Construction Begins on an Interstate Highway in California

September 25, 1967

In Southern California, a groundbreaking ceremony was held at El Cajon Boulevard and Boundary Street in San Diego for Interstate 805 (I-805). Planning for that route dated back to 1956, the same year in which the Interstate Highway System itself first came into existence.

After the groundbreaking ceremony, I-805 was constructed in phases. It was completed in 1975. The route, which has become a heavily used north-south Interstate highway in that region of California, serves as an auxiliary bypass of Interstate 5 and covers 28 miles (45.1 kilometers) between San Diego’s district of San Ysidro (just north of the U.S.-Mexico border) and — near the beach city of Del Mar — the Sorrento Valley neighborhood.

Originally known as the Inland Freeway, I-805 was officially renamed the Jacob Dekema Freeway in 1982 in honor of a longtime engineer of the California Department of Transportation who had been instrumental in developing San Diego’s present-day highways network.

Photo Credit: Davidphogan74 at English Wikipedia (licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en)

For more information on Interstate 805 in California, please check out  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_805