[Talk-us] Historic 66 as highway=trunk in OK

[Paul Johnson]

On Wed, Aug 28, 2019 at 9:15 PM stevea <steveaOSM at softworkers.com> wrote:

>
> > Eeeeh, that's gonna be a hard sell for the most part, most Oklahoma
> expressways are built like this as are parts of Interstate freeways, with
> the only real difference between the two being at-grade intersections and
> limited driveways (as opposed to getting to install driveways virtually
> anywhere you want on it).  Indian Nation Turnpike is a great example of
> this.  Save for being fully controlled access from the get-go meriting a
> motorway tag, it's of substantially the same design and in about the same
> condition as the expressway portions of 66.
> https://openstreetcam.org/details/1119877/3443/track-info
>
> So, trunk is wrong?  Your link appears to display an old road, re-paved
> many times, but I wouldn't call it a bad road, maybe intermediate or good.
>

Well, on the INT it would be, it's tagged as motorway because it's
controlled and limited access with dual carriageway.  The section of 66
we're talking about is trunk because it's only semi controlled and only
loosely limited access.


> > When there's more driveways, it either narrows and becomes a boulevard
> (like US 75 does for a couple kilometers in Okmulgee,
> https://openstreetcam.org/details/1119877/803/track-info;
>
> If but for the driveway, that looks like trunk, but the driveway makes me
> say primary or secondary.
>

Expressways tend to have more rules on how you can connect a driveway up to
one and how frequently they appear, not that driveways are banned nearly
entirely.  They're not anywhere near as common as you might get with a
primary, and driveways are usually but not always grouped together where
they meet the highway compared to what you'd normally expect on a primary.


> > or US 64 does entering Muskogee,
> https://openstreetcam.org/details/1366842/204/track-info)
>
> Nice example of a similar (to above) transitioning to / from "median
> divided road" to "simply double-yellow line divided" (no median).  I don't
> think this is trunk, again, depending on daily traffic and speeds, I'd say
> primary or secondary here, but not trunk.
>

Obviously I disagree.  ODOT might just take up the road and convert it down
to a boulevard later (especially if the impending bordering incipient
expressway revolt starting to take root in places like Muskogee take deeper
root), but that would be pretty typical of an inline transition at the end
of an expressway pretty much anywhere in the midwest.  If all you need to
do beyond severing driveways is add an overpass and ramps to make it a
freeway, you're probably looking at a trunk, it's not always controllable
how things organically develop around edges of towns.  Another good example
is about a mile west where US 69 goes into Muskogee.  It used to be a solid
expressway down to McAlester, but over the course of the 2000s they started
adding grade separated ramps, and this decade they spent severing driveways
and at-grade crossings from Wainright Road to the south end of OK 113
making that 75 km stretch a motorway.

I get the frustration.  There's a lot of Oklahoma that looks weird because
of the expressways seemingly scattergunned across the state.  But, that's a
reflection of reality.  And that reality is a bit of the root cause of the
pushback the public's giving ODOT on new expressways and freeways now,
because there's so much unnecessary capacity that was built up without any
coherent plan or clear justification for building it, often while
overlooking more pressing needs like maintaining what already exists,
bordering on absurdity.


> > or frontages are added to wrangle driveway traffic with connections to
> and from the expressway and the frontage being closer in frequency to what
> you would get for driveways in somewhat rural expressways (for example, the
> George Nigh Expressway in McAlester,
> https://openstreetcam.org/details/48220/5369/track-info),
>
> Here, driveways make me want to hold my nose at trunk (though it otherwise
> looks like one), so again, primary if speeds and ADT #s (daily average
> traffic counts) warrant it, otherwise, secondary.  (Though, large
> 18-wheelers / semis hauling discourages me from saying secondary).
>

That's where things get a little sticky, sure.  ODOT built most of the
expressways and all of the turnpikes with aspirations that Oklahoma would
be as populated as California and often rammed through expressways on that
assumption.  There's just a lot of examples where ODOT tried to kill a fly
with a cruise missile and missed.  AADT on the examples I've given in
Muskogee and McAlester so far are all at least 10000.

US 69 examples are 15000 on the motorway portions and in McAlester where
it's an expressway with frontage roads, it's about 20100.  In Muskogee,
where US 69 passes through as a single carriageway primary street, it's
about 22000, getting significantly more traffic than the turnpike a couple
kilometers east.  Plans to build a freeway bypass through the neighborhoods
on the west side of Muskogee, keeping the existing trunk tails as a
business loop through town and upgrading the portions to the new freeway as
freeway were scrapped earlier this month, quite likely permanently, due to
opposition in Muskogee County and ODOT losing interest in building the
freeway.  Hard not to sympathize, they already have five expressways (OK
165 being built in 1969 to bypass the surface street portion of US 69, and
it only gets 9900 AADT, mostly local in origination, and oddly enough
mostly coming from or going to central Muskogee along 64 and 69) and a
motorway.  It's only got something like 35000 people and a land area you
can leisurely walk across in about two hours.


> > or they get upgraded to a freeway (for example, Skelly Drive/Skelly
> Bypass in Tulsa, where the original drive's driveways, at least on
> properties that weren't bulldozed 8 years ago when the freeway was last
> widened, attach to the frontages,
> https://openstreetcam.org/details/53572/5864/track-info).
>
> With K-rail median and eight lanes, this looks like motorway or trunk,
> depending on controlled access (or not).  Though, what is that off to the
> right?  A bicycle track?
>

A two lane, one-way frontage road.  It used to be located closer to where
the camera's lane is before the widening, all the business frontage and
about the first four houses along every side street got bulldozed in the
early half of this decade to move the frontage back to where it is so the
freeway could gain shoulders and a third lane.  The entire freeway (all
four lanes and no shoulders of it) used to fit in the space of the lanes
the camera is in.  All ramps from the freeway giving access to cross and
side streets connect to that frontage road.


> While it can be interesting and even entertaining to "shoot fish in a
> barrel" like this, (express our tagging opinions with little consequence),
> I think the main reason we do this (as Joseph's later post leans towards)
> we are, in a sense, trying to reach sane consensus by having these
> discussions.  This is made somewhat more difficult (especially for old-time
> mappers like me who have been around for most of the project's history) by
> tagging evolving.  For example, I'm unfamiliar with Joseph's tagging of
> expressway=yes (I'm studying it now), though I have seen motorroad=yes (and
> understand why it is a good tag that should be used where applicable).
>
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