mapcat wrote:

(2) Should there be a standard for County Road, such as CR-XXX?

Given that individual counties within a state may vary on this, and the relative unimportance of these roads, it seems that complete localization would be impossible, or at least impractical.

Not that Dave meant any ill will, but I'll reply here in my continued crusade to raise awareness that East Coast / Big City environments lead one to think that County Roads, BIA Routes, Indian Service Routes, Forest Roads, and other country roads are unimportant. They may not have the volume seen in 10-million-people-cities, but those roads are just as important when one travels in those locations.

Those traveling in the desolate or isolated but beautiful regions of the southwest, western, and other rural areas of the US will want these roads well marked.

mapcat wrote:

(4) There is a app display issue to consider here. "State Route XXX" takes a lot more space on the display than "SR-XXX" or some other abbreviation. Is that important?

I think it is for ramps, but not anywhere else. A road named "State Rte XXX" has a length comparable to any other street name.

True, but I think this might be worth more discussion, even if it is just so I learn more...

I would think that we want to save space on the display as much as we can. Shields are seemingly the most space-saving. Just because "State Rte XXX" is as long as other names of streets doesn't mean we might want to consider the user interface in saving space.

As I recall in-person discussions and here on the forums, Ramps were used to hold and pronounce things like SR-XXX. Since ramps don't display street name info, it really doesn't matter what is in them other than for consistency and editing.

During discussions at the meetup, the pendulum seemed to have swung to avoid long names like "State Hwy XXX" and "State Route XXX" and put the shorter forms like SR-XXX into the name field for roads. I thought that was originally to enable those to display shields, but then that issue was separated. I still see value in keeping things as short as possible as long as it's understandable.

skbun wrote:As a followup to myself, I guess what I'm saying here is that collectively, we all have done more discussing about this than it actually would have taken for us to all go out, buy a two-liter of Mountain Dew, and end this, doing it _right_, by mass selecting segments, making sure we get a continuous select (meaning the road is named the same all the way), and not only change names of highways, but do it right in making sure the road isn't broken, that there's good consistency extra junctions suppressed, etc. We the CMs are really the only ones who CAN, because we have the experience, and the wide editing ability.

I've already started doing this in areas I am editing in NM, AZ, CO, and a while back in TX, but for those who noticed at the Meetup, I prefer Coke Zero.

We've also accomplished some uniformity in most of the continental Southwest Region on using SR-xxx (for State Hwy or State Route), CR-xxx (County Road), and of course US-xxx. I am not sure we have found the right POCs in HI to agree to this or not.

I like the Waze backside database change solution to this, although there are a lot of points. It is such a big manual job that it will take a while to do this. The hard part, I have found, is that if you do this at the 500m level and select the road, you can miss tiny segments that were unnamed or named the alternate way with different city names, etc.

I agree with mapcat that it looks bad on the map to have naming conventions interspersed. The good news, it seems, is that if you make a mass change at 500m, then let the edits settle out, come back and walk the highway again, those incorrect named segments pop out and can be squashed. The alternative is to do a closer inspection, and that takes a lot longer.

I agree. Forget the permalinks. Break it down by up ute and state in a list. I have converted much of NM and am doing others nearby on the side as I edit other things. I am not worried about too much organization, but there should be a review sweep of routes at some point.