The other day, @Flap_Slimy_Outward discovered in Slack that we’ve been misidentifying a great number of roads on reservations in Arizona for a long time. We’re going to need some help sorting out this mess.
On the ground
Every public road on a federally recognized Indian reservation is eligible to be part of the BIA/FHWA Tribal Transportation Program. Each road is assigned a number up to four digits long. These roads are generally divided into BIA routes and tribal routes depending on ownership. BIA routes are marked on the ground by white-on-green arrowhead signs. The signs are somewhat inconsistent but generally look like this:
It’s more complicated in the Southwest. In Arizona, there’s a statewide system of Indian Routes marked by a similar white-on-black arrowhead sign. These routes can cross reservation boundaries but are specific to Arizona. Because they’re relatively accessible and well-signposted, many online sources have confused Indian Routes with the entire BIA system across the country, including Wikipedia, the OSM Wiki, and OSM Americana.
On top of that, the Navajo Nation signposts their tribal routes using white-on-green signs that are subtly different than the BIA route signs. In fact, Navajo Routes and Indian Routes seem to account for all the routes on the Navajo Nation. I’m not sure if there are any signposted BIA routes in the Arizona portion of the Navajo Nation. The Hopi Tribe similarly designates Hopi Routes, though I don’t know what the signs look like if any. The Ramah Navajo Chapter in New Mexico has their own highway department and refers to “BIA routes”.
On the map
The TIGER 2005 import brought in extensive coverage of reservation roads. Unfortunately, TIGER doesn’t distinguish these systems, instead assigning the name “Indian Rte nnnn” to every road. Around 2010, a mapper went around replacing every reference to “Indian Route” with “Navajo Route” or “Hopi Route”, without distinguishing the Indian Route system. A number of these “Navajo Routes” extend into the Hopi Reservation. Way ref=* tags were changed to have “BIA”, “N”, or “H” prefixes inconsistently and often incorrectly. Later, some mappers added these roads to network=US:BIA route relations, without distinguishing either system from the federal system.
I think we’re going to need more of the community to come together and help sort out these routes, as the Waze community is doing. Unfortunately, this can’t be an automated edit. The changes were too long ago and they were thorough, including even name_1=* and tiger:name_base=* in some cases. Besides, even the original TIGER data is suspect in many cases.
I’ve updated the network=US:BIA documentation with tips for recognizing and tagging these route networks based on the Slack conversation. As a starting point, I’ve retagged Indian Route 2 and its member ways based on a visit in January and Navajo Route 20 based on news reports. Do the network=US:AZ:Indian and network=US:Navajo tags seem reasonable? The network=US:BIA tag can remain in other parts of the country for the federal system.
(Thanks to @Flap_Slimy_Outward for bringing this issue to the community’s attention.)
