Talk:Seattle, Washington

Guidelines for primary, secondary, tertiary roads?

I tried to intuit standards for use of primary, secondary, and tertiary road tags in Seattle, and only recently found United States roads tagging. The standard I've been using mostly follows the standard described:

• Primary - Minimum of three lanes each direction, or two lanes each direction plus a continuous center turn lane.
• Secondary - Minimum of two lanes each direction, or one lane each direction plus a continuous center turn lane.
• Tertiary - Minimum continuous center stripe, with no unguarded intersections and right-of-way over residential roads.

If anything, this definition leads to more roads being tagged as secondary than should be (given United States roads tagging), but seems defensible. More to the point, it appears that a lot of roads in Seattle are tagged "secondary" that probably shouldn't be (e.g. I recently changed Green Lake Way from "secondary" to "tertiary").

Does the definition above seem reasonable? I imagine I'll be changing more roads from secondary to tertiary unless there's objection. -- RobLa 23:08, 14 March 2009 (UTC)

Initially, this was my thought, but the consensus on the mailing list was that tertiary was meant for main access to/from residential subdivisions only (a 'super-residential'), which is why I mapped both Green Lake Ways as secondary in the first place. (this same consensus led me to map non-freeway state routes as trunk) --Cohort 09:31, 15 July 2010 (UTC)