Interstate 80 (I-80) is an east–west transcontinental freeway that crosses the United States from San Francisco, California, to Teaneck, New Jersey, in the New York metropolitan area.

In Pennsylvania, I-80 is known as the Keystone Shortway, a non-tolled freeway that crosses rural north-central portions of the state on the way to New Jersey and New York City.

A portion of the route through Pinole involved the experimental transplantation of the rare species Santa Cruz tarplant in the right-of-way.

The freeway serves the Reno metropolitan area, and it also goes through the towns of Fernley, Lovelock, Winnemucca, Battle Mountain, Elko, Wells, and West Wendover on its way through the state.

The Nevada portion of I-80 follows the paths of the Truckee and Humboldt rivers, which have been used as a transportation corridor since the California Gold Rush of the 1840s.

[2] This portion of I-80, crossing the Great Salt Lake Desert, is extremely flat and straight, dotted with large warning signs about driver fatigue and drowsiness.

It ascends Parleys Canyon and passes within a few miles of Park City as it follows a route through the mountains toward the junction with the eastern terminus of the western section of I-84.

Farther west in Wyoming, the Interstate passes through the dry Red Desert and over the Continental Divide.

It extends from west to east across the central portion of the state through the population centers of Council Bluffs, Des Moines, and the Quad Cities.

[5] It enters the state at the Missouri River in Council Bluffs and heads east through the southern Iowa drift plain.

On the west edge of the Iowa City metropolitan area, it intersects I-380, a segment of the Avenue of the Saints.

I-80 passes along the northern edge of Davenport and Bettendorf and leaves Iowa via the Fred Schwengel Memorial Bridge over the Mississippi River into Illinois.

[6] In Illinois, I-80 runs from the Fred Schwengel Memorial Bridge across the Mississippi River south to an intersection with I-74.

The two Interstates cross rural northwest Ohio and run just south of the Toledo metropolitan area.

[citation needed] In Elyria Township, just west of Cleveland, I-90 splits from I-80, leaving the turnpike and running northeast as a freeway.

I-80's designated end (as per signage and New Jersey Department of Transportation (NJDOT) documents) is four miles (6.4 km)[10] short of New York City in Teaneck, before the Degraw Avenue overpass.

The highway was built in segments, with the final piece of I-80 completed in 1986 on the western edge of Salt Lake City.

In "Basin and Range" (1981), he described how the idea emerged in a conversation with Princeton geologist Kenneth S. Deffeyes:[13]What about Interstate 80, I asked him.

And he mused aloud: After 80 crosses the Border Fault, it pussyfoots along on morainal till that levelled up the fingers of the foldbelt hills.