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Post by Daknife
troyv wrote:
skbun wrote: There is a standing request which started with the US 2013 meetup in February to do the following:

- Eliminate the 'service road' road type
- Rename 'Dirt/4x4 road' to 'Unpaved'
- Add a new type called '4x4/offroad/I-forget-the-exact-word', an even "lower" class than 'Unpaved'.

Doing this would still allow users to use the checkboxes that say 'Avoid unpaved roads' or 'Avoid long ones' meaningfully, while also keeping it simple for the user. As far as I know there is no ETA on these changes being made.
I guess my eyebrows got raised when I saw using types of pavements, like sealcoating, as an attribute for roads. Maybe part of that was in the other thread I posted where I saw that. I don't see much of that in this thread.

My other thing with perfectly drivable gravel roads is why would you want to avoid it? I do see some reasons for avoiding those types of roads mentioned in here, like paint getting chipped and excess dust, and messing up your car. That seems reasonable. But I also see that if a graveled road is a popular and efficient route anyway, I would think that the municipality in charge would want to pave it. I guess I am not a real big fan of the "unpaved" attribute. I just don't see enough reason to have it.
That other thread is dealing specifically with Forest Service roads and is mostly just a discussion, with no real calls or even plans to call for everything to be an option. But it is still a very relevant discussion because there are many variations in road types and qualities. And when you get off the beaten (paved) path, a miss-categorized or miss-identified road can get someone stuck, and in the woods stuck can and has meant death, both in cold of winter and heat of summer people have gotten stuck because a road wasn't what their GPS or map said it was and by the time they realized their mistake there was no turning back. I was nearly caught by this myself last summer, I wouldn't have been at any risk, just really annoyed. My family went camping, my parents got enough signal to text lat lon coordinates so I looked to Waze, googlemaps and my TomTom to try to pick the best route in. Everything pointed to one route in being much shorter than the alternative, but then my father came out to good signal to send instructions to take the alternate way in. I did, it was late and dark and my kids were whining by the time we got to camp, and the next day I happened across the "shorter route" everything else pointed to. It had been allowed to grow in to be an ATV trail and it was a rough ride on an ATV. Based on everything all the maps were showing (all from the same tigermaps) had I taken the better route, I might have had a much longer drive, if not gotten stuck (unlikely because I know when a road is getting too narrow for my truck.)

You may not care about all the variations but when those variations or the lack of a good method of portraying them due to too simple a set of road types. It becomes important to some of us who actually deal with these road types. No we don't want a mile long list of road surfaces, pavement methods, maintenance schedules and so on but there are definite problems with the current "It's a paved road type or it's dirt/4X4" options.
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Post by Daknife
PhantomSoul wrote:IMHO, a road being unpaved, no matter what its pack quality, automatically disqualifies it from being any kind of highway, as well as a primary street, regardless of what kind of marker it may have, or whether there are any other roads in the area. Main roads are paved, regardless of who maintains them. Period.
Speaketh the editor from New Jersey. No disrespect, and your opinion is as valid as anyone else's but it's funny how those from areas with far less "real" rough terrain are usually those making such statements. There are dirt/gravel roads in the midwest and west that are official US Hwy's and/or State Hwy's. They are usually quite well maintained but with low traffic flow and you can do 50-60 on them with no problem at all, you just don't follow bumper to bumper at full speed like so many do on an interstate at rush hour, you give the guy in front of you space for the gravel (and the dust) to settle down so it doesn't take out your windows or headlights. An unpaved road can most certainly be called a Hwy and there are many that are officially highways, do we go counter what the official designations are?

And as others have noted, this is not a purely US discussion as the editor options are the same worldwide.
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Post by Daknife
dan_in_TX wrote:Just to keep the discussion alive, TXDOT announced that they're going to un-pave some roads in South Texas.
Yea, gotta county here in Utah doing the same thing, chopping it to gravel is like a fraction of the cost of repaving and then all they need to do to maintain it is run a grader down it every now and then and maybe the occasional shovel full of new gravel. Those who live or have business on the routes are not happy.
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Post by danofsatx
PhantomSoul wrote:Frankly, to me, anything unpaved is a "dirt road/4x4 trail" and should be marked as that type in order to make the "avoid dirt roads" switch in the client work as accurately as possible until a better classification system is developed, if that even happens.
Really? I guess the entire East Coast from Miami to Portland is a sea of concrete and asphalt then. I grew up in Ohio, and since that time have lived in Virginia, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, California and Texas, and every single one of these states has state, county, and/or township maintained roads that are graveled or chipped and sealed. They are major roads, and a lot of times the only way in or out. They're not "dirt", and don't require 4x4, they're just really dusty and play havoc with your paint. Here's one example near where I grew up - it's a ~4 mile shortcut that has quite a few houses and more roads off of it, but it's still a gravel road.

-side note, that are of Ohio needs a lot of work...maybe I should amend my AM application to
include that area, too ;)
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Post by danofsatx
Just to keep the discussion alive, TXDOT announced that they're going to un-pave some roads in South Texas.
SAN ANTONIO - Texas Department of Transportation officials have announced plans to move forward with converting some roads in West and South Texas oil and gas fields to gravel.

Some South Texas counties affected by the change would include Live Oak, Dimmit, La Salle and Zavala.

TxDOT also announced the speed limits on those roads would be reduced to 30 miles per hour.

TxDOT officials say the switch is necessary because of the heavy trucks traveling the lightly built roads, taking equipment to rural oil and gas drilling sites.

TxDOT needs to get permission from county commissioners to convert the roads to gravel.

A total of 83 miles of roads would be converted from paved to gravel, officials said.
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Post by doctorkb
I'd argue that sealcoating is a form of paving. You end up with a surface that is virtually indistinguishable from asphalt (for the normal user).

True gravel roads (where they aren't sealed, just graded periodically) should be in the "4x4/dirt" category.
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Post by doctorkb
PhantomSoul wrote:I would think that any unpaved road, by definition, cannot be a highway.
You would think. But apparently, that's not the case in some of our highways up here in the GWN. :)
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Post by harling
WeeeZer14 wrote:I'll just mention that the term "Primitive Road" is foreign to most east coasters ;)
True: by now all the cow-paths have been paved. But we do have a functional equivalent: roads that have so many potholes and so much broken pavement that they have reverted to Thomas Hobbes' "State of Nature".
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Post by harling
WeeeZer14 wrote:
harling wrote:
WeeeZer14 wrote:I'll just mention that the term "Primitive Road" is foreign to most east coasters ;)
True: by now all the cow-paths have been paved. But we do have a functional equivalent: roads that have so many potholes and so much broken pavement that they have reverted to Thomas Hobbes' "State of Nature".
So anything not paved in the past 24 hours :lol:
Or anything not paved since the last snow... whichever is the more recent.
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Post by jasonh300
That's all fine and dandy with the way the road structures work in United States. However, this issue mainly comes up in other countries where the infrastructure is different from what we're used to.


Via my iPhone 4S.
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