Recently I was updating some roads in Maine and was finding many with alt names of fire lanes and a variety of ways those were named. I didn’t know if there was a preference or standard we should apply to these. I know in my time driving in remote pets of Maine they are often signed and referenced in directions although also most of these have regular road names as well. Thoughts?
By law all Maine fire lanes had to be given normal names, which are used for all postal deliveries. When possible fire lanes ought to be renamed using these official names (see the mapping resources in the Maine Wazeopedia for sources).
There is no harm in keeping the old fire lane name as an alternate road name, if that will help navigation. Be aware that at least one town used an unfortunate naming convention for fire lanes “I-nnn” such as I-295. These can lead to incorrect navigation because of the potential confusion with the federal interstate notation. For these roads, we’ve used the convention of adding a space after the hyphen.