Classification of US Route 50 in Nevada, and whether or not a small city such as Ely is a "trunk destination"

Communities United States
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I get why the discussion is heavily focused on Ely, but also, I think that plenty of other rural trunk roads start or end basically nowhere, but are the primary means of getting you to the other main parts of the road network - another trunk, an interstate, etc. I’m looking at most of the length of 395, but also CA 46, CA 156, and CA 41. Taking 395, I’d bet that the vast majority of traffic isn’t going specifically from Victorville to Bishop, or Bishop to Carson City/Reno, but those are instead places people join or exit the highway as part of a longer journey - that’s the nature of scenic and rural long-distance highways.

Spoken another way, there’s a huge “route-shed” or whatever you want to call it on both US-50 and US-395, where, if you’re off on some random road, the likehood that you get routed onto those highways to go anywhere long distance is exceedingly high. You basically must take them for long distances even just to connect to the rest of the road network. That makes them high importance in my book - they’re the roads that other feeder roads send you to in order to travel long distances, rather than being a feeder to a higher tier themselves.

As I stated earlier, I take a look at the trunk guidelines and think US-50 satisfies them, just like @Joseph_R_P, but also, we’re probably not majorly harmed by keeping it as primary. But I do think that it’s worth reconsidering or adding some specificity to those guidelines if people here don’t think it should be a trunk road - if a single road that crosses hundreds of miles of desert, and is highly improved - not some random wilderness road - doesn’t qualify, then why not? I think @Minh_Nguyen is right that it’s OK if the guidelines are ambiguous, and at the same time, I think this road has enough things screaming trunk to me, except that it doesn’t end at major population centers on one end? But even then, at what scale?

Take Fallon, NV to Grand Junction, CO. Those cities are similar in scale to cities that other rural trunk routes have, and you don’t need to drop a pin far outside of Fallon before Graphhopper decides to take you on US-50 to go to Grand Junction. I do think that the other attributes are compelling as a way to tag the more objective things, and let other tools decide how to show it, but then I’m just honestly not sure why we even use the concept of trunk anymore at all.

I’m talking in circles, I know, but I think it’s just because trunk is kind of a maddening concept.

Amusingly, while playing around with various routes to compare for this, I saw that, if you want to route from Bishop to Grand Junction, OSRM will take you up to Ely, then along 50 from there. Valhalla and Graphhopper take you through Vegas instead. But that route from 395 to 50 and ending in Grand Junction made me laugh and really just connects the parts together here for me.

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Why the scare quotes? Routesheds are a thing. :wink:

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Yes, certainly Ely isn’t served by interstates. So I get how US 50 is the best route to it from other places. But I still just can’t quite buy that it’s a major population center. I get that there are no towns for hundreds of miles around, but it has a population of less than 4,000! Why can’t it be that there just are no places with more than a primary-level importance to the road network in northeastern Nevada?

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I agree! In the California/2022 Highway Classification Guidelines - OpenStreetMap Wiki (which I helped draft), we tried to write down the city-to-city connection served by every trunk road, after listing all the population centers that qualified at the top. So for instance, US 395 in California is part of the best San Bernardino-Reno connection and the best Reno-Bend connection, despite not going to either San Bernardino or Bend itself. Similarly, CA 41 and 46 are part of the main routes from SLO (and more broadly the Central Coast) to Fresno and Bakersfield, respectively, and CA 156 is part of the Salinas/Monterey-Central Valley route. IMO this is a helpful exercise that fits the consensus we settled on, that the network of trunk roads are the “principal, long-haul connections between population centers of regional importance.”

I see where this is coming from, but I wonder how this argument can’t be made for any long, well-paved road in a desolate or geographically rugged area. They connect a lot of low-density area to somewhere, but that’s not the same as connecting two population centers because it doesn’t form part of the network but rather feeds it. There are lots of roads in e.g. the Sierra Nevada that connect population centers to the mountains, that even probably get a lot more traffic than some of these roads we’re discussing (thinking of e.g. the roads to Yosemite) and have big route-sheds in terms of area. But they don’t lead to any towns of importance. So we classify them as primary, and save trunk for the ones that, say, someone traveling between cities or across the country would use.

I suggested essentially that routing upthread somewhere:

I think that justification is a little tenuous, if the only connection served is 12 hours and two states away and neither are even especially big cities. But I mean, if the consensus is that Ely counts as a population center by the local community, or that the Grand Junction-Fallon connection really is locally important, then that’s fair enough and not particularly outrageous or anything, I’m just a bit skeptical. But I think that the concept of a trunk network that forms the connections between major population centers is valuable, and we should think hard before saying any relatively good road in the wilderness deserves to be promoted. I’m much more strongly against, say, the Dalton Highway being trunk than US 50.

But I guess I’m not really sure what the problem is with classifying it as primary is either. There aren’t that many primary roads in rural NV either, so to me that classification still indicates it’s pretty important and a good road to take from the rural areas to bigger towns.

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I love it, and of course you’ve done this already :laughing:

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That is THE defining characteristic of trunk roads, that it connects population centers of regional importance! If US 50 has been bypassed by the Interstate under this definition, it isn’t trunk by our current guidelines.

Regionally important is of course vague. I would argue that Ely is more like Coldfoot, Alaska – a place with the purpose of servicing travelers, but not a particularly meaningful destination unto itself.

Prudhoe Bay certainly has more name recognition than Ely. It’s more of a destination than Ely. That’s why I think if you call Ely regionally important by Nevada standards, you have to call Prudhoe Bay regionally important by Alaska standards.

To be clear, I’m calling for consistency here, not necessarily advocating one way or the other.

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This is more of a reply to your whole post, but I think your conclusion makes sense - thanks for entertaining my assorted “what-ifs” (and even one you’d already gone through. I was losing track of our hypotheticals.

I also want to specifically acknowledge what you mentioned about the population centers that count - I like that the 2021 classification started with the places that would be included when considering trunk, and in a setting where nothing is perfect, that seems reasonable and defensible.

In my head-canon, US-50 is trunk, but that could just be its place in my own life and I also agree with you that I don’t think there’s a particular problem with it remaining primary. I can respect that those of you who have worked on these topics for much longer than I have disagree.

The last thing I’ll mention is that in taking a look at Apple/Bing/Google, they all render it more prominently than OSM (sooner, or at the same classification as their trunk equivalent), but I don’t know if that’s a justification for a change, or against it, honestly. It’s an interesting point of comparison, but I almost think that the diversity of opinion OSM provides is a point in favor of keeping US-50 primary as much as OSM being different than a bunch of other tools is a point in favor of considering a change (and that even ignores that we don’t use their guidelines, we use our own).

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By the way, our neighbors to the east are discussing highway=trunk status for similarly remote highways:

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I caught wind of this discussion and wanted to circle back to it and see if we’ve come to an actionable consensus? Based on what I’ve read, we’ve made a lot of comparisons to other areas of the country, referenced several state’s classification guidelines, and given plenty of opinion but haven’t necessarily settled on a direction.

As far as what direction to go, I find myself ambivalent on this issue. While Ely counts itself with a fair bit of mining history and the location of the Nevada State Penitentiary, there’s not a lot of reasons to visit. Having made the drive from points east to points west (and vice versa) far too many times to count, I have little appetite or desire for anything other than the most efficient route possible (i.e. Interstate 80) with the most opportunities for decent food and clean restrooms (again, Interstate 80).

I’m happy to update the Nevada Highway Classification page based on whatever the consensus dictates.

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What is considered a mountain peak depends on its local prominence. If a single fixed elevation was used then I could easily pick a number and argue that there are no mountain peaks in the continental US east of the Rockies.

I live in a city of over 100,000. By the “less than 4,000” argument any highway connecting my city with another of similar size should be a trunk. But my city is just one of many in the area and we have no particular prominence. No large employers, not even a hospital. Ely, with a population of only 4,000, is prominent enough to have a hospital, court house, etc. and is the place that people for a significant distance around go to conduct business. It is a locally prominent city.

Now whether or not US-50 should be a trunk I don’t have a strong opinion. I will say that when I lived in the SF Bay Area and visited Colorado I preferred to take US-50. It didn’t really take longer than I-80 and I thought the scenery was nicer.

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I guess it’s a good sign of the health of our overall classification guidelines that the thorniest remaining edge cases elicit little more than a collective meh. Contrast it with the situation in some other countries that stuck with something similar to our old guidelines based on construction quality, and the knots they’re trying to untangle everywhere as a result. Mainly I think we should make sure all the considerations we’ve brought out in this conversation are encoded in more descriptive tagging.

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