If you’ve taken a drive on one of Wisconsin’s iconic scenic roads, chances are you’ve noticed a bit of alphabet soup.
Signs with names like BB, CV, N and SS flank Wisconsin’s county roads, and Shelly from Marshall wanted to know why.
She asked: “Why are Wisconsin’s county roads labeled with letters instead of numbers?”
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So WPR’s WHYsconsin reached out to Daniel Fedderly, executive director of the Wisconsin County Highway Association — a nonprofit organization that represents the state’s 72 county highway and public works departments — to find out.
“It’s good to start off with a little background,” Fedderly said. “We have state highways that are under state jurisdiction … then we have county highways that are under each of the individual counties — 72 counties in the state — and those county highways are under the individual county’s jurisdiction.”
From a practical perspective, Fedderly explained it was necessary to keep the two systems separate so that maintenance and repairs wouldn’t be duplicated.
“They needed to be able to keep them separate, and hence, they separated them by the numbers and letters,” he said. “That way they could keep track of whose was whose because you had the same people, the same crews, the same individuals taking care of several different sections of road.”
It’s a system that’s been in place for more than 100 years, Fedderly said.
“That system was first set up in 1917. And the Wisconsin County Highway Association was initially formed in 1911,” he said. “It is credited as being the oldest such association in the nation and the Wisconsin Legislature saw fit to form the County Highway Association, so that there was a methodology for how they coordinated their efforts in terms of taking care of the state system.”
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