Hello all!
As part of the US Trunk Road reclassification there’s a trunk road proposed for Central North Dakota crossing the border at the International Peace Garden. The intent of this was apparently to connect to Brandon via PTH 10. Does this make sense from a Canadian perspective? Per port-of-entry data, this is the third-largest POE on the North Dakota side (pre-COVID data).
Canadian road tagging guidelines (https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Canada/Tagging_guidelines#Trunk) generally reserve highway=trunk for routes that are part of the National Highway System (see https://tc.canada.ca/en/corporate-services/policies/national-highway-system-nhs-map), and the road in question is not such a road. The border crossing at Boissevain handles a small fraction (~15%) of the traffic that the one at Emerson (south of Winnipeg) does (see Road Transportation, Table RO19). Physical characteristics are not a sole determinant of a road’s tagging either, but the road segment in question is a sleepy little two-lane, undivided one.
As such, I think it’d be silly to tag it a trunk road. Anecdotally it’s nowhere near as important as PTH 10 north of Brandon to Minnedosa, linking the Trans-Canada (Highway 1) and Yellowhead (Hwy 16). And those two highways, far and away the busiest in Manitoba, are themselves only tagged highway=trunk.
Just one man’s opinion, but I don’t think there has to be any uniformity between the tagging of roads at border crossings, and it’s totally reasonable that highways on the American side would be tagged with a higher importance than on the Canadian side. I think for instance of the crossing at Coutts, Alberta (Alta. Hwy 4) and Sweetgrass, Montana (I-15): OpenStreetMap You hit the border coming from Alberta and the tagging immediately jumps to motorway from trunk, for good reason: I-15 really is built and maintained to a higher standard. The difference is palpable, the only Alberta highway that comes close is Highway 2 between Calgary and Edmonton.