[Talk-us] Name tag on unnamed, but numbered routes

[Minh Nguyen]

Vào lúc 19:09 2021-11-19, Paul Johnson đã viết:
> It's only unambiguous literally from Caltrans going well out of it's way 
> to avoid duplicate route numbers in the Interstate, US and State 
> systems, too, except in rare cases where one is an unfunded extension of 
> another (CA 110 comes to mind offhand, since it's contiguous with 
> California's I 110 past where I 110 ends).  What shape and color the 
> shield happens to be is nearly entirely irrelevant in California (though 
> numerous edge cases exist at the county and especially the national 
> forest network levels, thanks to each county and national forest having 
> it's own network unrelated to anything Caltrans has more than outer 
> periphery oversight for, something that /mostly/ doesn't come up unless 
> you're trying to follow Route 66 or you're near the boundary between 
> Angeles and San Bernardino National Forests, and by that point you're so 
> deep into the contextual weeds only folks who even care those roads 
> exist in the first place know the difference and will pick up on it anyway).

A knock-on effect of this Caltrans policy is that a lot of mapping and 
navigation software coming out of California treats route shields like a 
decorative afterthought rather than a unit of information. Local 
knowledge really matters, not just on the data end of the pipeline.

> Correct me if I'm wrong, but my recollection is that Caltrans, like 
> Oregon's ODOT, goes out of its way to only honorifically rename stuff 
> using brown signs, not completely rename a road after a random highway 
> worker who got hip checked by a truck after them overnight by state law 
> obligation, or a soldier who died and whose family has the ear of a 
> politician looking for cheap political capital.  In which case thank 
> whatever godlike entity you thank that you're living someplace that 
> actually thinks about things like "is this going to confuse everyone", 
> "can we actually afford/is it practical to put 15 words on a street sign 
> at every intersection", and "do we already have other roads with 
> substantially similar names crossing the road we want to rename" as 
> basic questions first (neighborhoods immediately in my vicinity have 
> two, unrelated, bridges on opposite sides of downtown named identically 
> after Martin Luther King, Jr, differentiated only by context by which 
> one is on Cincinnatti Avenue; and a Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard 
> intersecting Martin Luther King, Jr. Expressway, making for an 
> interchange that literally only makes sense by context of street vs 
> freeway).

It's a green sign in California (G12-2 in the CA MUTCD), but you get the 
idea. These days, there is a formal policy on who to name freeways and 
bridges after. [1] It isn't as capricious as one might imagine, but it 
still isn't optimized for navigation by any means. I have no compunction 
to tag "San José Police Officer Michael Johnson Memorial Highway" as a 
road name, since there's only one sign at either end, but also because 
missing an exit isn't a very positive thing to remember someone by. It's 
fine as an official_name, and a name on a traffic_sign. [3]

There's no rule preventing memorial names from overlapping, and they 
often do. I've seen this happen at the municipal level too, where two 
people ended up sharing the same block of a street. [4][5] The 
authorities only nominally name the street; the brown street name signs 
they put up matter more.

[1] 
<https://dot.ca.gov/-/media/dot-media/programs/research-innovation-system-information/documents/place-names/web-2019-named-freeways-final-a11y.pdf>
[2] 
<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Southbound_California_State_Route_85_at_northbound_Interstate_280_overcrossing.jpg>
[3] https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/8707923993
[4] https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/586131599
[5] https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/736898078

-- 
minh at nguyen.cincinnati.oh.us