The fun with US 44 is just beginning.


WB at MA 114A, clearly near RI. Old enough to have the arrows through text.


Old button-copy, westbound on the Super-2.


Two signs on US 44 WB in Taunton, at the center of town where things go one-way around a square. If you can't tell the WEST and the arrow with the shield are funky, you're clearly not a roadgeek.


Okay, US 44 is somewhat out of place in MA (in fact, it's north of US 6), but US 58 is even more ridiculous. Try MA 58.


Ongoing construction on the US 44 freeway as of March 2004. US 44 follows a 2-lane expressway (traffic lights but controlled access - and passing is allowed!) around Middletown, but that alignment abruptly ended and 44 returned to clogged surface roads through Carver. The freeway, now that it's open, takes 44 straight into MA 3 just north of the current interchange. During construction, there was a small piece already built, which was unnumbered (i.e. 44 wasn't rerouted till the whole thing opened). It looks like US 44 now multiplexes with MA 3 so that it can still end at MA 3A in Plymouth, and instead of becoming MA 44A, the old route is now unnumbered.


A view along and under the bridge that now carries MA 80 over US 44.


On the newly opened freeway in 2006.


The western end of the freeway stub during construction, and the WB onramp from Industrial Park Road that has since opened. Although the freeway serves essentially nothing, businesses are already springing up around its current end, so Plymouth/Carver is slowly becoming a center for southeastern Mass.


At the end of Industrial Park Road at MA 80, this sign points you indeed to US 44, not MA 44. MA 80 is a curious road, shaped somewhat like a reverse C, so that while you're heading southeastward to US 44 if you make a left, you'd actually be on 80 WEST. MA 80 still ends at old US 44, instead of being extended along the old road to MA 3 Exit 6.


Massachusett's only signed bike route (and signed quite well, actually), Bike 1 runs from Boston to Cape Cod, and from the age of this Plymouth sign has been around for a couple of decades now. I see some good opportunities for other Bike routes (westward along MA 2 and MA 2A, northward up the coast).

Into RI on US 44
Onto MA 105
Onto MA 3
US 44 on Steve Anderson's bostonroads.com
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