We are in the process of attempting to standardize the naming of US Highways across the entire country.
In January, 2012 at the first Waze Conference in Palo Alto, it was decided and unanimously agreed upon that the new standard for US Highway naming would change from “US Hwy ##” to “US-##”.
Unfortunately, because of the ongoing issues we’ve had with highway shields, it wasn’t practical to make a sweeping change immediately.
At this point, several states have already made these conversions. It also has come to light that shields are not working properly in some places regardless of how the US Highways are named. We have weighed the options of having the short naming, which provides better TTS and display in navigational directions, or having shields appear on the map, and in the vast majority of cases, the shorter name is more desirable.
At this point, we’ve cataloged all US Highways that exist in each of the 48 mainland states, and will track the completeness of each of these highways.
What we need now, before proceeding with this project, is to know if there is any objection from Level 3 Area Managers or higher.
If you have an objection to this due to the loss of shields, please post here. The only valid objection that will be considered is loss of shields. If there is sufficient objection, your state can opt out of this project. However, these objections need to be made now, as once the conversion takes place, there is no turning back. Once the shields have been removed, they will not come back just by changing back to the old naming convention.
Note that Waze is currently working on a new implementation of shields that is independent of the highway name, and once that implementation takes place, then any objections will no longer be relevant.
Any further concerns, please feel free to discuss here or send me a PM, or contact sketch, who is overseeing this project nationally.