One of the more interesting downtown entrances for an interstate highway is here in Mobile, AL, where the highway crosses a very wide Mobile and Tensaw Rivers via a series of low level bridges and causeways, and, at the last instant, disappears into a free tunnel and emerges at the south edge of the downtown core. The connections from there to downtown Mobile only go directly to the inner beltline circle of main streets in a counter-clockwise direction, through and interestingly laid out interchange on the east edge of downtown. This portion of the inner loop ('Water St') feeds directly into I-165 just north of the map, and appears to have once been planned to become a part of I-165 (has this connection been cancelled?). If your destination is the south or central part of downtown, one has to exit I-10 westbound BEFORE the I-10 tunnel, and instead take the US 90/98 'Bankhead Tunnel' to Government St (I forgot to highlight the WB off ramp right before the tunnel).
Downtown connections to/from the south/southwest on I-10 are much more direct. :-)
US 31 and US 45 both origionally ended in downtown Mobile. US 31 was multiplexed with US 90 and 98 from the east, and US 45 came in from the northwest via US 98 (just off the map to the west), but I believe that they have been cut back to where the multiplexes ended.
The tunnels pass under a major shipping channel (it leads to everyone's favorite pet water project, the 'Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway'), and were likely built because bridges to clear the channel would have simply been too high and the approaches too long and/or steep to adequately serve the downtown area, and they would have had to TOWER over the waterfront.
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