This highway links Birmingham with its southern suburbs of Homewood, Mountain Brook, and Vestavia Hills.

The resultant cut exposes geological strata spanning millions of years (150 million years of geological time within 650 feet or 200 metres of exposure),[1] including the red ore seam that spurred Birmingham's development.

A new species of Lower Silurian (middle Llandovery epoch) phacopsid trilobite, Acaste birminghamensis, was first collected from exposures on Red Mountain.

[1] One of the original ideas proposed for linking Birmingham to its southern neighbors was the Red Mountain Tunnel project.

Eventually the tunnel idea was abandoned due to its high cost and extended amount of time it would have taken.