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The rules agreed upon by the Brazilian community in 2020 limit it to secondary because it is not paved. If it was paved, it would initially be secondary because the two urban poles are very far apart (and the proposal includes a distance criterion to avoid having to initially assess the main routes between all city pairs), but could later be promoted to trunk if proposed.

In some countries, such as neighboring Bolivia or distant parts of Russia, the local community accepts assigning a higher road class to important regional roads with an underdeveloped structure. In other countries, such as those in Western Europe, the local community is firmly against it. In Brazil, we kind of agreed on a middle ground, leaving the door open for the discussion of specific cases, like this one. The region where this road appears has too few mappers to discuss specific cases with feedback from multiple people though.

In 2020, the highway classification of the UK was cited several times in the discussion of the proposal, as we found that it served as the basis for the highway classification of many other countries, but the most cited aspect was the continuity of the routes even when the physical structure changed, a strong argument against the Brazilian 2013 proposal that relied entirely on the physical structure and led to fragmented road networks across the country. Since 2020, Carto has began representing unpaved primary roads, so maybe it’s worth debating whether our current rule isn’t a little too restrictive.