Summary

For my first diary post, I’ll go into the ongoing dispute in the highway class tagging in one of my focus areas, the south-central San Joaquin Valley, particularly regarding rural four-lane roads in Fresno and Tulare counties.

Background

Traditionally, highway=trunk is used in the US for expressways and controlled-access roads with fewer than 4 lanes, though tagging standards vary from place to place. highway=primary is the typical tag in California for state routes, while highway=secondary is usually used for signed county routes, of which Tulare County has many.

In urban areas, the California OSM Wiki page also recommends using highway=secondary for roads with 4 lanes and highway=primary for roads with 6+ lanes.

The issue

When the rural 4-lane roads were remapped to reflect their divided 4-lane status (with the exception of Mooney Boulevard/CA 63, this was largely done by me), I generally tagged them as secondaries, with the rationale that they were clearly more important than the standard county roads (which I was generally tagging as tertiaries at the time). Since then, many of them had been upgraded to trunks by a single editor, which led to a pair of reversions when I tried to downgrade them again.

The current state

After a recent changeset, most of the non-state route four-lane rural roads (except for Golden State Highway and Mountain View Avenue) are now tagged as primaries. The Mountain View trunk tagging continues into Tulare County as Avenue 416, then turns south on Road 80 toward CA 198. The entire route of CA 65 in Tulare County (except for the freeway segment in Porterville) is also tagged as a trunk, even the 2-lane portions. The remaining four-lane rural roads in Tulare County are either primaries or secondaries.

My (originally) suggested solution

My (original) preference is to classify highways using a combination of importance and construction. With that said, here’s what I would do here.

• Keep the trunk tags where present on CA 198, CA 190, CA 180, and CA 65 between Porterville and Lindsay.
• Set most of the remaining four-lane rural roads to primary.
• Set Golden State Highway to secondary based on importance (it’s been bypassed by the CA 99 freeway).
• Keep Road 108 at secondary based on importance (Mooney and 99/198 are clearly the primary routes between Visalia and Tulare).

What I would do now

I was made aware of a wiki proposal to revamp the classification guidelines after my original post. In light of that draft, here is my new proposal:

• Follow the draft’s guidance on major state highways.
• Upgrade Avenue 280 to primary between CA 99 and Exeter. (already done)
• Set remaining county-maintained four-lane rural roads to primary, except Road 108 (which should remain secondary due to the presence of the parallel Mooney and CA 99).
• Reset most of the remaining state highways back to primary.
• Perform a top-down assessment of the remaining rural roads to find secondaries and tertiaries.