Highway Data Discussion (CHM/TravelMapping)

[yakra]

Count me as on board too.

I think it would be a good encouragement toward peer reviewing.

[rickmastfan67]

I'm game as well.

[rschen7754]

If you're okay with the extra overhead, it sounds good.

[Jim]

OK, good, lots of positive and neutral reaction and no real negatives pointed out to the three-tier proposal.   I'll give it a try when I have a chance.  I don't think it's hard but I want to find a time when I can block out a few hours for development and testing before I do much with it.

[mapcat]

WV 85 ends at US 119, right? ftp://129.71.206.174/county_maps/Boone_1_of_2.pdf (2014 map). TM shows it ending at WV 17.

[rickmastfan67]

WV 85 ends at US 119, right? ftp://129.71.206.174/county_maps/Boone_1_of_2.pdf (2014 map). TM shows it ending at WV 17.

Will look into this and update accordingly.

[rickmastfan67]

WV 85 ends at US 119, right? ftp://129.71.206.174/county_maps/Boone_1_of_2.pdf (2014 map). TM shows it ending at WV 17.

Will look into this and update accordingly.

OSM, Bing, Google, all show WV-85 going to US-119.

We currently have WV-17 & WV-85 ending at their intersection.

StreetView from 2011 shows WV-85 going all the way to US-119. https://goo.gl/maps/7HNf3NjcA8u

PDF you linked to shows a WV-85 shield along the route on the West side of Danville & US-119.

So, WV-85 needs to be extended to US-119.  I'll work on fixing this later tonight.

(Submitted)

[vdeane]

What's the current consensus on the NY truck route issue?  It seems like we're not adding new ones that are discovered but retaining the existing ones.

[yakra]

What's the current consensus on the NY truck route issue?  It seems like we're not adding new ones that are discovered but retaining the existing ones.

Did you post about that elsewhere on AARoads? Or on Github? A quick glance upthread here & I didn't see anything...

Anyway, my two cents:
Was part of the concern how "official" they are, whether they're designated/posted by the state or municipality or what? I know there are a couple truck routes in Kansas posted by the city that are included.
Jim added NY29TrkSar & NY9PTrkSar when I discovered them a few years back. I'm pretty sure those are city-not-state as well.
So maybe, add them when they're found, but not go out of our way to make sure we've found them all...

[vdeane]

What's the current consensus on the NY truck route issue?  It seems like we're not adding new ones that are discovered but retaining the existing ones.

Did you post about that elsewhere on AARoads? Or on Github? A quick glance upthread here & I didn't see anything...

Anyway, my two cents:
Was part of the concern how "official" they are, whether they're designated/posted by the state or municipality or what? I know there are a couple truck routes in Kansas posted by the city that are included.
Jim added NY29TrkSar & NY9PTrkSar when I discovered them a few years back. I'm pretty sure those are city-not-state as well.
So maybe, add them when they're found, but not go out of our way to make sure we've found them all...

I recall posted about it somewhere around here, though I don't remember what thread it's buried in.  If we're keeping in, we have to add Truck NY 32 in Glens Falls (bypassing the roundabout on a short side street connecting US 9/NY 32 to NY 32) and Truck NY 25 on Eastern Long Island (though the route doesn't appear to be well signed except at the eastern end at the intersection of CR 48 and NY 25).  There's also some odd signage in Saratoga Springs regarding the US 9 north to NY 50 south and NY 50 north to US 9 south movements at the southern end of the overlap.

[Duke87]

Jim added NY29TrkSar & NY9PTrkSar when I discovered them a few years back. I'm pretty sure those are city-not-state as well.
So maybe, add them when they're found, but not go out of our way to make sure we've found them all...

I would argue that it is user-unfriendly and in bad faith to have a list of such things which is known to be incomplete but which no determined effort is being made to complete it.

Consider this: an individual could very reasonably look at a list or map generated by the project and say "okay, if I want to clinch all the state highways in this region of New York, this is my checklist". To go and start maybe sorta sometimes adding truck routes to the list of NY state highways as they are found is to go to users who have planned clinching trips off the existing data and tell them "hahaha you thought you clinched 100% of the roads here, but now we say you didn't, trololololol".

Given that:
1) there is no exhaustive list of NY truck routes available and the state has no involvement in their creation (i.e. they are "unofficial")
2) they are often signed poorly
3) usany has been an active system for several years and truck routes were not included when it first went active

my vote goes to not including any of them. ESPECIALLY because of item number 3. The decision on whether to include things like this should be made when a system is in development, not after it has gone live - due to concerns outlined above about people using the system data to plan clinching trips. I don't want to yank anyone's completion out from under them due to a change in the standards of what is deemed worthy of inclusion.

[Jim]

I don't have a strong opinion on the inclusion of these signed but unofficial NY truck routes.  Perhaps they can be moved to their own system, with the understanding that they will be included if signed but that no guarantee of completeness is being made.  A thought: are all of the truck routes we know about that have at least some portion not on other state, US, interstate routes always routed on NY's official but unsigned reference routes?

[yakra]

I would argue that it is user-unfriendly and in bad faith to have a list of such things which is known to be incomplete but which no determined effort is being made to complete it.

Aah, but in my scenario said list is not known to be incomplete!

My dismissal is just based on practicality: how far down the rabbit hole should a collaborator go to ensure that every potential truck route is known to either exist or not exist? How many hours of effort to pore into collecting them all, and for what diminishing returns?
For my part, I won't go back and comb through all the New Hampshire State Highways and convert every "FooBarVRd" label to the preferred "FBVilRd" format, when my time is better spent busting out the Nebraska State Links & Spurs, or finishing off the Manitoba Primary Provincial Highways. And similarly, I won't check GMSV and the website of every municipality there for the existence of the odd bannered route that's only recognized at the municipal level.
But if a report from the field comes in of something we've missed, then by all means add it. As we do for other errors & omissions.

WRT trip planning: I don't think this should be of too great importance. If a traveler has not been to a given area yet, their plans would likely include the mainline routes & other routes in the area. If they encounter a new unexpected truck route in the area, they can grab it, or not, as is their wont, and toss a report of it our way. If a traveler has already been to an area, there's the possibility they'd already know about a truck route there we've not included, and also send us a heads-up. I don't see a route's (non)-inclusion as being a make-or-break factor for making a trip to a given area.

As an aside:
Tim once described a rule of thumb on whether to include a Trk route: Does it make sense as an Alt route? I agree with this criterion. It means that NH16 Truck (Berlin) gets included, but NH107 Truck (Berlin) (as more of a truck route TO NH107) does not. Thus the US9/NY50 connection vdeane mentioned in Saratoga Springs (which I saw myself in I think 2011) would be out. It's more helpful guidance signage than a proper truck route.
IMO, cases where the truck route connects to the parent at one end and to the route the parent terminates at at the other end make sense as an Alt route. (ME ME228 Trk (Washburn) is an example.) Bannered routes will sometimes do this. (TX TX44 Bus (Corpus Christi) for example.)

I don't have a strong opinion on the inclusion of these signed but unofficial NY truck routes.  Perhaps they can be moved to their own system, with the understanding that they will be included if signed but that no guarantee of completeness is being made.

I'm not too hot on the idea of breaking them out into their own system. IMO it's clutter, making too many systems unnecessarily. Also confusing & counterintuitive, when in other cases truck routes, as with other bannered routes, are included in the same set as their respective parent state route systems. Joe Traveler just sees a truck route signed as a truck route out there in the field, and probably doesn't know, understand or care what authority designated/signed the route, whether state or municipal or what.

A thought: are all of the truck routes we know about that have at least some portion not on other state, US, interstate routes always routed on NY's official but unsigned reference routes?

Best thing to do would be to find a counterexample.
The only example (non-I/US/NY) I know of off the top of my head (I'm not going to go to the ends of the earth to exhaustively pore thru the USANY list for others right now) is NY29TrkSar; it follows Weibel Ave between NY29 & NY50. Can anyone confirm whether or not that's a reference route?

[vdeane]

Wiebel Ave is not a reference route.  Neither is Oakland Ave (Truck NY 32, Glens Falls, not in Travel Mapping).

I checked the location of Truck NY 25 near Greenport.  Despite thinking there was another reference further west, I cannot confirm with Google Maps, so I think it's just North Road and Morres Lane (both of which are signed Truck NY 25 from NY 25 itself).  If it gets added, I'll admit to counting my street view "clinch" of it; one can see much of it from NY 25 and I'm not driving back out that way just for a small truck route (it's an hour and a half round trip from Riverhead, which is otherwise the furthest east I'd need to go to clinch the remaining touring routes in Suffolk County; had I know about the truck route in advance of my trip out there, I could have looped around when I grabbed NY 25 out to Orient Point, but by the time I found it, I was just trying to beat as much traffic as I could back to my hotel).

[Jim]

Wiebel Ave is not a reference route.  Neither is Oakland Ave (Truck NY 32, Glens Falls, not in Travel Mapping).

Thanks.  To me, this lowers the status of these NY truck routes a bit more.  I'm thinking more and more that we should remove them.

[mapcat]

I vote for canning all truck routes, potential and existing. Besides the good reasons already raised, they're not necessarily permanent. Once the low bridge or sharp turn in the mainline route is remedied, no more truck route.

WRT trip planning: I don't think this should be of too great importance. If a traveler has not been to a given area yet, their plans would likely include the mainline routes & other routes in the area. If they encounter a new unexpected truck route in the area, they can grab it, or not, as is their wont, and toss a report of it our way.

I respectfully disagree. Although I'm not chasing down every state highway in every state, some here seem to be doing exactly that, and it seems unreasonable to expect someone who has carefully planned out a clinch-em-all trip to either (a) follow an unexpected truck route along an unknown path, perhaps adding 30 minutes or more to his or her itinerary, or (b) forgo the new discovery in the interest of saving time, only to need to plan a distant return trip just for that one. Option (a) would also be particularly aggravating to a traveller who, upon reporting the discovery, learns that for some reason it doesn't pass muster and won't be added anyway.

Finding a similar "surprise" new mainline (or business, or alt) route would be far less likely because of the meticulous work done on preparing all new route sets prior to activation. The discussion so far has made it obvious that at least one state lacks a comprehensive list of truck routes; I doubt most others differ.

[SD Mapman]

I vote for canning all truck routes, potential and existing. Besides the good reasons already raised, they're not necessarily permanent. Once the low bridge or sharp turn in the mainline route is remedied, no more truck route.

What about state-designated truck routes that function more as bypasses? I vote those should stay in at least.

The discussion so far has made it obvious that at least one state lacks a comprehensive list of truck routes; I doubt most others differ.

South Dakota does.

[Mapmikey]

[2 cents]

not sure why it can't just be left up to whoever maintains the state...CHM and TM are not the arbiters of whether any individual has "completed" a state's system or not.  That is up to the users to decide for themselves.

For example, someone may decide they need to travel all of Virginia's unposted state routes that are publicly accessible to clinch the state system, whereas TM will give you 100% credit with just the posted ones...

And while it is true that missing an unknown truck route would cause somebody to have to make a long return trip, that can also happen if a bypass opens after you've been there already...

For me personally I don't care if they are there or not.  If they are in I map them if I've been on them.

[/2 cents]

Mike

[froggie]

+1 what Mapmikey just posted, especially the part where it should be up to whomever maintains the state.  Generally speaking, whomever maintains a given state is likely to have more of a working knowledge of that state than others, and should know what to include and not to include.  We saw this very painfully with the Vermont routes/files on CHM.

[Jim]

Thanks.  I'd encourage all highway data contributors to prioritize updates in their regions and getting nearly-ready systems prepped for activation over plotting of new routes and new systems.  I don't want us to enforce the "you can only be developing 2 systems at a time" rule CHM had.  I know from experience that new development is a lot more satisfying than maintenance and tracking down annoying little problems but as we know all too well, systems get stuck so close to activation and never get that final push.

[yakra]

I second MapMikey & Froggie.

[Duke87]

I have no problem with it being a state by state decision whether such things warrant inclusion. I'm all in favor of this, frankly. Once size does not fit all.

What I DO have a problem with is the goalposts getting moved ex post facto. The decision about whether to include such things in a system should be made before it goes live, and then stuck with.

My opinion that truck routes should not be included is specific to NY, largely on this basis. They weren't included when the system first went live, so we should keep it that way for the sake of fairness to users relying on the highway data as a checklist (disclosure: I am one of said users, so I do have some skin in this game).

[rickmastfan67]

My opinion that truck routes should not be included is specific to NY, largely on this basis. They weren't included when the system first went live, so we should keep it that way for the sake of fairness to users relying on the highway data as a checklist (disclosure: I am one of said users, so I do have some skin in this game).

I think that was because we didn't know of most of them.  I recall having to bring it up to Tim's attention about the US-20 Truck route in Silver Creek, NY.  That route's been around for pretty much my entire life when I've passed by that town.

[mapcat]

+1 what Mapmikey just posted, especially the part where it should be up to whomever maintains the state.  Generally speaking, whomever maintains a given state is likely to have more of a working knowledge of that state than others, and should know what to include and not to include.

So, essentially, you're saying that if collaborator Bob chooses to include truck routes in his states, and collaborator Bill chooses to ignore them in his states, that's fine? How do you explain that to a user who, familiar with one of Bob's states, submits a list of truck routes he's found in one of Bill's states, and asks that they be added? To the user, they will be the same; "No thanks, Bill doesn't deal with truck routes" won't seem like a valid explanation.

And what happens when Bob tires of the project, and Bill takes over one of his states? Do the truck routes stay, or do they go?

If a blanket include/ignore for these routes isn't possible, then perhaps we should look to another user option for truck routes specifically, or bannered state routes in general.

[oscar]

+1 what Mapmikey just posted, especially the part where it should be up to whomever maintains the state.  Generally speaking, whomever maintains a given state is likely to have more of a working knowledge of that state than others, and should know what to include and not to include.

So, essentially, you're saying that if collaborator Bob chooses to include truck routes in his states, and collaborator Bill chooses to ignore them in his states, that's fine? How do you explain that to a user who, familiar with one of Bob's states, submits a list of truck routes he's found in one of Bill's states, and asks that they be added? To the user, they will be the same; "No thanks, Bill doesn't deal with truck routes" won't seem like a valid explanation.

And what happens when Bob tires of the project, and Bill takes over one of his states? Do the truck routes stay, or do they go?

All that seems to assume that all truck routes are alike, or that different states have similar policies about truck routes. As has been noted, even within one state (NY), truck routes come in different flavors, with some more "official" (from NYSDOT's standpoint) than others.

As rickmastfan67 noted, there's also imperfect knowledge of what auxiliary routes are out there. We can try to get that nailed down before system activation, but we won't always succeed (especially in some jurisdictions where documentation of such routes is sloppy or hard to find), and will depend on user reports to flag routes we should add. For example, TCH business routes in British Columbia (spotted by Mapmikey) and Saskatchewan (which Alps and I found) were late additions to the Trans-Canada Highway route set.

More broadly, in a volunteer-driven collaborative project like TM you're bound to have some differences in approach, that will affect what gets mapped and how in different states, etc. We can make some efforts to agree on broad guidelines (or continue to use CHM's), for collaborators to apply to the different circumstances of their states or other jurisdictions. But it's unrealistic to expect or even strive for perfect consistency, unless you have one central authority setting and enforcing rules. We tried that once, and it turned out to be unsustainable.