Reviving road classification proposal for British Columbia/Metro Vancouver

Communities Canada
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Hey all! I wanted to bring up the subject of road classifications in BC, specifically Metro Vancouver. One thing that’s irked me for some time now is how most of the city arterials are classified as highway=secondary, despite that some are clearly larger and carry a lot more traffic than others.

A few weeks ago, before I knew anything about tagging guidelines, I started to reclassify several roads in Vancouver to what I thought were better fits. Here’s a before and after of what I ended up doing:

Before
Before1920×1112 299 KB

After
After1920×1112 306 KB

After someone informed me that the classifications were governed by regional guidelines, and that those guidelines currently reserve highway=primary for numbered highways (British Columbia#Highways and provincial roads), I decided to put the rest of the changes I had in mind on pause. But honestly, I think what I did so far portrays the road hierarchy in Vancouver a lot better than before. For instance, 41st Ave is a much larger road than King Edward Ave, and now this difference is actually shown, rather than before where they were both classified as secondary.

I was pointed to a proposed new tagging scheme at British_Columbia/Highway_classification, and it seems like it is indeed closer to what I was looking to do! But I was told this proposal hasn’t really been discussed a lot recently, so I wanted to get the ball rolling again and see if we could take another look at perhaps continuing to refine this.

I’m still a bit new to the community, so I’m not sure what needs to happen before we adopt this! But I’d be happy to help.

3 Likes
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Thanks for brining up the topic!

I think the proposed guidelines for road classification are solid, but there are a few revisions I’d like to suggest.

First is a structural change to the guideline system where there is “tier model” for classifications. That way there’s an explicit base level classification for every road and edge cases can be moved to a “higher tier” when warranted.

I think this will help with determining what roads warrant “upgrading” to a higher tier.

Second, I think the guidelines should incorporate explicit references to official government classifications to help determine how the guideline is shaped. Some examples I think are helpful are:

This is sort of how I envision these changes working out with the same guidelines but more explicit criteria:

Classification Tier (low to high) Guideline Edge case criteria Notes
highway=unclassified All public roadways located on public right-of-ways Roadways on private land which function as a public roadway (potentially with access restrictions) Generally urban roads outside of residential neighbourhoods and all rural roads
highway=residential Roads within residential neighbourhoods or residential roads in non-residential neighbourhoods Local access roads which serve only residences Generally these roads have no paint and are not controlled with traffic signals and have to stop for major roads
highway=tertiary Designated collector roads or important rural roads Important rural roads might link separate communities/areas within the same rural municipality Generally 2-lane roads with a painted lane markings and may have traffic signals or have to stop for other roads
highway=secondary Designated arterial roads or roads connecting rural municipalities Roads connecting municipalities which are not served by a provincial highway Generally undivided 2 to 4-lane roads with traffic signals
highway=primary Provincial numbered highways or regionally significant arterial roads in Metro Vancouver Regionally significant arterial roads would directly connect a provincial numbered highway with the Metro Core, Surrey Metro Core or a Regional City Centre as designated by Metro Vancouver Generally 4-lane roads which may be divided with a median
highway=trunk Designated National Highway System routes or expressways between freeways within Metro Vancouver Expressways are routes which connect with freeways at either end but are not themselves built to freeway standards Generally 4 to 6-lane roads which may be divided with a median
highway=motorway Controlled-access freeways Generally pedestrians, farm vehicles, animals, bicycles and vehicles incapable of exceeding 60 km/h are prohibited, but some freeways allow bicycles
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My thoughts are that some of the secondaries should be tertiaries rather than moving the more significant ones to primary.

When I get home from SOTM I want to make some maps showing how the classifications have changed over time.

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Here are some more details on changes I’d like to see happen in a revised classification scheme.

I do think we should reduce emphasis on numbered highways in the new proposals, at least for Metro Van. Here in the city, the fact that a road is a designated highway doesn’t really change how people use the road or drive on it; people just treat it like any other road.

For instance, before my initial changesets, Broadway was classified as primary only to the east of Granville St, and classified as secondary to the west, presumably because the designation of BC Hwy 7 ends at that point. But that doesn’t make sense to me, because Broadway doesn’t suddenly become any quieter to the west of Granville — it is still a busy road on both sides (barring interference of the Broadway Subway project). That was one of the motivations for why I want to bring this up, and the main reason why I think the current classification scheme is flawed.

Broadway/Granville (before my initial changesets)
Broadway/Granville (before my initial changesets)1932×1382 394 KB

Another example is Highway 99 in Vancouver and how it connects from Granville St to the Oak St Bridge. The actual highway route is via 70th Ave, but going northbound it is impossible to follow this — there is a permanent no-left-turn restriction from Oak to 70th, and city signage directs drivers to use 41st instead. Similar signage is also present going southbound, directing drivers to use 41st to reach Oak, even though that doesn’t actually follow the official BC 99 route.
The point is, if we are classifying solely based off of “what counts as the highway”, it becomes quite difficult to decide how to do so in cases like this when the “official” and “signed” connections are different or hard to identify.

I think it would be a lot better if we relax our classification standards for highway=primary to be “the next level up from secondary”, rather than reserving it for numbered highways, at least in Metro Vancouver. This would “unlock” that tier to be used as another level for road classification, which I believe would be useful to more distinctly classify the roads in the city. I’m also tempted to do the same with highway=trunk too, but on a much more selective basis (I’m eyeing Lougheed Hwy as a candidate).

I don’t know if there’s some existing notion of it being important to have a uniform classification across the entire province, but if so, I don’t buy it. Such a notion causes us to coalesce roads that may be quite different in sizes/traffic volumes into the same classification, as was the case before I made my initial changsets. Thus we lose the ability to make instant visual comparisons between those roads (e.g. 41st is larger than King Edward).

Having a different classification scheme for the city may lose us the province-wide uniformity of classification, but I don’t think that’s really a problem. IMO, comparisons between roads locally in, say, Metro Vancouver, are much more important than comparisons of roads across the province from each other.

That’s also why I’m not a fan of moving secondary roads to tertiary. We already have good uses of tertiary in the city, such as 16th Ave, 33rd Ave, 57th Ave, and so on. Moving some smaller secondary roads (e.g. 49th Ave) to tertiary just pushes the comparison problem elsewhere. Clearly we know 49th is larger than 57th, but this would be impossible to visually tell at a glance if we classify them equally.

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I don’t have much to add here, but I agree that I’ve always been a bit annoyed about the classification in Metro Vancouver. My personal example is Commercial Drive (north of the diversion) which absolutely was not the same as Victoria Drive, but both were classified tertiary under the existing rules. This is also why I think downgrading roads would not work (as stated above).

The existing rules definitely underclassify roads too much in Metro Vancouver. Both proposals from nyanpsyche and in2itivity I’ve seen are something I would have come up with myself at some point. I do think regionally (at least in Metro Vancouver) a deviation from provincial guidelines is warranted given the region has developed substantially differently from the rest of BC.

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For reference, here’s the general criteria I was using for my initial changesets before I put them on pause. These are more “vibes” based, and I’m not sure how well fit they are to become actual guidelines.

Classification What I was going for
residential Local access roads in residential neighbourhoods. Most people don’t drive on these roads unless they have business in the neighbourhood. Little to no road markings, intersections controlled by stop signs or tiny traffic circles.
unclassified Local access roads in non-residential neighbourhoods. Most people don’t drive on these unless they have business in the area. Some may have road markings, but intersections do not generally have traffic signals.
tertiary Those small roads that really only serve best for getting from neighbourhood to neighbourhood, and aren’t really used to travel long distances. There isn’t a lot of hustle and bustle around them.
secondary These are where we start to see city arterials. These roads are often used for getting across the city/town. They may pass through business districts and have development or activity happening around them. Intersections are controlled by traffic signals.
primary Larger arterials that see a lot more traffic, where many people use them as a thoroughfare. Heavier traffic than secondary, but not much additional infrastructure to suggest the road is “special”.
trunk Not only is through travel well-served by these roads, but it is the primary purpose. These roads are large, may have higher speed limits, and partial controlled access.
motorway Highways and controlled-access freeways.

These are obviously not very well refined and just generally what I was going for, but I feel like they capture the general idea of what I’d like to see in the new tagging guidelines.

I also had several users ask about how we should handle highways that go on city streets, and whether they deserve higher classifications because of that. I was originally against it, but I’m starting to see the merit, although I’m not sure how we would incorporate them into the actual guidelines.

I might see if there’s a way of combining my ideas with nyanpsyche’s to make something better. And if anyone has any additional ideas, feel free to share!

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Been busy this past week so I’ve only just had a chance to catch up on the discussion. So happy to see so many great points brought up!

I totally agree that there is a disconnect between the form of the roads vs their functionality. All maps have to reckon with these discrepancies and OSM is no different. I’ve done some more research and this debate was settled in 2009 when the highway key was approved. According to the documentation for the key, the importance of the road within the network should be considered and not the physical characteristics.

I think this makes a lot of sense since there are other tags which describe physical characteristics (eg. lanes, width, shoulder) wheras this is the only tag useful for determining how a road is used. I also think looking at how a road is built is very fraught sinced there are many cases of overbuilt minor roadways and underbuilt major roadways.

So upon reading more about the highway key and seeing the arguments against it, I absolutely agree that being a numbered highway should not inherently determine the classification. However, I do think the B.C. Highway Functional Classification list should still be used because it explicitly lists which highways are for international, provincial and regional trips. I think this would neatly solve the issues in2itivity has raised with Hwy 7 on Broadway and Hwy 99 on Granville Street in a consistent way since these parts do not show up on the list at all.

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While we’re here, can we talk about road classification on Bowen Island, which is technically in Metro Vancouver? Most roads are tagged as tertiary or residential, despite the fact that most roads tagged as the latter don’t lead into developed neighbourhoods, but many have houses on driveways separate from these roads.

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I’m not familiar enough with Bowen Island to understand what the roads are like there, but it looks like a few folks came in and made some changes recently!

I’m not 100% on board with Bowen Island Trunk Road being classified as trunk, especially in comparison to the roads it connects to on the other side of the ferry terminal. But at a cursory glance I’d be inclined to classify that segment as primary, and perhaps parts of Grafton/Adams as secondary!

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Thanks. That changeset you mentioned is a good start, but I think it still could use some fixing; I’ll a stab at it later if I can.

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I haven’t visited Bowen Island but from what I can tell I would concur with in2itivity’s suggestions.

Without some first-hand local knowledge, I’d look at using the Figure 5: Map of current vehicle networks from the Bowen Island Transportation Plan as reference.

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Hmm, I took a look at the Highway Functional Classification document and it looks promising, but since it’s on a provincial-level scale, I’m not 100% sure how useful it will be for our road classifications in Metro Vancouver. From a quick look at the map, the only marked roads in Metro Vancouver are, well, the highways. All the red and green marked roads I would almost certainly want to classify as highway=motorway or highway=trunk! But since everything else just isn’t marked, I think that’s probably as far as its usefulness probably goes.

I’m not sure what needs to happen next to move forward with this… I’m also not the best at writing guidelines so I’d love to have some light shed on the process!