I am bringing this to the group’s attention as these issues have been discovered by a group of editors in Alabama, which is also impacting many other states/regions. So the National Wazeo needs updating.
The current National Guidelines state that County Routes (County Roads) should always be Primary Streets. I believe this guidance needs to be updated, as there are several states including Alabama that can’t use it. We now have access to scripts and overlays which provide easy, usable Functional Classification guidance for each state. In the past, this was much more cumbersome. The following are some examples from Alabama that demonstrate why we believe the current guidance does not provide the most efficient routing choices.
The majority of roads in this city are named CR-XX. Since Primary Streets have routing priorities, and the majority of streets are PS, this nullifies the routing priority and renders it ineffective. We don’t believe this was the expected and desired result from the guidance chart.
Unpaved CR traverses forest - These would be PS per the current Wazeopedia guidance. They are not listed as collectors per the state, and therefore we do not believe it is intended to use this as a preferred route.
Short CR with only one outlet - There are a large number of short CR’s with only one outlet. Making these PS serves no routing purpose unless the state’s FC guidance provides otherwise.
Solution: Update in the “Primary Street ” section, change “Signed, numbered county routes (and, in Louisiana, parish routes) paved with a hard surface. In select jurisdictions only (check [[local guidance]]), signed, numbered county routes (and, in Louisiana, parish routes).
In the quick reference chart, in the one cell where “county route” meets “local/not mapped”, remove “PS” and replace with either “PS or Street” or with nothing, and either way add a footnote “g” in that cell which states “check [[local guidance]]”.
Follow your State/Local FC. If there is no guidance then the editors would need to follow the National Wazeo Flow Chart.
I already ran this by Sketch and Driving79 to get their approval on this.
Some states/regions do follow that national guidance as written. In Ohio, if a road is a CR, then it is a PS. If that chart is changed, then we’d have to have local guidance that doesn’t match national guidance. I don’t know how many other states/regions would also need to pull down the current national guidance to a local level if that happened.
Other places, like WV, have our own guidance for FC that does not follow that chart so there would be no difference. In WV, very much of the state would be PS if we followed that. :lol:
Many states do not follow the national guidance and have their own standards on their state wiki pages. New Mexico, for example, does not require CRs to be PS. Many of the CRs are 4x4 cowpaths.
I’m currently dealing with a UR from a user who got a route from Apple maps that was an hour faster than what he got from Waze. He appears to have followed the slower Waze route. Apple sent him down a lengthy 4x4 CR and he thinks Waze should have done the same.
I think a key difference here is this phrase. Many states publish FC data. For numbered CRs, the suggestion is to follow the state classification if it exists, which will take care of many of the edge cases of over-classification.
If falling back to the table, it may be valuable to add a note that short, dead-end segments that have CR numbers, also be classified as LS, even if paved. The suggestion of adding a ‘g’ comment of check local guidance is fine too.
Have you considered using the “Routing Road Type” in the WME to lower the routing priority of the CRs? It has the effect of making them local streets for routing purposes without having to alter the national wiki.
An NOR editor once told me routing through NYC overwhelmed routing server resources because so many of the roads are FC’d as MH in accordance with the national guidance. Waze’s desire (according to this editor) was that they reduce the road routing priority. (I don’t know if they did.) This is another hyper-local situation. I’ve experienced many routing server failures myself trying to get through NYC to New England.
I see one big downside to this suggestion, that being that only R4+ can set routing priority and in states where CRs are very common for LS use, that could be a real workflow problem as it also locks certain properties.
Every state tends to handle County Roads differently. While some states they supplement the state highway system, others they’re just roads that need numbers and are typically sequential. Oklahoma literally gives every road in the state a “county road” number in sequence starting from the panhandle and working outward, but other states use them as part of the highway road network.
Even going by using shields would not end up with a proper result. I’ve seen counties in Arkansas use a hexagon County Road shield on every road in the county, while I know other states like Alabama use them to actually get places.
In my mind, I think the minimum should be set then have any local/state guidance push higher. My thought would be by default any CR- would be LS, but state guidance/functional classification would likely promote it higher.
That would be a concern if we were talking corrections being required for a wide swath of the country, region, or state. Regardless, as jm6087 notes, there’s sufficient flexibility for localized regional or state decisions already built in to the national wiki, so I hope n4dog’s concern has been addressed.
The intent (at least to those working on the proposal) was to make it more clear that many regions/states do not follow only PS for CR. This is not very clear or prevalent concerning FC. It is stated at the very beginning of the overall Road Types page, but that’s it. It is clarified further there may be regional/local guidance that differs for other sections of the Road Types page (such as the Routing road type section or the When to select the Unpaved attribute section and the Railroad section). This was what we were trying to do for FC.
Hello everyone!
Wonderful discussion!
Please consider my points below.
I noticed the messages above pointing out that these issues can be addressed by regional, and state (local) guidance. With that in mind, I think a challenge to that local guidance arises from the Quick Reference Chart.
The problem with the chart is in the “examples” row. This row has an example of “CR-15” for the “County Routes” column. When you follow this column down to where it meets the “Local/Not Mapped” functional classification row, the only choice is “Primary Street”.
I feel comfortable saying this is the source of confusion. This example leads editors to a quick judgment that ANY road with CR-XX has to be “Primary Street”.
The solution of adding the word “Street” to the “Primary Street” cell is a good one but there might be a better solution.
If we add “CR-XX” to the “Robertson St” example in the cell to the next column to the right, the confusion in the examples row is clarified. This simple change would cover the instances where a road maintained by a county, and having CR-XX signs posted, is simply a road and not a “Route” (part of a highway system).
After changing this cell in the quick reference chart, the “examples” section below the chart would be the area reinforcing the change. The additions to this area would set out the differences between a “County Route” and a simple road maintained by a county “county road”.
Hopefully this solution allows regions and states within those regions to take advantage of any newly available FC resources that will improve their maps or, with the absence of reliable FC sources, leave their maps as they are.
I think we can all agree that the authors of the U.S. Road Types wazeo page did a wonderful job. The task of publishing a single article that meets the needs of a nation, 50 states, and thousands of counties and county-equivalents, couldn’t have been easy.
A local/regional wiki ALWAYS trumps the national wiki. The local/regional wiki can have its own reference chart. The Texas FC chart has County Roads that are not collectors as LS.
I don’t feel there is a need to add CR-XX to the Robertson St cell. Just changing the last row (Locally/not mapped) for County Roads from PS to LS would accomplish the exact same thing. If a CR-XX is a collector then it is covered by the Major and Minor Collector rows for County Roads already.
The national wiki is currently very clear that ANY CR-XX “has” to be PS (unless local/regional wiki overrides it - like Texas does)
Thanks for your reply John! You make some great points!
That seemingly rigid stance in the national guidance is exactly what brought about this discussion.
After finding there were more states (including yours) that this guidance doesn’t fit, the reasonable next step was to point out that fact and to ask that the national guidance be at least “softened” to include the possibility that a road with a CR-XX sign might simply be a street in front of someone’s house and not necessarily a connector(collector) to a highway system.
Introducing that possibility in one high-level guidance seems like a better idea than introducing it numerous times (once per state).
BTW. Did you find any value in the additions to the examples area below the chart (in my link)?
A change like this may need to go through your RC to the champs for discussion since that kind of change is probably a champ decision.
Since we have our own standards, I don’t really have an opinion for the national guidance.
Basically just changing the last row to “Street” for County Road is all that would need to be done. (if it is decided to change the national guidance)
I don’t feel there is a need to change anything else
The problem is that it would then invalidate other regions guidance and cause them to need to generate regional guidance that matches the old guidance if this is changed. I’m not sure how many regions default to national guidance now and how many would use the proposed modification, so not sure which one would be in the majority.
I think John unwittingly got to the crux of the issue with the chart above. CR-xxx is a County Road not a County Route. Many states make a distinction between a County Road and a County Highway. County Highways should be typed as Primary Street or higher. The base type of most County Roads should be local street, as they serve the same purpose as a typical urban residential street–just with a higher speed limit. So, yes, absolute guidance that a road named CR-xxx is a primary street is incorrect. The chart should be updated to reflect the correct road pronunciation as well.
I am confident that the way it’s currently done is not working. It is not even close to universally applicable, so it’s bad guidance. Standards even for shielded, paved CR are so different from state to state and county to county that it is impossible to give an answer either way.
The ideal solution, imo, is to change that one cell in the chart to “check local guidance” and to change the guidance itself to reflect this (i.e., under Primary Street, change the text to say “In some jurisdictions (check local guidance), signed, numbered county routes (and, in Louisiana, parish routes) paved with a hard surface”, and add the same thing under “Street”). That way, no one has the wrong idea.
The other option is to change the default to Street and allow local wikis to override, but then you’ve got the same problem in the opposite direction.
The problem is not that local wikis aren’t empowered to override national guidance. The problem is that misleading national guidance can lead some to ignore local wiki pages (which are sometimes not as well maintained (pay no attention to the man behind the curtain)), and can also lead some local leadership to put undeserved faith in national guidance even in situations (such as this) where following national guidance in a certain locality can lead to an absurd result. So you can’t really fix the fundamental problem without specifically calling out that there is no one national answer to this question and that local guidance must necessarily prevail here.
There is no solution that won’t require updating some local wikis. That should not stop us from fixing the problem.
