Michigan State Highway 8, or M-8, is a short but important Michigan state highway lying within Detroit. Mich of it is the Davison Expressway, one of the earliest (1944) freeways in America, which became a connector between the John C. Lodge (Michigan State Highway 10) and Fisher (Interstate 75) freeways, the latter its eastern terminus even though the freeway continues. What had been Davison Avenue was rebuilt into a depressed freeway, but it fell far short of Interstate standards due to a lack of a wide shoulder. It was closed and rebuilt to a wider freeway in 1996 and 1997 with standard shoulders and a better median for improved safety and traffic handling and an interchange with Woodward Avenue (by then Michigan State Highway 1). Only then did it get the designation as M-8.
M-8 also includes a short segment of highway, really the offramps of Interstate 96, the Jeffries Freeway, but Davison Avenue between the offramps and the John C. Lodge Freeway remains unsigned.
Freeway entrances and exits are limited in number, and are designed with special onramps and offramps, so as to ensure that vehicles do not disrupt the main flow of traffic as they enter or leave the freeway.
Another common problem with freeways is that it is nearly impossible to avoid wrong-way drivers, and the subsequent head-on collisions are often fatal.
In the rest of the country, freeway is the usual term; however, the distinction between freeways and expressways is not always as clear or well-understood as it is in California, which has many of both kinds of highway.
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