Hi! I’d like to start a discussion over here about a move we’re seeing in a few of the western states to standardize on a short and single format for US, State, and County roads. This is one that California and Nevada have adopted, and Utah is now considering.
If you do editing in Washington as I do, you’ll likely see that there are a LOT of different name formats out there, and it’s kind of a mess. How US, State, and County roads are named is left up to each state, and that said, I’d like to ask how editors in Washington feel about this, too.
Here would be the proposal for Washington, similar to how California and Nevada went with it:
SR-XXX for Washington numbered state highways (Washington’s official names for roads owned by the state IS ‘State Route’, and this seems to be in fairly common usage among drivers…
US-XX for Washington US highways (Same exception as above such as for State street through the Wasatch front)
CR-XXX for Washington county roads where applicable and this is the only name for the road
I also agree with this, but likely won’t look to make mass changes until road shields are implemented.
Oregon is also a bit odd because we refer to all routes as “highway” whether US or state. I don’t think it would be too odd to hear “state route twenty-two” but I’m not sure what the general public might think about this.