Why does Highway 50 road sign point Sacramento drivers to Maryland? Bee Curious answers
If you’re wondering how far the drive is from West Sacramento to Ocean City, Maryland, it’s about 3,073 miles, according to a mileage sign at the intersection of U.S. Highway 50 East and Interstate 80.
The sign is cemented in the region’s lore — as a mystery and a mecca. In 2002, even, tourists from Baltimore, Maryland, made the trek to take a photo with the sign for their honeymoon.
For others, it’s a reminder of home. In the same year — when the sign was stolen — a Bay Area resident told The Sacramento Bee it was a memory of her childhood near the East Coast city. When she’d drive to Sacramento, she could smell the salty air and sunscreen.
“I anticipate that sign,” Suzanne Mitchell told The Bee in 2002. “It makes the ride shorter.”
The sign was replaced (again — it had been stolen before). And now, more than 20 years later it still sparks curiosity among passersby.
Nicole Thomas recently asked Bee Curious, a community-driven series where we answer questions about the Sacramento region: “Why does our freeway show where Ocean City Maryland is by West Sacramento?”
Here’s your answer, Nicole:
Why is it here?
Simply put: It connects the West Coast to the East Coast.
“U.S. Highway 50 connects both coasts and each location references each other,” said Dennis Keaton, a spokesperson with the California Department of Transportation.
More than 3,000 miles to the east, a similar sign is posted on U.S. Highway 50 in Ocean City, Maryland. On a green banner, it states: “Sacramento Ca 3073.”
You can take Highway 50 — known as the “Loneliest Road in America” — all the way. An atlas will be your friend, as the GPS tries to lead you to more traveled routes.
On the quickest route — about 40 hours without traffic — you’ll just need to follow I-80 East straight to U.S. 50 East/Ocean Gateway in Queen Anne’s County. Then you’ll take U.S. 50 East and Ocean Gateway to Caroline Street in Ocean City. You’ll hit tolls, too.
Whose idea was it to put the signs up?
The sign in Maryland first went up in 1974, according to the June 2002 Bee report.
In the 1980s, John R. Cooper who led highway maintenance at Caltrans, spotted the sign in Ocean City and decided to put one up in Sacramento, CapRadio reported in 2016.
Due to their novelty, the signs in the two cities have been swiped by thieves and replaced multiple times. It got to a point where Maryland highway officials had to hang the sign above the freeway instead of mounting it into the ground so that it would be harder to steal.
From 1999 to 2002, the sign in West Sacramento had been stolen twice.
For the replacement, Caltrans wanted to make it harder and less appealing for thieves to carry off. The agency made it bigger and included distances to Placerville and South Lake Tahoe.
“Rarely has one road sign been the source of so much aggravation,” The Bee article stated, reporting how the sign manufacturing company responsible for making the sign replacement made a typo. It printed that the distance to Ocean City was 3,037, not 3,073.
At the time, replacing the sign again would take more than $1,000 — nearly $1,800 in 2023. Caltrans decided to glue over the numbers for $10.
The sign hasn’t been stolen recently, said Keaton from Caltrans. But the cost to replace a sign today would be about $5,000.
