I wanted to get a feel for how everyone felt about my thoughts on naming highways on ramps in Wisconsin.
My proposal is to omit the words “State” and “US” from the exit ramp names. We would continue interstates as I-XX, as normal. (“County” would be a wildcard, I will start another thread on these.)
Ex: Instead of naming a ramp “Exit 168: State Hwy 32 S / State Hwy 54 / Mason St” just shorten it to “Exit 168: Hwy 32 S / Hwy 54 / Mason St”, as I did here. This makes it a lot easier to follow along when you have voice prompts on, IMO, and makes turn/exit instructions cleaner, especially with multiple shields on an exit. Also, for example, I have never told anyone, nor have I ever heard anyone give directions to take US-41 to Appleton, it’s just called Highway 41 in normal conversation (which matches the signage that I’ve mentioned too).
I’ve been paying attention to signs by the highway (I have pictures too) and they all say, for example “Hwy XX 12mi” They call county roads/highways “Hwy X”, as well (if they don’t have a picture of the shield showing instead)
Simply calling them Hwy, won’t cause any problems with US highways, since Wisconsin State Highways don’t repeat numbers from US highways and Interstates. We would continue naming the actual highways as we currently do to maintain shield generation in the client. This DOES follow the wiki
I agree that it is better to have the shortened naming, especially for TTS. But, I feel it would be best to have all the signage info present (roads AND cities).
Different people will focus on different parts of a sign. Some drivers will always notice a shield first, others the city names (or street names). Since we don’t know what the next driver will see first, all the info should be there. Unless there was confusing info, like perhaps a highway and a street having the same name, that’s when leaving in the longer description of a road would be helpful (I don’t know of any real world examples of this, but I wanted to at least point it out).
It seems to me that the word ‘highway’ gets used more often than not when referring to any road that is not named. (Hwy 190 is rarely called that because it is better known as Capital Dr.) So shortening signs to just use Hwy for most all roads (county, state and US) I don’t feel would cause any confusion with drivers.
I might recommend going with, even if JUST for exits, the following for ramp text length and TTS brevity:
I-XXX (Interstate)
SR-XXX (TTS says ‘State route’, which yeah, isn’t ideal, but it’s the only short ‘state’ abbreviation, and is still shorter than ‘Highway’ or even 'Hwy '. We can call a road ‘Highway 41’, but that’s a US highway, so…you run into a conflict there.
US Hwy XXX (This is the only one for which there isn’t a good one)
CR-XXX (TTS says ‘County road’. I know Wisconsin is Special, and the only state in the Union that calls them ‘County Trunk Highways’, or ‘County Trunk XX’, but…well, CR is the only abbreviation in the book so far.)
The issue basically comes down to (and this is discussed in another nearby Wisconsin thread), we sort of have to balance ‘local conventions’ with other higher priority issues, like ‘the size of the text box we have’ and ‘What abbreviations Waze supports today’, and ‘Making sure high priority roads are classified as such in the first place’.
SH-xxx is proposed to be added to tts, that would help with screen space but not with the tts getting chatty. I think we should keep state, US, and county designations they inform the driver they are moving to a larger or smaller road. When bad navigation occurs maybe the driver will wake up and check why they are being navigated off interstate to small county road. To many people just follow navigators blindly.
Where I have had issues is with lots of hwy’s from same ramp. Then the repeated hwy is annoying and instructions will start to run over the top of each other. I don’t know what could be done about that. I proposed something like “Exit 168: State Hwy 32 S / 54 / Mason St” so state hwy would only be said once but was shot down on main forums.
Yes. All the info from the signage should be there (wiki agrees too “The name of the ramp should match the exit or entrance signage as closely as possible”), in my example, the green sign doesn’t have the city name, just the street. I probably should have had more than one example, sorry.
Those signs are not the entrance/exit signs that the standard is talking about. They’re the courtesy ‘These exits are coming up soon’ signs you’ll see in urban areas.
Here’s an example of the signs the Wiki is addressing: http://goo.gl/maps/mHfls
In this case, the proper exit name is ‘Exit 344: SR-50 / Kenosha / Lake Geneva’.
It’s okay to call this ‘State Hwy 50’ in the exit name if people like, but it’s longer, and we don’t have the SH- abbreviation yet. I’d go with SR, but that’s just my opinion on it.
(This said, if roads are properly typed, named, and checked for continuity and turn restrictions, changing their names is actually not very hard after the fact, because you can use ‘select entire street’.)
