[1] Glover hoped naming a street in Sprague's honor would sway him to route the transcontinental railway his company was constructing through the budding town.

[2] Sprague Avenue became part of a transcontinental highway that linked Chicago and the Twin Cities in the Midwest to Seattle.

Recent projects by the City of Spokane have renovated and revitalized the streetscape along a majority of this two-way section of Sprague in hopes of spurring economic development, in hopes of replicating the result prior projects like this in other parts of Spokane, including Market Street in the Hillyard neighborhood, and South Perry District in the East Central neighborhood.

[6] In Spokane Valley, Sprague runs as a major arterial, part of a one-way couplet with the adjacent Appleway Boulevard one block to its south.

The couplet stretches for about 2.5 miles (4.0 km)[8] from Sprague's interchange with I-90 eastward toward University Road where it currently ends.

Others wanted to continue the couplet's original vision and extend it further into Spokane Valley, which would have taken it through most of the city, almost to its border with neighboring Liberty Lake.

The easternmost 1.7 miles (2.7 km) portion of Sprague in Spokane Valley runs as a local collector roadway.

In this area, Appleway Boulevard picks up the arterial function from Sprague, branching off toward the east-northeast toward Liberty Lake.

This section of Sprague, especially between the one-way streets of Stevens and Washington has one of the highest concentrations of bars and night clubs in the city.

[10] The area has been considered the red light district of Spokane and was where serial killer Robert Lee Yates found many of his victims that worked in the sex trade in the 1990s.

Many portions of the Sprague Avenue corridor were also identified in the early 2000s as the preferred alignment for a regional light rail system in Spokane.

[14] However, the light rail proposal and associated planning never made it past a 2006 advisory vote by the general public.