[Talk-ca] Proposed changes to road classification and related stuff

[Jherome Miguel]

Well, I used to think trunk should link the 100 largest population centres
across Canada as of 2021 (except towns), but there seems to be this
emerging consensus trunk should link urban areas with at least 50k in
Ontario (with exceptions such as Kawartha Lakes due to it being a grouping
of small towns than a cohesive urban area despite its population of 79k,
and towns can be left out). For the other provinces, that can be the same,
save BC (mountainous Interior plus a sparsely populated north with small
cities that are economically important destinations on the network) and
Newfoundland and Labrador (small population, and Labrador being remote with
a few small settlements). The Territories usually have only one major
population centre that can get a trunk link, often the capital only,
therefore their highway tagging will remain the same.

On Thu, Feb 10, 2022 at 7:35 PM Kevin Kenny <kevin.b.kenny at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Thu, Feb 10, 2022 at 9:02 PM Jherome Miguel <jheromemiguel at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>>
>>> This might be my Toronto-centricity speaking, but I'm having a tough
>>> time with Owen Sound being mentioned as a important regional
>>> population centre. It's the population of a mid-size neighbourhood.
>>>
>>>
> For comparison, New York's guidance was that trunks should link the 600
> largest communities in the US, but this rule, uniformly applied, would lead
> to some results that we thought unacceptable. It didn't feel right for
> Vermont and Wyoming to be entirely devoid of trunk cities. It comes down to
> how big a 'region' is when considering regionally significant population
> centres; we USAians certainly thought that a state should have at least
> one.
>
> Of course, a trunk road may serve to link cities in neighbouring
> jurisdictions.  Many CA/US border crossings in the East have trunk roads
> serving them because of population centres on the other side.  US 11 keeps
> its trunk status in northern New York because of its role as a link between
> US locations and trunk cities such as Cornwall, Brockville and Kingston,
> even though Massena and Ogdensburg would not rate such treatment. I'd
> presume that Route 133 in Québec would have the same sort of treatment
> because of its role as a link between Montréal and New England.
>
> Sometimes this sort of reasoning elevates relatively small roads to
> trunks.  I don't know what the preferred route is, say, between Duluth and
> Winnipeg, or Bismarck and Regina, but since there's a general consensus
> that those are trunk cities, the preferred route should go over trunk roads.
>
>
> --
> 73 de ke9tv/2, Kevin
>
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