Author and history

History of US Ends .com

late 1980s: During his college years, Dale Sanderson started drawing maps similar to those now on this site.  One of his senior projects was a mockup for a book of detailed maps showing each of the US routes (he completed US 1 through US 7).  He drew the maps by hand, cutting out state boundaries and coastlines with an x-acto knife.  It was incredibly labor-intensive, and although he wanted to finish the project, it went on hold for the next ten years.  

1991: Shortly after graduation Dale started working as a cartographer.

1992: This was the first time Dale photographed an "End" sign (with a film camera, of course).

1997: Dale designed some Wyoming highway maps for use on the website of Andy Field and Alex Nitzman.  The material on that website would eventually grow to become AARoads.com, but for the first few years everything was hosted on GeoCities.

1998: Using the extra web space on his GeoCities site, Dale began the "End US Highway" pages by scanning and posting his handful of highway terminus photos.  At the time he had no inkling that this concept would soon become the web's focal point for US highway endpoints, but going online connected him with a lot of other people who were interested in that topic.  [website snapshot]

1999: the first of eventually hundreds of people began submitting their endpoint photos to be hosted on Dale's website.  It was then that he started being more intentional about photographing endpoints at every opportunity.  Meanwhile, GeoCities was acquired by Yahoo, which soon began enforcing bandwidth limits.  This had a negative impact on image-intensive websites.

2000: Dale continued to develop his GeoCities website, reformatting it twice that year.  He enlisted the help of Robert Droz, whose website (us-highways.com, defunct as of 2016) allowed Dale to get a handle not only on the current endpoints, but also on all the historic US route termini.  [website snapshot]  This was before the days of good online mapping services, so he relied heavily on a CD-ROM for detailed street maps.

2001: Dale realized that he had everything he needed on his computer to continue his detailed US highway map project (see 1980s above), so he started tinkering around, building a graphic database during his spare time.

2003: As a workaround to circumvent Yahoo's bandwidth limitations, Dale distributed the website content among 14 different GeoCities accounts.  [website snapshot]

2004: Dale purchased his first digital camera in order to simplify the process of putting his photos online.  By that time he had collected a shoebox full of endpoint prints.  

2005: Dale finished his graphic database, and used that to generate the route maps on this site.  Meanwhile, as people continued to submit photos, he began to consider it an attainable goal to include a photo of every US highway terminus in the country.  So he put some tools in place which allowed him to measure progress, and which allowed users of the site to see which endpoints still needed to be photographed.  [website snapshot]

2006: Robert Brooks purchased the usends.com domain, and transferred ownership to Dale.  Initially, only the detailed US route maps were hosted under that domain, while everything else continued to be hosted by GeoCities.

2007: Dale finished the original series of interactive endpoint maps, using a service called CommunityWalk.  That website is now defunct, but Dale was able to preserve the geodata, and it lives on in a Google My Maps project (see 2019 below).  [website snapshot]

2009: Yahoo announced it was shutting down its GeoCities service, so Dale was obligated to create "version 2.0" of US Ends .com.  He chose to do this by transferring all of the material over to a website built in Dreamweaver, a process which took three months.  The website was then hosted by a company called Dryline for the next six years, with all content unified under the usends.com domain.  [website snapshot]  Meanwhile, the goal to host images of all current and historic US route endpoints was essentially reached (partially because the missing images could be obtained through Google's Street View feature).

2010: the Facebook page for US Ends .com was established.

2012: the Twitter account for US Ends. com was established.

2016: Dryline (the web host for US Ends .com since 2009) announced it was shutting down.  Dale considered this a good opportunity to convert the website to a mobile-friendly format.  The old version was temporarily hosted elsewhere for about eight months, while he flowed the content into a responsive template created on the Weebly platform.  "Version 3.0" of US Ends .com went live in November with additional improvements, including hundreds of historic map images.

2017: Dale completed a map of the entire current and historic US route system and made posters available for public consumption.  Sales of this map help to offset the expenses associated with operating the website.

2018: the Instagram account for US Ends. com was established.  The CommunityWalk map hosting service went through some changes which severely impacted the usability of the interactive endpoint maps, so Dale imported all of the data into a single Google Fusion Table map.

2019: Google announced that their Fusion Tables product was to be phased out by late 2019, so the interactive endpoint map had to again be moved to a new service, this time to Google Maps.  Also, each of the main highway pages were enhanced with images of authentic, historic, state-name US route shields.  These images were created by highway sign expert Michael Summa from actual photos (in some cases different numbers had to be digitally substituted, using period-accurate fonts).  One of Michael's goals in this project was to illustrate the often-significant differences between the US highway shield designs that were utilized by various state highway departments [example].

2020: Over the years Dale gradually came to realize mileage figures that are listed for US highways are often incorrect, sometimes including those that are published by state departments of transportation.  So he began measuring the length of each US route himself, using a method that yields remarkable accuracy.  It took five months to measure 183,000 miles worth of roads, and the result for each US route was added to its corresponding web page.

2021: Dale obtained a copy of AASHTO's most-recent US route log (published in 1989), and realized that it has been a primary source of misinformation about the end-to-end mileage of US routes (even though AASHTO's document expressly noted that it was not suitable for that purpose).  Dale used this information to enhance the mileage paragraphs on the pages for each US route.  Also, the Florida US route map was made available for purchase.

2022: AASHTO recently made their route numbering committee archives available online.  This has been a treasure trove for highway historians, but there is one major drawback: much of the material has been misclassified in the database, meaning a standard search can miss some relevant documents.  As a result Dale decided to begin a methodical review of the entire archive, building his own reference database with all of the documents correctly reclassified.  By the end of the year, he had spent 128 hours reviewing nearly 14,000 pages... and that covered only the first two decades of the US route system.

2023: Dale completed his review of the AASHTO archives (see above): 58,000 pages worth of US highway related documents.  In addition he reviewed all of the known AASHO/AASHTO route logs (from 1927, 1929, 1932, 1934, 1935, 1939, 1942, 1951, 1955, 1969, 1974, 1979, and 1989).  All of this resulted in changes to almost every webpage (mostly minor edits to the specific dates when AASHTO officially revised the various route descriptions).

2024: Using the information that he had gathered during the previous two years, Dale began writing a book that he planned to make available in time to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the US highway system (which was upcoming in 2026).

2025: The book Great Lines Across America was published in March (book sales help to offset the expenses associated with operating the website).  In 2018 Weebly was purchased by Square, which at some point chose to discontinue maintenance on Weebly's legacy website building software.  By 2025 the situation had degraded enough that the time had come to migrate to a new host, so Dale spent eight months building a new version of US Ends .com.

2026: US Ends .com "version 4.0" went live in January.  This new iteration did not include much in the way of content enhancements, other than the addition of subheadings to aid with page navigation.  But due to the timing, this version did place extra emphasis on the 100th anniversary of the US route system.