Was there a discussion prior to this change? It seems a bit controversial to downgrade a national highway to secondary - something that's been fully eradicated in the US.

I retagged this to primary because it being secondary created a random dead end in the primary tags. Since trunk has been changed to be for long-haul routes, primary has been changed to also include other main roads. In this case this is the main road through Zion and is important for people travelling there from Arizona and New Mexico. A lot of these changes are the results of discussions in the Utah local and highway classification channels on the OSM US Slack.

I don't think this change was necessary, as I intentionally divided this road to clean up things like bus route relations, lane counts, the administrative boundaries, etc. If you're going to do something like this, please remember to correct the relations and lane counts and re-add the highway features.

Hello, may I ask what changes you made on Kramer Estate Drive? I'm mapping this neighborhood currently and something you've done to the road caused an edit conflict.

No worries! Note for future reference that most, if not all motorways should have some sort of grade-separation from other roads.

I should also mention that roads should not be classified by their speed limit and road markings, because surface-based classification just circles us back to the trunk = expressway issue. I've never heard of holding in-person meetings or talking with local government on how the roads should be classified on OSM, since that's a better matter to discuss with others on Slack to get opinions of people from other states as a way to avoid a local bias of how things should be done. That's sort of an issue we've been having in other states like Oklahoma, where the primary editor is keeping people from outside the state from fixing the road classification issues.

I'd suggest that, if you go to meet with locals, discussing road classification on the basis of what a road connects rather than how much traffic uses it or what it's like on the surface. Having a cluster of minor roads can sometimes form a zigzag route for traffic through residential areas rather than a simple route along a couple collector roads towards their destination. You can use OSM's navigation system to see where drivers will be taken through if they use OSM for navigation. Remember to help make the map understandable to people from all over.

Traffic volume doesn't play much of a role in highway classification. If road tags were based on traffic volume, most city streets would be trunk and US 50 and US 6 would be tertiary.

Since trunk has changed its definition from expressway to long-haul route, that means that most secondary roads that are regionally or locally important can be bumped up to primary. In this case, NV 289 from US 95 to I 80 acts as the primary access to Winnemucca for travelers heading west on I 80 as well as the eastern half of the main city street. See how the roads in other similarly-sized Nevada cities like Elko and Mesquite have been upgraded.

As for the other residential road upgrades; tertiary is primarily for through roads and minor arterials and roads that connect locally-important destinations like commercial zones and institutions and schools.

Roads should be classified on an importance basis, and this is what's being worked on throughout the entire US. I've been focusing on the states I've lived in like NV and VA and btwhite92 has done some similar work around Reno with secondary roads.

Consider re-upgrading these, as tagging roads on how much traffic uses it isn't vital enough for people who need to use OSM data for navigation.

Hello, please don't delete RIROs like this. Motorways should be fully-grade separated from other roads and the links you deleted acted as the proper slip lanes to enter the freeway.

I'm not entirely sure that Amarillo Boulevard should be trunk, since I-40 and Loop 335 provide better routing for long haul traffic passing through Amarillo (it also looks like some slip lanes and ramps were missed in the road upgrade). However, I'd say US 287, US 87, and US 60 through downtown Amarillo are trunk. Great work on upgrading other long-haul routes around Texas and Oklahoma though!

Hello, this is not the way to add names to road, this is how you add roads themselves. You created a primary road over this secondary road.

Please consider contacting locals before downgrading trunk highways. Harrisburg and Lancaster to Wilmington is a valid trunk route.

My mistake, I confused the portion east of the Leesburg section for the one signed as Market Street. The document I was looking at was https://www.virginiadot.org/info/resources/Traffic_2016/AADT_053_Loudoun_2016.pdf

The map shows dated data, back from when VA 7 was an non-grade-separated highway within the boundaries. VDOT documents refer to the entire Loudoun County segment of VA 7 as Harry Byrd Highway and the Business Route as Market Street.

If US 29 had really nothing around it or was more of a frontage road then I would agree it should be primary but since, although it parallels I-66, it is a regionally important highway that forms a consistent straight route from Charlottesville to DC. I'd prefer to keep it trunk instead of creating more gaps while in the process of filling them. Apart from some minor roads and some Maryland instances, the DC Metro/NoVa region seems to have a fairly reasonably-tagged road network that provides different instances of road tag applications and can be a useful reference.

In Virginia and most surrounding states, bypasses and expressways like this are always tagged as trunk. I could log into Slack but I'll have to try to remember my password since I got locked out a while ago.

Well the part of US 29 that parallels I 66 is still a heavily-trafficked highway that can act as an alternative and is built up the 'urban trunk road' standards. US 29 also does not have any interchange with I 495, just an overpass. Are you speaking of the series of interchanges along US 50?

All I did was correct the tags from when it had a common name but improper tags. If it's upgraded the opening date will still be in there.

Thanks for the clarification. Just a correction though, the speed of UT 68 from Porter Rockwell Boulevard to the other MVC segment is (at least mostly) 55 MPH. That was another reasoning of me upgrading the corridor.

Trunk isn't necessarily exclusively for expressways. It's also for important and high speed roads that can serve a similar purpose, like US 6 from Spanish Fork to Helper. The Redwood Road corridor connecting the two UT 85 segments temporarily acts as the only way for cars to get to each segment. When the MVC corridor is built as the bypass around this section it then should be downgraded to primary. You can find this a lot around the US when a regular main street is the only way to get from expressway segment 1 to expressway segment 2. Sometimes a bypass is later on built around the town the surface street passes though and the bypass is tagged as trunk/motorway and the main street is tagged down to primary as it is no longer the only through road to get from segment 1 to segment 2. See the examples here: osm.wiki/United_States/2021_Highway_Classification_Guidance#Trunk

This appears to meet the criteria on the wiki though, because trunk is described as being used for expressways, long-haul routes, and other high-importance roads.