[Talk-us] Update on potential highway classification reform

[Brian M. Sperlongano]

With regard to Ithaca, I had this paper map from 2011 lying around, here's
a clip from it:
https://imgur.com/gallery/k7SCY53

It seems they thought that NY-13 was the most important road through
Ithaca.  I'm not advocating copying from another map of course, but it's
interesting to see the choices that other cartographers made when faced
with the same issue.

On Wed, May 19, 2021, 6:32 PM Jmapb <jmapb at gmx.com> wrote:

> Checking in from the Catskills in NY, I don't see anything around here
> that would merit trunk under these new rules. Again, of course, it
> depends on the interpretation for "population centers of regional
> importance", whether that's a minimum population or some other measure.
> But basically the population centers are the corners of the
> Albany-Kingston-Binghamton interstate triangle, all motorway-connected.
>
> We currently have a couple of trunk stubs heading west from I-87, on
> State Routes 23 and 28. I believe these were tagged based on the
> "reasonably high-speed limited-access dual carriageway that's not quite
> a motorway" definition of trunk. I don't see a problem with the current
> tagging but if a ruleset were adopted that downgraded them to primary I
> wouldn't have a problem with that.
>
> Peering westward, the problematic center of regional importance that
> stands out to me is Ithaca. It's a hub of primary and secondary state
> highways radiating in all directions, and none is the single major route
> into town. Depending on which city you're driving from you'll approach
> on a different one. It would feel odd to promote most or all of these to
> trunk.
>
> ---
>
> Back in my NYC stomping grounds, I'm looking at the Brooklyn and
> Manhattan Bridges. These are both currently trunk, which I like. The
> proposed urban trunk rules, by my reading, would say the Manhattan
> doesn't qualify for trunk status because only one end connects to a
> motorway (versus both ends for the Brooklyn.) But there is not a serious
> difference in the prominence of these two roadways. If anything, one
> might say Manhattan is the more prominent because it carries more lanes,
> but I strongly believe they should have the same classification. (If
> they were *both* forced to downgrade to primary, I wouldn't weep. Much.)
>
> The proposed definition of primary also gives me pause vis-a-vis NYC, in
> particular the line"in a large enough city, surface streets with an exit
> from a motorway would likely qualify as primary." I see plenty of
> examples of motorway exits onto secondary and tertiary streets. The
> streets in question are not primary because they are *not* the most
> prominent streets in the urban grid. (And there's probably some sense in
> dumping motorway traffic into places that don't clog up the major
> arteries!)
>
> Just to be clear, I don't think all of NYC's surface streets are
> perfectly classified, but this kind of rule is going to hurt more than
> it helps. We'd end up with lots of one-block-long primary highways,
> which would trigger a ripple effect of upgrades to match comparative
> prominence and to fix continuity errors.
>
> ---
>
> It could well be that NY State deserves one page of classification
> rules, and NYC another. But if we end up with a list of 50 different
> state rulesets, all with city-specific addenda, I feel for the sanity of
> the mappers (not to mention the wiki maintainers.)
>
> Jason
>
>
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