Talk:California/2022 Highway Classification Guidelines

US 395 vs CA 139

User:Willkmis and User:Btwhite92, thanks for doing great work on this! I can't claim to know much about California highways themselves, but I'm one of the people who's been spearheading the effort from Oregon. In Oregon, having US 395 as trunk would be almost ludicrous: it's a route that serves no important connections at all, has some of the lowest traffic of any primary roads in the state, and is completely overshadowed by the parallel north/south corridors of US 97 and US 95. In contrast, OR 39 (the route that connects to CA 139) is much more important, serving as part of the best route from Reno to Bend, Eugene, Portland, Klamath Falls, and others.

Thus, the OR classification scheme has OR 39 as trunk and US 395 as primary at the CA border. I don't know much about northeastern California traffic patterns, but would it make any sense for CA to switch the trunk tag from US 395 to CA 139 north of Susanville? From the perspective of an Oregon mapper it would make much more sense. Other than that, I think OR and CA are on the same page regarding trunk interfaces between the two states. Oregonian3 (talk) 15:43, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

User:Oregonian3 Couple reasons here from my perspective: between Susanville and Alturas, the traffic counts are about twice as high on US 395 than on CA 139 - while CA 139 is the way most routing engines are going to send you for travel between the Willamette Valley and Reno/Carson, it isn't the way "recommended" by local authorities nor the way generally used by freight traffic (steep incline out of Susanville on CA 139). Routing engines typically put you on minor county highways near Bieber for this connection since they are technically faster, but I certainly wouldn't promote these roads to trunk nor consider them the "main" route between these two areas. North of Alturas, this route carries the main route between Redding and Boise. It is, as you noted, very remote and quiet, but still serves an important route and any detour off this route will add a significant amount of travel time. In that sense, it seems similar (to me) to US 95 between Reno and Boise - very remote, low traffic count, unimproved 2-lane highway - but still the best way between two major metropolitan areas. --Btwhite92 (talk) 02:45, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

User:Btwhite92, thanks for the reply. I view US 95 and US 395 in Oregon as very different from each other. US 95 has about five times the traffic counts at its lowest section than that section of US 395 does. US 95 never dips below 1000 vehicles per day, while US 395 has less than 250 vehicles per day at its lowest point between OR 31 and US 20. US 95 serves as the route to Boise from pretty much anywhere to the southwest, including major cities such as Sacramento, the Bay Area, Reno, and more. In contrast, US 395 only serves as the most direct route between Redding and Boise (even from Chico it's quicker to use the I-80/US 95 route). I think we can all agree that the Reno-Boise and Sacramento-Boise route should be trunk, and they are with US 95 being trunk. However, I don't think that Redding-Boise is important enough of a route to justify a trunk connection, especially due to the hyper-remote nature of the area. They're far enough away from each other, and Redding is small enough, that almost nobody is going to need to make that drive. Aside from its US route designation (which I view as completely meaningless), it's no different from OR 31, OR 78, and OR 140 in the area, all of which are now also marked as primary. Southeastern Oregon is so, so remote that I think only having US 97, US 95, and US 20 as trunk makes sense; those three highways are by far the three most important routes for non-local traffic in the section of the state.

If CA consensus is that CA 139 should be primary, I'd have no objections about changing OR 39 from trunk to primary. But I do have objections about having US 395 in OR as trunk. Oregonian3 (talk) 19:09, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

User:Oregonian3 Thanks for contributing! It's important to me that we agree on classifications across the state border. I'm personally not very familiar with this part of the state, so forgive any ignorance. Traffic counts aren't to me the be-all end-all of road classification, but they are a useful tool to check assumptions about the "best" routing. I do notice that CA 139 does have much higher traffic at the Oregon border than US 395 according to Caltrans (https://dot.ca.gov/programs/traffic-operations/census/traffic-volumes/2017, AADT 2750 vs 750 each way). But south of Alturas, US 395 is slightly higher, especially past CA 299 splitting off toward Redding (650 vs 870 at the Lassen/Modoc County Line). Paired with User:Btwhite92's note that freight traffic avoids CA 139 north of Susanville, could this indicate the "best" route between Bend and Reno uses OR 39 -> CA 139 -> CA 299 -> US 395 via Alturas? No router seems to want to direct me that way, but obviously they don't have the local road quality context we have.

That still doesn't really solve the issue of what to do with US 395 north of Alturas though, as that would still carry the Redding-Boise routing. Redding isn't a big city compared to Sacramento or the Bay Area, but it's easily big enough to qualify as a trunk destination in my opinion, with about 90,000 residents in city limits (about the same as Bend). So, I read the trunk guidelines to indicate that the best way from Redding to all other trunk cities should be solely via trunk/motorway-class roads, even if they're fairly distant. The question then really becomes, is US 395 the "best" route between Redding and Boise? Or would travelers mostly choose a less direct routing that is less remote? Maybe the traffic counts indicate they do the latter. But I don't really think the low traffic in itself indicates that this isn't a trunk route, just that it gets little use (potentially but not definitively hinting that travelers tend to choose a different route). It's definitely an edge case though, because if accepted as trunk, it could be the most remote/lowest traffic trunk route in the continental US. But maybe it really is (some road has to be!). I will add, however, that if US 395 between Alturas and Burns is trunk by carrying the Redding-Boise route, I think we may also have to upgrade CA 299 from Redding to Alturas to trunk, which is not currently proposed. Also, just for reference, it looks like Redding-Boise via Alturas (CA 299/US 395) is about 9 hours, while routings via Bend (US 97/US 20) and Reno (CA 44/US 395/I 80/US 95) are both about 10 hours, so it's about a one hour difference in travel time. --Willkmis (talk) 21:44, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

Whether CA 299/US 395 should be considered the main route between Redding and Boise will probably take some local knowledge to answer and I'm happy to concede on this. My opinion about US 395 being trunk between Susanville and Alturas vs. CA 139 being primary between Susanville and Adin despite being a bit faster comes from having driven between Reno and Eugene & Portland a handful of times, as well as from the advice of an officer who pulled a friend of mine over for speeding on 139 through this section recommending US 395 instead for through travel. CA 139 (specifically between Susanville and Adin) seems to have more in common with other mountain "primaries" in the northern Sierra area, as opposed to US 395 which is more through-traffic/freight friendly. Just to be clear here - CA 139 north of Canby should be certainly be trunk, and I believe this is in the CA reclass proposal.--Btwhite92 (talk) 02:07, 19 January 2022 (UTC)

With regards to the sections in CA I definitely don't have the knowledge to answer that either; I can only speak to the sections in Oregon. So from my perspective I only care about what the interface with the OR border looks like :) If we're all in agreement that CA 139/OR 39 between Canby and Klamath Falls should be trunk, I'll go ahead and leave the OR section as trunk too.

With regards to US 395, seems like it's probably best to see if others have any opinions? Either way it seems like a borderline case; it's definitely possible to make coherent arguments that it should be trunk and coherent arguments that it should not be trunk, as we've seen above. Oregonian3 (talk) 15:57, 19 January 2022 (UTC)

It looks like CA 139 may have been omitted from the current guidelines, so I'm going to go ahead and add it (north of Canby) and the short CA 299 segment between Canby and Alturas to the proposed trunk route table as the best Bend-Reno routing. Though I laid out the argument that US 395 north of Alturas could be trunk above, I'm personally more persuaded by the argument that it doesn't offer enough time savings to make up for its remoteness as the "best" Redding-Boise routing, as well as desire to match classification with Oregon, as most of the route is there. So I'm going to go ahead and move it to the "not trunk" table, but note that it could be subject to further discussion.--Willkmis (talk) 06:48, 20 January 2022 (UTC)

Sounds great to me! All the other non-interstate OR/CA border crossings (US 101, US 199, US 97) are already listed as trunk in both states' proposals, so everything is matching now. Oregonian3 (talk) 16:44, 20 January 2022 (UTC)

Mission Bay, San Diego

Nice work! For what it's worth, as a San Diego resident, I would knock all the roads around Mission Bay down to primary, except for the segment of Nimitz south of I-8. All the other roads are no more prominent than the surrounding primary roads (e.g. Grand, Garnet, Friars, Pacific Highway, etc.). Only Nimitz south of I-8 is comparable to the other nearby trunks (e.g. portions of Friars, Fairmont, and Pacific Highway).

Thanks for noticing my ??? and chiming in. I've been in this area a couple times, and I agree that that's probably a good start. A lot of these roads, whether they're primary or trunk, look like they could be a good fit for expressway=yes. --Willkmis (talk) 03:50, 7 July 2022 (UTC)

Temecula-Hemet connection

Reviewing https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/127636676, which downgraded part of CA 79 to primary, in contradiction to the CA classification guidelines (which I wrote). The more I look at it, the more I lean toward completing the downgrade of CA 79 between CA 74 (north of Winchester) and I 15 (near Temecula) and upgrading CA 74 east from I 215 to the CA 79 junction. This change would indicate that I 215/CA 74 is the “best” route from San Diego/Temecula to Hemet, rather than CA 79. My rationale: signage on the freeway seems to indicate Hemet as the destination of CA 74 (I 215, exit 15), but Hemet is not listed as a destination of CA 79 (I 15, exit 61). Routers indicate that CA 79 is the slower route, even if it’s more direct. Also, it appears to drop to 2 undivided lanes in Winchester, whereas CA 74 seems to be 4 divided lanes the whole way (though the dual-carriageway isn’t yet drawn in OSM), perhaps an indication of their relative importance. I proposed this on OSMUS Slack, and one person thought this was reasonable, though the nearby E-W parallel Domenigoni Pkwy. is often used as a bypass too. Domenigoni may be highway=primary + expressway=yes. I will probably implement this change in the coming weeks if there's no other feedback here. --Willkmis (talk) 23:42, 20 March 2023 (UTC)

These changes were implemented in changesets 134692622, 134692695, and 134692909, and the tables were updated on the wiki to reflect this change in the guidelines (diff). Further local feedback still more than welcome!--Willkmis (talk) 15:43, 9 April 2023 (UTC)

Nice work, everybody, especially updating our Classification Guidelines wiki. I grew up in San Diego and have a sister in Temecula whom I've visited dozens of times (from either the Bay Area or San Diego) and while I don't get to Hemet very often, I have driven through it, and these updates seem tight and accurate. BTW, if you are in the area, Julian (CA 78 / CA 79) has some of the best apple pie on Earth. Stevea (talk) 20:50, 9 April 2023 (UTC)