Template talk:U.S. Routes

This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the U.S. Routes template.

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U.S. Roads: U.S. Highways This template is within the scope of the U.S. Roads WikiProject, an attempt to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to state highways and other major roads in the United States. If you would like to participate, you can edit the article attached to this page, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and/or contribute to the discussion. Types U.S. Routes Notes and alerts This article may or may not have a map. Please check, then add |needs-map= to this template accordingly. This article may or may not contain a junction list. Please check, then add |needs-jctint= to this template accordingly.

Three-digit primary routes

As far as I know, the only primary three-digit U.S. Route is US 101, and since this template only includes the primary U.S. Routes and not the auxiliary U.S. Routes, shouldn't US 163, US 400, US 412, and US 425 be removed from this list? I am aware that these routes are the only three-digit routes without parents, however this alone doesn't make them primary routes. Using this logic, parentless Interstate 238 would count as a primary Interstate, but Wikipedia gladly does not count it as such.

Also, I checked through the edit history of this template and found that the reason these routes are included here is that this template used to be split into "primary routes" (one- and two-digit routes + US 101) and "parentless three-digit routes" (US 163, US 400, US 412, US 425). When the two sections were later combined, it made US 163, US 400, US 412, and US 425 appear as primary routes alongside the one- and two-digit routes + US 101. If there isn't any good reason to keep them, I propose that US 163, US 400, US 412, and US 425 be removed from this template. Azmjc02 (talk) 02:28, 21 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed listing them individually, along side the primary routes, grants a lot of weight to these "oddball" routes. However, disagree that completely delisting them is the solution.

It's not the same situation as I-238. I-238 can be, and is, listed as a spur route of I-80. It's both intuitively obvious, and backed up by sources that route is for all intents and purposes a spur of I-80, just Caltrans ran out of numbers. However, with US-163, etc. there is no documented "implied parent", so if completely removed from this navbox, it is inaccessible from it. Several roadgeeks consider US-163 an honorary spur of US-91, however unlike I-238, there is no documentation to that affect, that is pure roadgeek fantasy.

What I would prefer is have a link in this navbox to "other/non-standard/oddities" that links to a list/listacle/section of an existing article" that lists US163,400,412 and 425 as the oddities among US Routes that have no parents. I don't think we need to create a new article, perhaps list them in a section of U.S. Numbered Highways or something. However, if there is an appropriate listacle, I'd prefer that more. Dave (talk) 17:24, 22 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]

You have made some good points, and I think the lack of accessibility to these routes would be a major downside to my proposal. Therefore, would something similar to the way the Template:Interstates template is set up work? Since both templates list the primary highways for their respective systems, they are related, and the thing the Interstates template does is list the primary Interstates just like the U.S. Routes template does, but the Interstates template provides a link to both the primary and auxiliary (3-digit) Interstates.

This could be done for the U.S. Routes template as well; there already is a link to a list of primary U.S. Routes (US 1 to US 101), so only a link to a list of auxiliary U.S. Routes (3-digits minus US 101 and including US 163, US 400, US 412, and US 425) would have to be added. This would also entail splitting the List of United States Numbered Highways article into "List of Primary United States Numbered Highways" and "List of Auxiliary United States Numbered Highways", with any links to the original page redirecting to the Primary U.S. Routes page.

This would solve my problem that the "oddball routes" are given too much weight compared to the two-digit routes, and it would solve your issue about accessibility (one could click on the Auxiliary U.S. Routes link in the template to access the oddball routes).

Ideally, to standardize things and have the systems match, the List of Interstate Highways page should also be renamed/moved to "List of primary Interstate Highways" because there already is a page for auxiliary Interstates, but that isn't completely necessary.

I hope we can reach some sort of agreement where both persons' concerns are addressed. :) Azmjc02 (talk) 20:12, 28 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]

The comparison between Interstate and US Highway nomenclature doesn't work. The primary–auxiliary divide in the former system is denoted by the number of digits in the designation: primary Interstates have one or two digits, and auxiliaries have three. In the US Highway System, auxiliary highways are special routes, and primary highways are not. So US 141 is just as primary as US 41, but Bus. US 41 is an auxiliary.

We do need though to keep navbox templates easy or navigate, or they fail to work well. Filling them with hundreds more links will clutter the box, pollute the "What links here" lists for individual highways and prompt people to deploy the template to many more articles. Instead, because the child primary highways are linked from the parents, this navbox only links to the parent primary highways to keep the size of the box more manageable, bar the few exceptions where something that looks like a child lacks a parent from which it would be linked. Imzadi 1979 → 21:56, 28 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed. I would definitely be in favor of a minor redesign of the layout to something more tabular/columnar (rather than just a list of ~100 numbers like it is now), but the infobox as it is provides information on all primary (two-digit) routes and those three-digit routes that are non-conforming to the system. Hans404 (talk) 22:58, 28 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]

How about a bakeoff between the rival proposals for this infobox? Anybody feel up to putting their proposed revamp in a sandbox? Rather than speculating one would be too complicated, let's see. Regarding the list articles, one thing I find curious is [[List of auxiliary Interstate Highways is sorted by parent, but List of United States Numbered Highways is sorted numerically. Imzadi makes a good point that auxiliary interstates are closer in function to special routes of US Highways, so I agree they don't have to be consistent. But this seems like a case where they should be. Dave (talk) 05:02, 1 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]