Well from my editing around northern AZ, I just gave up and left the road named as they are. Most of them are dirt and have had zero traffic on them since the basemap import. I don't deal with Indian areas enough to know a good answer, the BIA option sounds good, but a two letter abbreviation would be better in my opinion, to match SR, CR, US, UT, AZ, NM etc... But I really don't care as long as a standard is picked.

Just a note on this topic I did just update the road currently being paved to act as an alternate to the section of US-89 that is closed south of Page AZ. The basemap import name was Indian Route 20, but all news reports and the AZDOT page about the repair project have been calling it Navajo Route 20 or NR-20. I have a couple sections set to dirt but just renamed the entire length as NR-20 with US-89 Alt as an alternate name.

Once the paving is complete I'll probably move the US-89 Alt designation to primary and change the road type to Minor hwy until the main road is repaired, but I will keep the NR-20 as an alternate and will switch it back when mainline 89 is reopened.

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Just a thought on our previous posts you said

vectorspace wrote: And, if that particular NR-xxx road you mentioned has been listed as a BIA route, then to me it should really be BIA-xxx.

But if the BGS and smaller Hwy signs along the road all say NR-XX should that not be what we use? In dealing with US Highways "US-89" works well vs "US Hwy 89" because both are seen on the same stretch of road. More verbose signs will say US Highway 89, and the smaller Logo signs say US-89, so picking one of the two standard terms works. Similar for SR instead of State Hwy or State Route as when you get down to the Logo signs they are the State symbol and a Number. Now the NR-20 signs I see have an arrow-head and the numeral 20, if the BIA designation is also 20 then BIA-20 works, but if the only place you find the BIA designation is in some obscure federal reference that NOBODY looks at and is found nowhere on any signage then NR-XX should be the name used. Additionally it is more correct in my opinion to go with the Individual tribal designations rather than BIA because the tribes are Sovereign Nations and what they designate their roads is what the Tribes say, not what some bureaucrats in DC say. Or are we going to just designate a universal standard without any regard to sovereign nations. Are European Wazers forcing all of the EU to use one standard rather than following/aalowing what the various nations use within those nations?

Just thoughts, I don't have a real strong opinion on this, I don't travel through reservations very often, it's just something that occurred to me the last time I was looking at the AZDOT page about the 89 rebuild project and saw a picture of a NR-20 sign. We are constantly advised to follow the BGS, if the road is marked In real life with an NR-XX designation it will only cause confusion if we insist in using some BIA designation that isn't used anywhere else. And I dare say many larger reservations will have a Route 20 on them.

I think what you propose is a grand idea but I'm beginning to question it's feasibility and wisdom. The Tribes are not the BIA, the BIA is how the Feds provide the funding but that doesn't mean the Tribes will appreciate their roads being called BIA-XXX.

BIA-XXX would make sense. Have you checked how TTS deals with it?

My only thought on the BIA roads, is that it would be nice to know, if any authority fiqure would answer you.....
There's a number of areas and BIA roads that well plainly said is it's probably not a good idea to be driving through there unless you belong there. Would be a good idea to mark those as private roads.

As I thought, many roads would be considered private.... But how to figure which ones would be difficult..
Another point that another wazer asked me about is what is dirt road and what is street, which you see a lot in reservation area. I advised that person that in my opinion, in those type of areas a dirt road to them is a street, and a main route of transportation, and should be marked that way.

The few GIS contacts I've tried to make with the local reservations haven't been very helpful, or interested in standards at all. For example, I've made maps and sent them with my office Field Manager for meetings, and they ask what something is on the map, and why we are using the colors we are using.

I direct them to the legend and send them a copy of the federal standards for Federal Ownership colors (ensures a map looks uniform across the federal offices, golden for BLM, Pink for DOD, blue for State), and they promptly ignore it and do their own thing. Worse off is each GIS person, if they even have one, has different preferences. Some of the arguments that could be limited with the standards being followed are countless.

I've seen abbreviations in many ways, but perhaps we should be looking at the Tiger data to see what the TIGER (Tiger Uppercut!) team and the Census Bureau are recording them as? Or the E911 roads data (I've got this dataset for the entire state if anyone is interested)?

Let me check real quick.

Okay, here's what I got.

I opened up my base map and looked at the 2006 Tiger Roads data and the E911 data from last March.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v131/ ... 3a7d6b.jpg

Note the selected roads (the orange color is tribal, this particular area is the Acoma and Alamo tribal areas of the Navajo Nation in Socorro County NM)

If TR isn't able to be used, perhaps...

NTR - Native Tribal Road?
IRR - Indian Reservation Road?

I think staying with the basics, even if they conflict with other road names elsewhere is the way to go personally. We have to look at the end user I think.

BLM roads, while rare in my area, are BLM roads, that's the name of them. Forest Service Roads are also theirs.

Good conversation, I'm going to need to process this all and then read it again.

Sounds like someone is about to set a precedent. Although there is something about it in the Wiki. I have to dig deep to find it, though.