[Talk-us] [Talk-us-newyork] Highway classification guidelines for New York State

[Kevin Kenny]

On Mon, Sep 13, 2021 at 4:47 AM Minh Nguyen <minh at nguyen.cincinnati.oh.us>
wrote:

> > Federal legislation continues to use functional classification in
> determining eligibility for funding under the Federal-aid program.
> Transportation agencies describe roadway system performance, benchmarks and
> targets by functional classification. As agencies continue to move towards
> a more performance-based management approach, functional classification
> will be an increasingly important consideration in setting expectations and
> measuring outcomes for preservation, mobility and safety.
>
> The most we could say is that the two systems end up addressing somewhat
> overlapping sets of needs. But as elegant as FHWA functional
> classification may be on its own, shoehorning it into the existing
> highway=* tagging scheme would not be as clean as using a dedicated key
> like HFCS=*, because highway=* was originally designed by non-Americans
> who had no idea about the FHWA's specific functional classifications and
> it has come to be used by data consumers who also couldn't rely on FHWA
> definitions.
>
> Other Principal Arterials also came up back in May in a discussion about
> correlating the National Highway System to highway=trunk. It's worth
> consideration as a starting point, but I'm pretty sure we'd need to
> distinguish between urban and rural principal arterials. When I looked
> into it for California, I found that this one functional class includes
> a wide variety of roads with starkly different levels of accessibility
> and mobility, even within a single urban area. [3]
>

Moreover, like so many things in the US, it's also become quite politicized
in places.  In some p;laces, the physical characteristics of roads, their
designated functional class, and their designated arterial class, vary in a
patchwork with very little coherence, because they're based primarily on
which local interest groups lobbied most effectively for highway funding.

I gather that other nations may be more sensible in the design of their
road networks.

The UK system, as tagged, admits of roads that are of very poor quality
(and possibly of equally poor political support) that are trunks because
they are nonetheless the best available option to connect the highway
network with the places that they serve. It also appears to have
classifications that would appear, to US mappers, as underrating urban
arterials. When I look at the maps of UK cities, many of the trunks appear
to stop at ring roads or other junctions in the outskirts of major cities,
rather than continuing as collectors into the urban core.

As far as urban-vs-rural, it appears that the largest city that anyone
pursuing this line of inquiry has attacked so far is Providence, RI. With
New York, specifically, I've been pleading for the help of Downstate
mappers.  The cities of Buffalo and Rochester are considerably smaller and
appear to be fairly sensibly structured.  About the only thing that's
become clear to me is that the relatively high-speed roads (with infrequent
grade crossings) that link a central city with suburbia might NOT be trunks
(because they aren't preferred for interurban routing). NY 5 in West
Glenville, or NY 85 or NY 32 from their respective freeway termini into
Delmar, are not the main roads between significant cities. Local traffic is
heavy enough that they received significant upgrades (center median,

-- 
73 de ke9tv/2, Kevin
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