[Talk-us] Texas business route letter subscripts, or how I learned to stop arguing and ignore a certain user

[Paul Johnson]

On Friday, December 21, 2012, Clay Smalley wrote:

> In Texas, every business route has a unique letter attached to it. In this
> image from TxDOT, there are a few examples:
> http://onlinemanuals.txdot.gov/txdotmanuals/fsh/images/Figure%204-2.gif
>
> These are what show on the vast majority of highway signs. They are useful
> for navigation, and and official designation used by TxDOT for identifying
> which city a business route runs through.
>
> A while back, I took the liberty of adding these letters to the ref=* tags
> of these business routes, as well as their relations, to reflect this (e.g.
> ref="US 377A Business" in the example).
>
> Along came an armchair retagger from outside of Texas.
>
> First he claimed that they're not part of the official route number, which
> is not true according to TxDOT's highway designation files, which are
> freely available and easily accessible online.
>

So it sounds like you know the ground truth, and have done your homework.
 Good job.


> But my main problem came when he started removing them without notice
> whenever he made an edit to any of these ways.
>
> He also made a point that I 35E Business which goes through the town of
> Pearsall, Texas is not a business route of the I 35E that goes through
> Dallas. That made sense to me, so I'm going through and retagging all the
> business routes with hyphenation (e.g. ref="US 377-A Business"). But he
> seemed to still have a problem with the business letters existing in the
> data.
>
> What sayest thou, community? I'm honestly tired of edit wars and pointless
> bickering, and would rather just get this question out of the way.
>

Sounds like yet another problem brought to us by the letters N and E, and
the number 2...
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