Road Numbering Changes

[Jhoan Seb]

I decided to create this thread to record recent changes. I think the most notable change so far is the sudden change made by the Kazakh Ministry of Transport, which has now officially adopted the abbreviations "KAZ" and "KZ" in Latin instead of Cyrillic for the classification of certain roads.

Kazakhstan has been changing its internal organization so much that they decided to change the telephone code and unify the entire territory into a single time zone.

The list of new designations can be found here:
https://adilet.zan.kz/rus/docs/V1500011402 (Virtually every road connecting Kazakhstan with Russia, Kyrgyzstan, China, and Uzbekistan has been renamed KAZ)

The change took effect in 2024, and it was not until this month that Kazakh contributors to OSM took on the task of modifying these routes to implement the new system: https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/466872745/history/7

There's some news article that's explain more about this change: https://www.zakon.kz/pravo/6454951-v-kazakhstane-obnovili-pravila-klassifikatsii-avtodorog.html / https://qazjolgzi.kz/en/novost/new-indexes-have-been-set-international-and-republican-highways

[Chris]

Thanks for reporting this change.

This means that the earlier route numbering scheme with A1 to A36 and R1 to R62 has been scrapped. The earlier system eliminated the Soviet system but kept the former Soviet M-numbers (there were only 5 of them).

[Jhoan Seb]

In addition, the Guyana Ministry of Transportation has been implementing road numbering, using US Route Shields to represent its national routes.

[Molandfreak]

Does Kazakhstan (or any other Central Asian former Soviet republic) still sign the European E-routes through the country?

[Chris]

I was wondering if there are any photos of the new KAZ and KZ signs in Kazakhstan, I'm curious as to what these shields would look like.

So I looked up a recently completed road project, Kalbatau - Maykapchigay / Chinese border. But it has the older M- and A-numbering. According to satellite imagery this interchange was completed before the new numbering took effect.



It took a while before the A-numbers were posted in the field. I don't know exactly when they introduced the A-numbering (2011 is mentioned, but it has been said that it is older).

The first photo with an A-number on Skyscrapercity was posted in 2011:

[CNGL-Leudimin]

A few months ago the province of Zaragoza, Spain renumbered all their provincial roads. They previously used a mess of CP-xxx, CV-xxx (which I referred to as ZV-xxx in order to avoid duplications with the Valencian Community) and VP-xxx, now they are standarized to ZP-xxxx. It was first announced about a year ago, and I first noticed the new numbering in the wild in early May at ZP-2102 (formerly CV-683, or ZV-683 as I styled it) entering Nuez de Ebro.

[Jhoan Seb]

It took a while before the A-numbers were posted in the field. I don't know exactly when they introduced the A-numbering (2011 is mentioned, but it has been said that it is older).

https://wiki.aaroads.com/wiki/Draft:Soviet_Central_Asia_Road_Numbering#Partial_Dismantling
I am currently working on a draft of that, specifically Kazakhstan transitioned from the Soviet system to an independent one in 2000 (https://law.gov.kz/client/#!/doc/7545/rus/05.12.2000) and it is the first mention of this system in Kazakh legislative documents. But it was de jure; de facto, it took about a decade to fully transition to this system. According to Road Numbering System: https://sites.google.com/site/roadnumberingsystems/home/countries/kazakhstan