[Talk-us] Trunk

Nathan Mills nathan at nwacg.net
Sun Oct 8 20:21:52 UTC 2017



On October 8, 2017 3:46:07 PM EDT, Paul Johnson <baloo at ursamundi.org> wrote:

>
>County and rural roads, particularly of the 3- and 4-digit National
>Forest
>routes and...really pick an unpaved section line almost anywhere in an
>area
>bounded by the Rocky Mountain frontier, the Appalachian frontier, the
>Rio
>Grande River, and the permafrost line in Canada.  Unclassified could
>mean
>anything from so steep and unmaintained as to be barely passable by a
>4x4
>in otherwise pristine weather, to a 15 meter wide, graded-and-packed
>gravel
>road allowing a city car to rip along at 80+ km/h without trouble; a
>beat-up, worse-than-unpaved gravel-and-tar car-rolled tarmac to a
>smooth-as-glass concrete surface.  

Seems like some of those would be more properly tagged as a track. I was thinking more in terms of network classification for the primary and lesser highways. In that sense, while tertiary (for example) may be different quality in different areas, it serves the same purpose in the road network. Not too long ago many primary and lesser routes were unpaved or poorly maintained between cities, after all, especially out west and still today in some mountainous and particularly rural areas in the US. That said, if a family car can't safely navigate it, it should be a track given my understanding. Regardless, there is already a wide variation in what a primary, secondary, etc looks like between cities and suburbs/exurbs/rural areas. Obviously, they will vary even more in the wilderness.

There aren't a whole lot of through roads that are unusable in a sedan in good weather that I've seen in the lower 48, though. My standards are pretty low on that count, so maybe my opinion on that differs from others. I've been down a lot of barely maintained mountainous forest roads in small sedans without much incident. You just have to be prepared and know when to turn back. ;)

And just a minor bit of Tulsa history pedantry: The Riverside expressway plan never actually went beyond paper due to opposition from people living in Maple Ridge near the north end of Riverside, who had the clout in city hall to keep it from happening. The closest to it is the part between 71st and 91st, but that is the way it is because it wasn't built until well after the rest of it so the adjacent properties were mostly already developed with access to the east, thus the lack of intersections and driveways except at the section lines and the few developments that have been allowed between Riverside and the river itself.

-Nathan
-- 
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