate 40 over SR-58 further west, but there is no money for this. This would be the first east-west connection north of Los Angeles, and the only one in southern California that doesn’t pass through the Los Angeles or San Diego metro area.

Bakersfield

Between State Route 58 in the east of Bakersfield and the Westside Parkway in the west of Bakersfield, a piece is missing. The Westside Parkway ends 2 miles from SR-99. In between is an office park. Traffic is also not easy between the two highways, you have to turn several times via California Avenue or Truxtun Avenue.

The 2015 preferred alternative was a direct extension of the Westside Parkway to the interchange with SR-58/99. A new corridor had to be expropriated for this. 120 companies and 310 homes had to be expropriated. The cost of expropriation is $180 million. In 2016-2017, a large part of the route was acquired and the homes and businesses were demolished. There will be no new connections on the missing link. The entire project will cost $330 million. On June 12, 2019, the construction of this missing part, which is to be opened in mid-2023, started.

Ultimately, it is also planned to extend State Route 58 as a freeway to I-5. This makes the function of SR-58 as a bypass of the Los Angeles region more meaningful.

Traffic intensities

Traffic volumes between US 101 at Santa Margarita and I-5 at Bakersfield are extremely low, with 300 vehicles per day. The highway section in Bakersfield has up to 81,000 vehicles per day. Further east this drops to 20,000 vehicles, and 12,000 vehicles as far as Barstow.

State Route 58 in California