User talk:Compdude/Draft:Washington highways

Some notes on your routes:

• WA-970 does cut the corner on the Seattle-Wenatchee route, but I don't know how much Seattle-Wenatchee traffic it actually gets.

• The usual Spokane-Sandpoint route is via I-90/US-195, possibly cutting the corner on ID-53. Going via US-2 takes about 20 minutes longer.

• US-395 out of Spokane is a locally important route, not a regionally-important one. Traffic volumes drop off rapidly as you head north (18,000 vehicles/day approaching Deer Park, 8300/day approaching Colville, 4800/day crossing the Columbia River bridge, 2200/day just north of the bridge), and only about 250 vehicles a day cross the border with Canada, putting it ahead of only the Danville crossing as "least used".

--Carnildo (talk) 18:32, 12 May 2021 (UTC)

Just saw your post now. Here are my responses:

• WA 970 is the typical route to get from Seattle to Wenatchee, and is signed as such. It saves about 20-25 minutes versus continuing on I-90 down to US 97. My family has visited Wenatchee from Seattle many times over the years, and that is the usual route that we'd always take to get there.
• For US 2 between Spokane and Sandpoint, my motivation for making this trunk is so that all of US 2 in WA would be trunk, since it is the non-freeway east-west route across Washington. If you're coming from north Spokane, US 2 would be the fastest way to get to Sandpoint.
• As for US 395, yeah, I wasn't really sure about making this trunk. However, Trail, BC as well as Castlegar, BC just north, seem to be a more important regional centers in that part of BC than Grand Forks, so maybe perhaps it would be better to make WA 25 be trunk up to the Canadian border. Thoughts?

--Compdude (talk) 22:20, 6 September 2021 (UTC)

• Calling US-2 a trunk road as the northernmost of the cross-country routes is reasonable; calling it "trunk" as the main Spokane-to-Sandpoint route isn't.
• I wouldn't call any of the border crossings north of Spokane "major". Of the four, WA-25 is the busiest, but according to the 2018 traffic data, that's still only 400 cars a day. For comparision, US-97 is 1400 cars/day, and west of the Cascades, I-5 sees 13000 cars/day.

--Carnildo (talk) 09:11, 10 September 2021 (UTC)

VigilantPenguin's additional trunk route suggestions

After thoroughly reviewing the list of Trunk routes I agree with all the currently listed ones and additionally I think the following should be added:

From	To	Trunk routing	My justification
Friday Harbor, WA	Sedro-Woolley, WA	WA 20 Spur / WA 20	Connects Anacortes Ferries, serves San Juan County; Note: WA 20 would continue as Trunk East of Sedro-Woolley if not for the winter closure
Coupeville, WA / Oak Harbor, WA	Seattle, WA	WA 20 / WA 525 / I-5	Serves population centers on Whidbey Island
Coupeville, WA / Oak Harbor, WA	Port Angeles, WA	WA 20 / US 101	Covers route that serves Port Townsend/Jefferson County
Coupeville, WA / Oak Harbor, WA	Bremerton, WA	WA 20 / WA 19 / WA 104 / WA 3 / WA 303	Upgrades WA 19 and WA 303 to Trunk
Seattle, WA	Port Angeles, WA	WA 305 / WA 3 / WA 104 / US 101	Via Seattle/Bainbridge Island Ferry - Covers major ferry route
Seattle, WA	Port Angeles, WA	I-5 / WA 104 / US 101	Via Edmonds/Kingston Ferry - Covers major ferry route and Edmonds connection
Seattle, WA	Bremerton, WA	WA 304	Seattle/Bremerton ferry route
Seattle, WA	Pullman, WA	I-90 / WA 26 / US 195	Route between the two major state universities, adds east/west trunk route for Othello
Wenatchee, WA	Republic, WA	US 97 / WA 20	Connects Republic to trunk network to the West
Republic, WA	Spokane, WA	WA 20 / US 395	Connects Republic to trunk network to the East, adds trunk route for Colville

Also, I believe the inclusion of the following as Important regional centers is warranted due to their lack of a more prominent city in their immediate vicinity and are not covered by existing or proposed trunk routing:

• Colville (largest city & county seat of Stevens County)
• Coupeville (county seat of Island County) or Oak Harbor (largest city in Island County)
• Friday Harbor (largest city & county seat of San Juan County)
• Othello (largest city in Adams County)
• Port Angeles (largest city & county seat of Clallam County, is called out in the Trunk Routing but not listed as regional center)
• Port Townsend (largest city & county seat of Jefferson County)
• Pullman (largest city in Whitman County)
• Republic (largest city & county seat of Ferry County)
• Wenatchee (largest city & county seat of Chelan County, is called out in the Trunk Routing but not listed as regional center)

I also considered for inclusion as an Important regional center but rejected:

• Cathlamet (largest city & county seat of Wahkiakum County, but it's pretty close to Longview/Kelso)

Republic is tiny (1000 people), and Ferry County as a whole is smaller than the smallest regional center on the current list (Sandpoint, which I don't think should be included either). WA-20 sees fewer than a thousand cars per day, less than even the quietest section of any of the other proposed trunk routes.

Colville is also small, at about 5000 people. It's sort of a regional center, but not even close to the scale of something like Coeur d'Alene or Lewiston/Clarkston.

Othello is about the size of Sandpoint. In isolation, it might be a regional center, but Moses Lake is just half an hour to the north, while the Tri-Cities are 45 minutes to the south.

Pullman is a lot like Cheney: it's effectively a satellite of a nearby regional center (in this case, Lewiston/Clarkston). --Carnildo (talk) 20:20, 3 March 2022 (UTC)

Primary/Secondary/Tertiary roads

We may want to come up with definitions for "minor population centers" as mentioned in US highway classification guidance - I think as a general guideline State Routes should probably generally be primary (which it seems like they currently are), but the question is what other roads (outside cities) should also be primary. Should very small communities (e.g. Tieton, Kittitas, both around 1500) be connected with primary as well? Or maybe just secondary for those much smaller communities? Vantage has about 50 people and yet Vantage Hwy is marked as secondary, while Kittitas Hwy is only tertiary.

In cities might be useful to have better guidelines,especially where roads may change classifications partway through - should roads generally stay as the same classification if nothing about them physically changes? Should any level of classification in cities be based on physical design at all?

Ielenia (talk) 02:06, 11 July 2026 (UTC)

Ok looking back at roads (mostly from my drive home yesterday) I think I'd like to amend my previous comment about SRs, 2-digit ones should probably be primary but the more minor 3-digit ones could probably be either secondary or primary depending on exact use.

I think maybe for intercity routes it may be worthwhile to categorize cities into rough sizes which would allow for roads to be classified based on what they connect to (e.g. these cities should be connected with primary, these smaller cities should be connected with secondary), or maybe we could go through a list of all highways in WA (both SRs and the non-motorway US highways) and categorize all of them, splitting as necessary at cities.

Ielenia (talk) 19:12, 11 July 2026 (UTC)

Thanks for initiating the convo here. My general thought is that we're putting too much emphasis on what the designation of the road is rather than the function of the road. In my view, whether or not a road is maintained by the state or is maintained by a city or county is mostly irrelevant to a road's classification. It's instead more about how the road functions. That includes but is not limited to:

• Does the road serve as one of the main access routes into or out of a city?
• How much traffic uses the road?
• What does the road "feel" like (e.g. is it direct or is it windy, or how many lanes does the road have and what's the speed limit)?

Speaking broadly, I do think it's worth commenting on what constitutes a "very small community" like you note above. I generally use a threshold of around 1000 people, but I don't really like having a hard and fast limit because two communities both of 1000 people can have very different vibes. As an extreme example but one that illustrates my point, Aspen Colorado is a town of around 7000 people, and Craig Colorado has a population of around 9000 people. However, Aspen is a town that "feels" bigger than this since it's surrounded by lots of other smaller communities in the Roaring Fork Valley and has a substantial population outside the city limits, while Craig is in the middle of absolutely nowhere. I'd argue that Aspen should be served by a trunk road but Craig only needs to be served by primary road. Obviously this example isn't in Washington, but it illustrates the point that I don't think we can have just one cut-off value.

But overall I do agree with you in that we could try to categorize cities. Some of them clearly need to be served by trunk roads (e.g. Walla Walla), some clearly need only primary roads (e.g. Goldendale), and some are so tiny that secondary roads are fine (e.g. Mossyrock). As an ambiguous example, I see Tieton as right on the border between needing a primary road and only needing secondary roads.

One additional point: I do think that the "best" route between any two cities should almost always be at least secondary. What the "best" route means is a bit ambiguous, but I think it's more of a you know it when you see it situation. I'll use Wapato as an example. I think we can both agree that it's one of those cities that should be connected to by a primary road. Wapato's main access routes to the north and south (US 97), and the east (Donald-Wapato Road) are both at least primary right now. However, is the best route between Wapato and Toppenish US 97 or is it the road along the railroad tracks? The latter is quicker between the city centers of the two cities despite US 97 being a trunk road next to it, so I'd argue that this road along the tracks should definitely be at least secondary.

As to your two examples above, I think Kittitas Highway is is at least a clear secondary road that absolutely should be upgraded per your reasoning, and perhaps even to primary (as should the road from Exit 115 on I-90 into town). And I'd need to look into it a bit more, but I'd say it's likely that Vantage Highway should be downgraded to tertiary since I-90 is just a better/faster route to use into Vantage from just about anywhere.

That's a lot of words I've just written, but I hope this helps a bit with my thoughts. Oregonian3 (talk) 18:22, 20 July 2026 (UTC)

Well it seems we agree on the broad strokes, just differing in some of the specifics. We did discuss on the Slack that traffic should not really be a deciding factor for classification. There was a bit of discussion about potentially using roads' functional classifications as provided by WSDOT, mostly as a guideline, which is something other states have done (iirc, but i may be misremembering).

I think in general we should be careful not to overclassify roads too much and give them the appearance of higher importance than they actually have.

I also think that, for future larger-scale edits (i.e. city-wide changes to networks), it would probably be worth trying to reach out to local mappers and having a broader discussion about changes - locals will likely have better or more complete knowledge of how roads are actually used. Not to say that your changes have been bad, many of them are alright, I just think this would be worth doing moving forward - (I know for me I was initially confused about a lot of the changes to Yakima but being able to properly hear the rationale behind things has helped me understand, and it would be nice to continue to have these kinds of conversations about these)

Re: some of those specifics:

• Kittitas Hwy should probably be upgraded to secondary (not higher imo), from Canyon Rd along Mountain View Ave and Kittitas Hwy, then right on Main St to the I-90 interchange - I may actually do this myself as I'm the main editor for that area anyways
• Vantage Hwy seems to be secondary mainly because University Way is secondary, and extending it to Vantage avoids spurs which are generally undesirable overall for the network (it's explicitly called out as something to avoid in classification guidelines) - it also has historical reasons, as it's the route of former US 10, which was the main route east-west across the area. Personally I think it's fine as-is - having it secondary all the way from Ellensburg to Vantage avoids certain "bad" characteristics; it definitely does not need to be any higher than secondary though.
• The road between Wapato and Toppenish is probably a good example of a secondary inter-city road, I don't think it necessarily needs to be upgraded, but the case could be made as it is a very direct path between the cities. I do think Donald-Wapato Rd probably doesn't need to be primary though? It doesn't exactly go anywhere (seems like Donald is very small)

Overall you've done a lot of overall-positive work, but I do think it would be good to all collectively look over everything again once we have a more proper set of guidelines about classifications since they haven't really been established yet (it would be rather unfortunate to reclassify a lot of roads only to have to go back and undo that work if we decide on something else, and classification should probably be consistent as much as possible across the whole state) Ielenia (talk) 07:31, 21 July 2026 (UTC)

Completely agree with most of your points!

Functional class is a bit of an interesting one. Using that was actually my first inclination in general many years ago in other states, but we quickly learned that functional class often doesn't actually match well with how important the road actually is on the ground. This is often due to roads getting bypassed by future interstates or other high-capacity roads that have rendered the older road obsolete in function. I think it's one of those things that is a good guide or starting point (and maybe useful as a tiebreaker) but shouldn't be the primary classification system.

And I agree. My work certainly isn't going to be perfect (nobody's will be), and so my goal is to leave the network in a better state than whey I started :) I also completely agree that we should go back and revisit once we have a complete guideline. I'll probably finish up the work around Yakima and the areas around Granger, Sunnyside, Grandview, etch. (I want the eastern Yakima area city to be consistent with the western Yakima area, and the eastern Yakima Valley to be consistent with the western Yakima Valley; leaving things inconsistent across the same area pains me haha). And then once we have a complete guideline we can go back and revisit specifics.

I do want to call out that I do still think the Donald-Wapato Road should be primary. Not because it's the connection between Donald and Wapato (if it were only this then I'd say secondary), but because it's the connection in to Wapato from pretty much everywhere to the east or southeast via I-82. I see this road and US 97 as the only two that should be primary in Wapato itself. I'll add that I also plan to upgrade the Konnawac Pass Road to primary (or secondary) for similar reasons: it's the main route into Moxee from the south or southeast.

And I do see your point on on overclassification, but I tend to try to err on that side because I think it's more helpful to the average consumer than underclassification. I think there's the expectation that a secondary road will be a "quality" paved road that can be used as a throughway between various points, and that a tertiary road will generally be good enough quality as well, while that expectation doesn't exist for unclassified or residential roads. So if a road is good enough quality to use as a through road (e.g. has decent pavement quality, has a center stripe, not too windy, and doesn't dead-end), I tend to think that it should be tertiary. There's some that I wouldn't be upset if someone re-downgraded though for sure.

Oregonian3 (talk) 14:19, 21 July 2026 (UTC)