Wade Avenue is a shortcut to I-40 from downtown Raleigh, functioning as a de facto bypass of Hillsborough Street even though it's never carried a state route designation.

The first portion of Wade Avenue to be constructed, between Oberlin Road and Brooks Avenue, wasn't built as a four-lane corridor. Rather, it was a sleepy side street not unlike the other residential streets in west Raleigh. In 1954, work began to widen Wade to four lanes and extend it east to Capital Boulevard. Construction of the Oberlin-to-Capital segment took nearly five years, owing to property considerations and resulting in the high number of curves in the stretch.

At the same time, a portion of Wade running west from Dixie Trail to today's Beltline interchange was constructed; where the interchange stands today Wade made a 90-degree turn to the south, ending at Hillsborough Street. Both of these 1950s-era extensions were originally designed with four lanes, and haven't been widened since, except for redesigning the road in 1963 to tie it into the freeway section near the Beltline.

Wade ended at the Beltline for a few years after the Beltline's completion in 1963 until I-40 was extended into Wake County in 1967. The "Raleigh-Chapel Hill Expressway" (the original name, though it was informally referred to as the Wade Avenue Extension and is now simply called Wade Avenue) carried I-40 from RTP into Raleigh, but the presence of driveways directly off the highway into parking lots at Carter-Finley Stadium prevented it from being signed as I-40; it was instead signed as TO I-40. The original driveways were eliminated during construction of the RBC Center, but a new one leading to the arena parking lots was built, continuing to disqualify the freeway stretch of Wade Avenue from receiving an Interstate designation.