I'm not sure.

On the one hand, I'd like to leave the Highway categories for roads that are a numbered highway... there are many such roads in Alberta and Saskatchewan that are barely worthy of the term "street", however.

On the other hand -- if we're going to call other unimproved roads "highways" simply because they're numbered, shouldn't we also upgrade the significant streets in larger centres?

I think my primary concern is that you'd get WAY too many "Minor Highways" and the term would lose significance.

Would streets like Cambie fall into the category of a primary route that goes between cities / municipalities? If so, I think a case could be made for "Minor Highway" status. If, however, it doesn't meet both of those criteria, perhaps it should remain "Primary Street".

Visually, Wininpeg looks about 30% more highway than Vancouver does... of course, the layout of Vancouver area is very different -- it grew out in one direction, whereas it looks like Winnipeg grew in all directions.

I think this is something that should be discussed. Winnipeg has all of its major arteries marked as highways, despite the fact that not all of them are highways within the city. I think it looks good for the most part, although I think it was overdone and I have been planning on scaling it back for some time.

I tried to spark a debate on this a year ago with the local Winnipeg editors that were active at the time, but most of them lost interest and whenever I downgraded any of the arteries another user would change them to a highway again. At the time, anything that I felt strongly against required me to change back to a primary street and lock, which I really don't like doing for local routes as it discourages participation by other editors - this is the main reason why it still looks like it does.

My suggestion is to take a look at Winnipeg, think about it and maybe its worth us debating. Just take into consideration that Winnipeg has too many roads listed as a highway (I'll probably decrease the amount by 30%) and I do plan on scaling it back one of these days - hopefully the editor that was reversing all my changes is no longer active. I remember Chicago kind of taking this approach, but it looks like they have since scaled things back to following the wiki.

James

I'm not sure, I'd have a few more highways, notably in Vancouver core. With that being said, after taking a glance at Vancouver it seems like someone has been adding a bunch of highways on the 1st of March. It more in line now with what I would have thought GVA would have looked like.
James