[Talk-us] Guidance on road designation

[Richard Welty]

On 6/2/13 6:55 PM, Mark Newnham wrote:
> I'm looking for some guidance on road designation. I have a sample of the area here http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=39.59736&lon=-104.89872&zoom=17.
>
> My difficulty is with the size of the roads vs their utility. Having scanned the mailing lists and the wiki, I have tended to designate them tertiary, but am happy to change them.
>
> As background, this area is the edge of the Denver Technology Center, south of Denver, but this question applies to the whole area, and in fact most modern build on the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains.
>
> First example, Running East/West is East Peakview Avenue. This is a  typical example of a divided highway in the DTC. The road is wide (approx 12ft per carriageway, 2 lanes in each direction, center divider approx 3feet wide, plus 3rd lane when left turns are available)
> Second example, Running North/South is South Syracuse Way which is not a divided highway. The lanes are again 12ft Wide, 2 in each direction plus an additional 12 ft in the center for left turns.
>
> Whilst the roads are designed to take huge volumes of traffic, outside of peak hours they probably carry 300-400 vehicles per hour and 100 vehicles per hour or less on the weekend. The roads don't go anywhere and never will.
>
> What would be the best mechanism for designation?
>
i'd say that anything serving as an undivided collector (one step up from
a residential/unclassified) is good as tertiary. a case can be made that
you might upgrade the streets that are 2 lanes each way to secondary,
but that is really a local judgement call. typically there's a bit of hash
of functional vs actual traffic load vs physical configuration, it's not
actually terribly well defined.

as i zoom out, i see that a bunch of these, while 4 lanes, are 
relatively short.
that suggests that maybe they shouldn't be upgraded, they're not through
routes.

you're local, what do you think?

richard