Downtown Fresno.
According to TOPPHARMACYSCHOOLS, Fresno is a city in central California. The city is located in the San Joaquin Valley and has 545,000 inhabitants. The agglomeration has 1,014,000 inhabitants (2021).
Introduction
Fresno is located in the San Joaquin Valley, a large agricultural valley in central California. To the east are the mountains of the Sierra Nevada. Fresno is not well known because California is mainly dominated by the metropolitan areas of Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area, and to a lesser extent San Diego and Sacramento. Fresno has an agglomeration of one million inhabitants. The city is the largest in the United States that is not on an Interstate Highway. In 2020, the agglomeration exceeded the limit of 1 million inhabitants.
Road network
Fresno is located on State Route 99, one of two through highways through central California. Interstate 5 runs further west, bypassing major cities. The SR-99 does serve the major cities, such as Bakersfield, Visalia, Fresno, Merced, Modesto and Stockton, of which Fresno is the largest city. It is possible that SR-99 will become an Interstate Highway in the future, for example I-7 or I-9.
But the SR-99 is not Fresno’s only highway, the SR-99 mainly runs along the west side of the city, the SR-41 forms the north-south axis that opens up the center. The SR-180 forms the east-west axis that also opens up the center. The SR-41, SR-99 and SR-180 converge around the center. The interchange between SR-41 and SR-180 is one of the largest in central California. In the northeast of Fresno is the SR-168 that runs to the larger suburb of Clovis.
History
After World War II, a Freeway Master Plan for Fresno was developed. Of these, only State Route 99 was initially constructed as a freeway and opened to traffic in 1962. The other highways were not built until the 1980s, starting with State Route 41 as the north-south route. In 1995-1999, the central segment of the SR-180 opened between SR-99 and SR-168, at the same time the first section of SR-168 also opened. In the period 2002-2008, the SR-180 in the east of Fresno was constructed as a freeway.
