Absolutely. And GB1 you are most definitely not the mapper we are referring to here :)

My opinion here isn't super strong, but I do think these roads should be tertiary. Anyone traveling through the area would be using the freeway as the through route, only using the frontage road to access destinations on the frontage road itself. They don't serve any sort of critical connection or a large number of houses or anything like that.

I contrast these roads to something like the route through Idaho Springs which serves as the access point to the entire town and definitely should remain at least secondary, or Guanella Pass which requires a long detour when the pass is closed in winter.

Who maintains the road is something that I believe should have precisely zero bearing on how the road is classified, however. The traveler themselves would see no difference at all, and any map consumer looking for the best route between two places doesn't care who maintains the road as long as it's maintained in some way.

I'm actually not planning on working on the Colorado Springs area because I've never been there myself; I wouldn't trust myself to map there. Planning on working to the west at this point where I'm much more familiar with the terrain.

Totally. I can't see a scenario where a dirt road should ever be higher than tertiary; in my view a rural secondary road implies a quality road that any nobody should ever be worried about driving on.

Why did you revert my edits and upgrade some of these minor dirt roads to secondary?

Can you explain why you upgraded this to secondary? This is quite literally a dirt road through the mountains, and it hasn't been a state highway in quite some time. I'm of the opinion that no dirt roads should be any higher than tertiary, because a secondary road gives the expectation that the road will be a viable route for any car from point A to point B.

This should say "from secondary to tertiary", whoops!

I'm not going to edit war over this or anything, but I think the compendium of evidence above quite clearly points toward Orchard being a textbook secondary road.

If we were just going by traffic counts then we'd make Orchard from Parker to Buckley primary and the remainder secondary. But I think we'd both agree that this would be a poor classification. Naturally the points around Parker Road are going to have higher traffic than the areas further east, since Parker is a pseudo-expressway in the area. If we look at like-for-like, here's what I see:

Orchard just east of Parker: 22000
Quincy just east of Parker: 38000
Hampden just east of Parker: 39000
Arapahoe just east of Parker: 54000

Orchard between Buckley and Tower: 14000
Quincy between Buckley and Reservoir: 25000
Smoky Hill between Buckley and Tower: 26000
Arapahoe east of Buckley: 39000
Hampden between Buckley and Tower: 30000

Yet again, these like for like counts point towards Orchard as being much less important than the other roads, and deserving of secondary instead of primary.

And that contrasts with Smoky Hill, Arapahoe, Quincy, and Hampden in the area. These roads all have nearly 30k vehicles per day, substantially greater than both Orchard and Chenango. I didn't use this info when classifying, but this further supports my point that Orchard is secondary.

Orchard absolutely does not have 25x the traffic. See the traffic count map at https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/d31c861edab6491ab20909e65a794710#data_s=id%3AdataSource_2-19ab6b6b445-layer-7%3A3095 that DRCOG provides.

According to this map, Orchard has roughly 15k vehicles per day, while Chenago has 10k vehicles per day. That is pretty damn close in terms of traffic volumes.

My reasoning is that Orchard is less important to the network than the nearby primary roads. The other east-west roads in the area (Hampden, Quincy, Smoky Hill, and Arapahoe) all go through the entire neighborhood, connecting from one side to the other. In contrast, Orchard does no such thing: it only goes partway into the neighborhoods before turning north and turning into Tower Road: nobody would take this route from end to end.

I see Orchard as more akin to Chenago: an arterial road that is clearly important, but much less so than the other surrounding primary roads. And hence I think secondary is the appropriate classification.

That's definitely fair, and I'll keep this in mind. There are some that I might disagree with (e.g. upgrading Himalaya between Quincy and Hampden to secondary since it doesn't even have a center line), but not worth edit warring over.

I'd appreciate if you can leave a changeset comment to this effect in the future though if you're going to immediately undo some edits so that I or other mappers know it's not 1) a mistake from an edit conflict, or 2) blind reverts without rhyme or reason based on one mapper's opinion.

I'm not going to start an edit war, but seems like this undid a lot of my changes from an hour prior without any comment on my changeset in this area or other notice to me. Was this intentional, or a result of an edit conflict? Would you be able to provide a reason that you undid these? I can provide reasons for any classification changes that I made if you want justification on any of them.

I don't think the designation or maintainer of a road should have any bearing on how we classify the road. I care more about what the function of the road is, and this section of Highway 40 is no more than a glorified frontage road.

If the frontage road didn't have a highway designation, I think we'd both agree that it would be tertiary, since all it really serves is aa church and several houses. It's less important to the network than, say, Lookout Mountain Road nearby, which is tertiary and I agree shouldn't be upgraded above tertiary.

I certainly won't start an edit war if someone changes it back, but personally I don't see a reason based on what function the road performs that it should be re-upgraded to secondary.

It completes the loop, but what two cities does this actually form the "best" connection between? If someone is going to Golden from Broomfield I'd wager that most people would take I-25 to I-76 to I-70 rather than taking Highway 128 to Highway 193. And certainly they would if going to anywhere to the south or west besides Golden. It's the fastest route between Golden and Lafayette or Louisville, but I don't see that as worthy of a trunk connection anymore than something like Lafayette to Boulder (which would be via Highway 7 or South Boulder Road, neither of which are trunk).

I don't see unpaved as something that would preclude tertiary classification in remote areas myself; they can often be the best or only ways to access large portions of the wilderness or important attractions. But totally get and agree with you on the private road part. Feel free to downgrade it!

Sorry for the delay, been busy the past few days. No need to apologize! I do prefer using the wiki over Slack since it's way more transparent and leaves a permanent record of what's decided so that others can reference it later. Will take a look at the discussion there and respond when I have some time to look it over.

So far I finished Oregon and received no pushback at all (I don't think I got a single changeset comment in well over 200 changesets tbh). I take the lack of pushback as a sign that I'm doing something right :)

Do you have any specific concerns about any road? It's a very manual process and if I'm doing it right I should be able to answer why I upgraded any road that I did; it's not an automated upgrade with no thought put into it.

BTW I know that changing the classification of roads to and from trunk is controversial, hence I'm avoiding these too, although generally the trunk network in the western US is in a good spot already and I wouldn't make many changes at all even without this.

For rural areas and even some smaller urban areas, there are often no mappers who have ever gone through and looked at road classification at all. This led to inconsistent, nonsensical, or other classifications that were pretty clearly wrong. So this is more of a "first pass" in these areas just to get something on the board beyond automated tiger classifications or large bulk classifications. Will I always be right? Of course not; open to any modifications that anyone makes as long as it's justified.

Tertiary (again in Yakima proper only) is done. The outskirts still need work, but Yakima itself west of the river should now be pretty consistent with how the roads are classified relative to how they actually function (rather than how they "feel" or "look", which is not how we should be classifying).