[Talk-us] Recent Trunk road edits

[Jack Burke]

On Monday, September 28, 2020, Paul Johnson <baloo at ursamundi.org> wrote:

> On Sun, Sep 27, 2020 at 8:35 PM Jack Burke <burkejf3 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Recently, someone has taken it on himself to downgrade most (all?)
>> highway=trunk roads in the eastern U.S. to just primary.  The odd
>> thing is that the very wiki page he cites as his reason fully supports
>> keeping them as trunk.  Many of them I'm personally familiar with, and
>> even absent the wiki's definition, they actually make more sense as
>> trunk from a driving perspective.
>
>
> The wiki's pretty inconsistent but the generally accepted standard is
> "it'd be a motorway if it didn't have intersections" or "it'd be a motorway
> if it was dual carriageway".  I think some context would help.
>

How about a pair of highways that "would be motorways if they didn't have
intersections" for context?

Georgia 400 is a grade-separated, divided, high-speed freeway from its
southern endpoint at I 85, all the way to where it meets GA 369 near Coal
Mountain, 37 miles later. From there, it's an at-grade, divided, high-speed
(mostly 65mph, with short sections of 55mph in denser areas) highway with
extremely long straight sections and other sections with high-speed curves,
until it ends at GA 60 just outside Dahlonega, 16 miles past Coal Mountain.

GA 515 begins life where I 575 ends, at Ball Ground. From there, it is a
grade-separated, divided, high-speed (mostly 65mph, with a few sections of
55mph, and a couple of 45mph when it passes through Ellijay and Blue Ridge)
freeway that travels north to Blue Ridge, almost at the Tennessee border,
where it arcs eastward and continues to Blairsville.  That's 63 miles of
divided high-speed goodness. There it finally becomes an undivided highway
that continues on to Young Harris, "ending" a few miles past there. GA 515
was upgraded to its dual-carriageway status about 30 years ago as part of
the Appalachian development highway program.

I'm willing to bet that most OSM editors who drive on either of those two
will think "this is a great freeway, just with occasional traffic signals."

And then there's US 27/GA 1, a highway that was upgraded as part of the
GRIP initiative a bunch of years ago.  It's a north-south highway in west
Georgia that connects Chattanooga to Tallahassee. It's a mixture of divided
and undivided sections (far more divided than undivided), that switches
between 65mph (in most of the divided sections) and 55 mph (many of the
undivided sections) except when it passes through Rome and a couple of
other cities. And there are several other highways that meet this
description, too.

When all of these were upgraded to their current configuration, they were
built specifically to provide smooth, high-speed highway access to more
rural areas of the state, with the possibility of being upgraded further to
Interstate-level one day (think the new I 22).

All of these, and others, were highway=trunk until floridaeditor decided to
downgrade them (and challenge anyone to change them back).

Does that help any, Paul?

-jack
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