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

[Kevin Kenny]

On Wed, Sep 15, 2021 at 4:41 AM Richard Fairhurst <richard at systemed.net>
wrote:

> Generally the NY State guidelines you're proposing wouldn't conflict with
> this. I am a bit uneasy about applying highway=tertiary to unpaved roads.
> This is occasionally justifiable in Wyoming or on reservations etc., but
> would be anomalous for an east coast state. At the very least, the
> guidelines should have a strict injunction that if you do tag an unpaved
> road as tertiary, it needs a surface tag (and potentially
> tracktype/smoothness etc.).
>
> The unclassified/residential distinction is well expressed and similar to
> how it's used elsewhere. In the US you do have the complicating factor that
> TIGER A41-class geometries were imported en masse as highway=residential,
> and often... aren't. So a router can generally assume that a rural
> highway=unclassified was deliberately tagged in the way of
> highway=unclassified in other developed countries (minor road, paved unless
> otherwise stated), whereas a rural highway=residential is "treat with
> extreme caution".
>
> Any retagging of existing highway=unclassified to highway=residential
> would lose that information. I'd suggest, again, that the guidelines
> require any unpaved highway=unclassified to be given a surface tag, and
> that this is (at the least) strongly recommended for highway=residential.
>

Sure. I make it my personal practice to specify surface and smoothness for
any unpaved highway higher than 'track' (and generally for any track that I
survey in person). I'll confess to having missed the guideline that
'unclassified' and 'residential' are not assumed hard-surfaced by default.
In any case, I think of 'residential' roads as the leaves in the routing
network - if tagging is sensible, it should be necessary to use residential
roads only to get from the origin of a trip onto the network of larger
highways, and again to depart from the network of larger highways to get to
the destination. I'm perfectly content to give them a severe routing
penalty, particularly if a path goes from tertiary+ -> residential ->
tertiary+.

In any case, the proposal is to begin with motorways and trunks, and work
our way down through the hierarchy only as those become stable.  We may not
ever get down as far as the minor roads, at least not until TIGER review -
which still proceeds, even though it's going to take us twenty years -
catches up to them.

TIGER A41 (etc) not only often aren't highway=residentiat; they often just
.... aren't, as in ''existed only in the illusions of some intern at the
Census Bureau." Reviewing them has been a long slog - the whole affair has
a vaguely hallucinatory quality.

(Feel free to stop reading here. I begin to digress.)

I know you've been at least to the Catskills, so you've at least seen stuff
transitioning toward wilderness.  But for the benefit of some of the
Europeans (or even urban Americans) who are posting here:

Most people are familiar with the Eastern states only in areas near the
coast - and the whole I-95 corridor can be thought of as a single massive
conurbation. If you get far outside the corridor into the mountainous
regions, population density and road quality fall off a cliff. Sometimes
literally - the chief reason for some of the Adirondack and Catskill roads
to be left unpaved is that they take a beating from avalanches in the
winter.  In general, the far northern portions of New York, Vermont, New
Hampshire, and Maine, with the exception of the St Lawrence valley and some
of the larger communities like Plattsburgh or Burlington (or some of the
more popular ski regions) can be thought of as having infrastructure more
like what one might expect in a developing nation. Mobile phones are
unreliable, most homes outside of the larger towns lack broadband Internet,
and the road system is similarly poor, except for motorways and major trunk
roads that traverse the area on the way to somewhere else. I-87 still has a
stretch where there's a solar-powered radio call box every couple of km, so
that stranded motorists can call for aid. There's no mobile phone service
in there, nor any roads of any size; several of the interchanges simply
drop you on roads where the pavement ends a few hundred metres past the end
of the slipway. The boxes are solar powered and operate by radio because
getting power and telephone lines into them would have been prohibitively
expensive (and possibly require broadening the right-of-way or cutting a
service corridor through a wilderness area, both of which are no-no's).
Embedded in all that area (and we're talking an area about of a size with
Belgium) are maybe 150 villages/hamlets, and numerous isolated dwellings,
with a total population of about a hundred thousand. If the purpose of the
tertiary road network is to connect every village, then you are going to
have a few unpaved tertiaries. (Not many, but there definitely are some!)

https://kbk.is-a-geek.net/attachments/20160704/from-ny.jpg


-- 
73 de ke9tv/2, Kevin
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