California State Route 46
highway in California
State Route 46 (SR 46) is an east–west state highway in the U.S. state of California. It is a major crossing of the Coast Ranges and it is the southernmost crossing of the Diablo Range, connecting SR 1 on the Central Coast near Cambria and US 101 in Paso Robles with SR 99 at Famoso in the San Joaquin Valley.
The road that is now SR 46 was built and improved during the 1920s and was fully paved by 1930. The majority of SR 46 was originally designated as U.S. Route 466; however, after the latter was entirely removed from the U.S. Highway system, the eastern portion of the route became SR 46.
Route description
Route 46 is defined in section 346 of the California Streets and Highways Code. The definition omits the concurrency with Route 101 instead of duplicating that segment in the other route's definition in the code:
Route 46 is from:
(a) Route 1 near Cambria to Route 101 near Paso Robles.
(b) Route 101 in Paso Robles to Route 99 near Famoso via Cholame Pass.
State Route 46 begins at SR 1 southeast of Cambria, about one mile (1.6 km) from the Pacific Ocean. It heads east as the Eric Seastrand Highway across the Santa Lucia Range on a relatively straight roadway built in the 1970s, bypassing the steep, curvy Santa Rosa Creek Road. After passing near several wineries, this first segment ends at US 101 north of Templeton, where SR 46 turns north, overlapping the US 101 freeway through the valley formed by the Salinas River to central Paso Robles.
“California State Route 46” enters the record as highway in California. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what California, State and Route can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q493059. Authority coordinates are 35.645, -120.655. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1930.
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This entry incorporates text from “California State Route 46” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.