U.S. Route 9 in the context of "The Great White Way"

Broadway (/ˈbrɔːdweɪ/) is a street and major thoroughfare in the U.S. state of New York. The street runs from Battery Place at Bowling Green in the south of Manhattan for 13 mi (20.9 km) through the borough, over the Broadway Bridge, and 2 mi (3.2 km) through the Bronx, exiting north from New York City to run an additional 18 mi (29.0 km) through the Westchester County municipalities of Yonkers, Hastings-on-Hudson, Dobbs Ferry, Irvington, Tarrytown, and Sleepy Hollow, after which the road continues, but is no longer called "Broadway". The latter portion of Broadway north of the George Washington Bridge/I-95 underpass comprises a portion of U.S. Route 9.

It is the oldest north–south main thoroughfare in New York City, with much of the current street said to have begun as the Wickquasgeck trail before the arrival of Europeans. This then formed the basis for one of the primary thoroughfares of the Dutch New Amsterdam colony, which continued under British rule, although most of it did not bear its current name until the late 19th century. Some portions of Broadway in Manhattan are interrupted for continuous vehicle traffic, including Times Square, Herald Square, and Union Square, and instead used as pedestrian-only plazas. South of Columbus Circle, the road is one-way going southbound.

The George Washington Bridge is a double-decked suspension bridge spanning the Hudson River, connecting Fort Lee in Bergen County, New Jersey, with the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City. It is named after George Washington, a Founding Father of the United States and the country's first president. The George Washington Bridge is the world's busiest motor vehicle bridge, carrying a traffic volume of over 104 million vehicles in 2019, and is the world's only suspension bridge with 14 vehicular lanes. The George Washington Bridge measures 4,760 feet (1,450 m) long, and its main span is 3,500 feet (1,100 m) long. It was the longest main bridge span in the world from its 1931 opening until the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco opened in 1937.

The bridge is informally known as the GW Bridge, the GWB, the GW, or the George, and was known as the Fort Lee Bridge or Hudson River Bridge during construction. It is owned by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, a bi-state government agency that operates infrastructure in the Port of New York and New Jersey. The George Washington Bridge is an important travel corridor within the New York metropolitan area. It has an upper level that carries four lanes in each direction and a lower level with three lanes in each direction, for a total of 14 lanes of travel. The speed limit on the bridge is 45 mph (72 km/h). The bridge's upper level also carries pedestrian and bicycle traffic. Interstate 95 (I-95) and U.S. Route 1/9 (US 1/9, composed of US 1 and US 9) cross the river via the bridge. U.S. Route 46 (US 46), which lies entirely within New Jersey, terminates halfway across the bridge at the state border with New York. At its eastern terminus in New York City, the bridge continues onto the Trans-Manhattan Expressway (part of I-95, connecting to the Cross Bronx Expressway).

Some U.S. Routes are given directional suffixes to indicate a split of the main route — for instance, U.S. Route 25 (US 25) splits into US 25E (east) and US 25W (west) between Newport, Tennessee, and North Corbin, Kentucky, and US 9W is an alternate of U.S. Route 9 between Fort Lee, New Jersey, and Albany, New York. These splits were in the U.S. Highway system from the beginning, and were used when two roughly-equivalent routes existed. The American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) no longer assigns these numbers, and, in theory, current ones are to be eliminated "as rapidly as the State Highway Department and the Standing Committee on Highways can reach agreement". This policy was adopted by 1996; however, many of these routes still exist, mostly in Tennessee.

The Cape May–Lewes Ferry is a ferry system on the East Coast of the United States that traverses a 17-mile (27 km) crossing of the Delaware Bay connecting North Cape May, New Jersey with Lewes, Delaware. The ferry constitutes a portion of U.S. Route 9 and is the final crossing of the Delaware River-Delaware Bay waterway before it meets the Atlantic Ocean. It is one of only two year-round direct crossings between Delaware and New Jersey, the other being the Delaware Memorial Bridge.

U.S. Route 209 (US 209) is a 211.74-mile (340.76 km) long U.S. Highway in the states of Pennsylvania and New York. Although the route is a spur of US 9, US 209 never intersects US 9, coming within five miles of the route and making the short connection via New York State Route 199 (NY 199). The southern terminus of the route is at Pennsylvania Route 147 (PA 147) in Millersburg, Pennsylvania. The northern terminus is at US 9W north of Kingston in Ulster, New York, where the road continues east as NY 199.

In Pennsylvania, the highway travels through the length of the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area, along the southern part of the Poconos in Monroe and Carbon counties through Jim Thorpe and along parts of the defunct historic Lehigh Canal and Lehigh Valley Railroad then over the divide near Nesquehoning into the Schuylkill Valley along Panther Creek. For part of its route in New York, US 209 runs alongside the defunct Delaware and Hudson Canal, which ran from Port Jervis to Kingston, in each case, following the old land road connections connecting the anthracite coal fields of Northeastern Pennsylvania with the industries and heating customers in New York City.