Talk:Freeway

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Archive of Talk:Freeway prior to November 2006

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[edit] Drifting towards entropy, it seems

Well, I guess this article is becoming more and more of a mess (starting with the fact that it has the motorway icon at the top, which is never used in the country where the term "freeway" was pioneered, the United States). I'm too busy working on Lawyer as well as keeping up with my professional career to fix this mess, and it looks like everyone else is busy with school or work.

I briefly looked around on CalCat over the weekend and it looks like a few libraries do carry the old AASHTO Highway Definitions book, which would help clear up a lot of the arguments over definitions! Unfortunately, the only library with a copy that's 60 miles of me is the Institute of Transportation Studies Library at UC Berkeley, which has extremely limited public access hours (1-5 pm) and is closed weekends. So I won't be able to get up there for a few months. On the weekdays I'm just too busy with lawyer stuff like depositions. --Coolcaesar 07:50, 15 November 2006 (UTC)

I finally got the Highway Definitions book! Though it's actually a booklet. I'm going to start cleaning up this article and Expressway this weekend as I've been discussing over at Talk:Types of road. --Coolcaesar 06:03, 2 December 2006 (UTC)
"which is never used in the country where the term "freeway" was pioneered, the United States" - What does that matter?
  • Perhaps Freeway is a distinctly US name for an international concept, in which case the article should be renamed a la Airplane to something internationally neutral.
  • Or perhaps freeway is a sufficiently internationally-accepted name for a main article title, in which case every locale with freeways enjoys equal stake in the article.
  • Or finally, as seems to be the settled consensus, perhaps freeway is a distinct concept, not just a distinct name; if so, the article needs to be pruned to be relevant to freeways and not autopistas etc. I think that's clearly the WRONG way to approach it, in that it's totally unlike how Wikipedia handles any other varying names for a concept, but hey -- it looks to me that a bunch of US-based road enthuisasts have been successful in promoting this aberrant view to the point where it is pretty much consensus. I might change my point of view if I could be convinced that freeway were a totally separate concept from motorway, autopista, or what have you.
You want to have your cake and eat it too, by having an article on international limited-access highways remain under this name and retain international content but then privileging the United States based on the name of the article. Indeed, the article is outrageously US-centric, and apparently some of the rationale has to do with nomenclature. I'm too lazy to pull out WP standards at the moment (maybe later) but I'm pretty sure that parlay (name an international concept by the US name, keep international content in the article, then complain about its prominence w/r/t US content) is inherently unWikipedian. - PhilipR 14:56, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
Freeway originated in the US. So why should this not be directed to the US and also include other areas that have adopted this term and also mention the names used by other places that have adopted this concept? Vegaswikian 19:34, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
To the extent that the freeways themselves (rather than the term freeway) originated in the US, your point has some validity. But don't the German Autobahnen predate any US freeways, so that by your rationale the article would need to be Germanocentric? Regardless of who invented the freeway, origin is not the sole determinant in Wikipedia naming conventions. Fixed-wing aircraft were invented in the US (I'm not sure what term the Wright Brothers used) yet Wikipedia found it necessary to adopt a compromise term as a main name for the article. There are plenty of other topics such as football (soccer) where locale of origin is but one consideration in the Wikipedia naming conventions.
The other issue is that articles like Motorway, Autopista, Freeway, Autobahn etc. seem to be organized around documenting the terminology rather than documenting the actual entity. For Wiktionary that would no doubt be the proper way of doing things, but my understanding is that for WP this is pretty non-standard, albeit apparently pretty well-established in this instance. - PhilipR 20:11, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
Pardon my bluntness, but your postings are so out of touch that you have clearly failed to read this entire talk page, as well as Talk:Types of road. I suggest starting from the top of both talk pages and reading down until you understand exactly what is going on. If you go back up several sections, you'll see that SPUI wanted to do precisely what you are implying (that is, using this article to treat the topic generally), and I was sort of siding with that view, but a huge number of other editors objected, particularly User:Zoney. Specifically, many UK-based editors were highly offended by the notion of merging Motorway into this article, even though the term is clearly a minority usage in English (the fact that Hollywood is located in California helps to boost usage of "freeway" over "motorway"). That is why Vegaswikian and I have moved towards a consensus position of keeping separate articles for all similar types of high speed restricted access roads and then carefully trimming down each one to eliminate redundant material already available in the other articles in the group. Wikipedia users interested in the other names for similar roads can find out about them through the footer template and the main Types of road article.
If you want to develop a new consensus in favor of the position that SPUI was advancing, you can certainly join forces with him to advance that position. I am personally neutral on this issue and will side with any position on how to organize the road articles as long as it is coherent and consistent; if you can develop an articulate argument that Freeway should be the blanket term used on Wikipedia for all such roads, I will support you on it. But I have to warn you that you will encounter extreme resistance from Zoney and all other UK-based editors (as well as all French and German editors if you start advocating the merger of autoroute and autobahn into this article). I have to also warn you that I will oppose any merger of Freeway with Expressway (as some non-legal trained editors have unsuccessfully proposed in the past) because the two terms are distinctly different in U.S. federal law (as I have noted in the article's current version) and in six U.S. states. --Coolcaesar 03:33, 4 December 2006 (UTC)
You're right that I got lazy and failed to read a rather longish talk page (any of the 30 items I should be looking at? #24 perhaps?). Is there any practical way to have an informed opinion on this topic without reading several long Talk pages, e.g. is there a summary somewhere? I may just have to come to terms with the fact that Wikipedia is in some ways a hobby only for those with hours of free time, and that participants therefore tend to self-select on that basis. That's not a complaint toward you (after all, it seems reasonable that I should perform due diligence), rather a general gripe I have with Wikipedia. Often the persistent can win disputes through attrition.
Be that as it may, I think you've confirmed that my impression of the status quo is substantially correct, i.e. that some people have built a local semi-consensus for these articles that's radically different from established WP precedent for other issues such as fixed-wing aircraft. If I have time maybe I can try to reestablish consensus with SPUI or maybe it's a fruitless battle, I don't know. I think WP:WINAD is very much on our side, i.e. that articles shouldn't be in 1:1 correspondence with terms but with concepts. But if it's going to be a major battle then I'm afraid I'm just not that motivated to see things done the theoretically "right" way against resistance.
I generally agree about expressway/freeway, btw; I would probably expect a dab from Expressway to the articles on various forms of roads indicated by the term, since you're correct that the meaning varies greatly across locales, particularly across US locales. Regards, PhilipR 05:45, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Labels

Sometimes too much legal technicalities will result in unnecessary headaches. One could try to be nit picky about the definitions of hurricane (tropical storms that plague North America including Hawaii), typhoons (tropical storms that plague Asia-Pacific), and tropical cyclones (tropical storms that plague either Australia or the Indian Subcontinent) when this is totally irrelevant: they are all names of extreme low pressure tropical storms. We could also explore the legal definitions that discriminate "hill" from "mountain" depending which country one is in. And then if you legally declare something as a hill, I'll try to add enough dirt to legally make it a mountain. We could simply say that there is a general class of free-flowing high speed roads, accessible by entry and exit ramps and that such roads has the following counterpart names . . . . An article on freeways shouldn't be as divergent as an article on dumplings. A Chinese dumpling, a British dumpling, and a nice cinnamon-carmel apple dumpling are very different compared to a freeway and an expressway. Oh, yes, didn't the Supreme Court ruled on a case on what is legally a fruit and what is legally a vegitable when such legalities defy scientific common sense? Allentchang 17:03, 18 December 2006 (UTC)

You might be right, but try convincing Zoney and all other European editors of that. Again, as I've repeatedly stated, I will support either position as long as it is internally coherent and consistent, but if you want to push that position, you would probably have to draft a guideline, try to enforce it against the road articles (that is, by posting merge tags on freeway, expressway, motorway, autoroute, autobahn, etc.) and then push the resulting battle all the way through mediation and arbitration.
Are you really ready to do that? That would require hundreds of hours of work. Because I'm neutral, I would insert the occasional brief "I concur" comment but it's really up to you to draft the hundreds of thousands of words necessary to push that position and to rebut all counterarguments. I've filed one request for arbitration so far, which was successful (User:Ericsaindon2 was blocked for his vandalism and repeated insertion of original research) but arbitration and indeed the whole dispute resolution process is incredibly time-consuming. Also, it's possible that ArbCom might agree with the European position that to merge motorway with freeway (even if freeway is the majority term in terms of the number of native English language speakers who use it) would be offensive and insensitive since this is a encyclopedia of global scale.
Finally, you need to look at the articles on Autobahn and Motorway, which are already quite long. Merging those into Freeway would result into a gigantic article and cause many editors to argue for going back to separate articles based on the length issue alone. For example, that's what happened to the formerly huge Transportation section of the Los Angeles, California article, which is now Transportation of Los Angeles!
Essentially all these terms are approximate co-equals, which is why we treat them as such under Types of road. --Coolcaesar 21:06, 18 December 2006 (UTC)
"to merge motorway with freeway (even if freeway is the majority term in terms of the number of native English language speakers who use it)" -- Well, that issue is dealt with by a well established precedent (Airplane, Aeroplane => Fixed-wing aircraft). But I agree that it's a battle not worth the effort. If Wikipedia's powers-that-be want a less-rendundant Wikipedia, let them worry about it. Score one for Wikipedia:Why Wikipedia is not so great. - PhilipR 21:49, 19 December 2006 (UTC)
That compromise actually worked because "fixed-wing aircraft" is frequently used in formal writing, especially histories of aviation, to distinguish all modern aircraft from the movable-wing aircraft that came before (when people thought that the way to fly was to flap their arms like a bird's wings). The problem with freeways/expressways/motorways/autobahns/autoroutes etc. is that although they are all a type of road, there is no universally accepted adjective that can be coupled with "road" like "fixed-wing" can be coupled with "aircraft." Neither "high-speed" nor "restricted access" standing alone are sufficient. "High-speed restricted access road" is ambiguous, as are "high-speed limited access road" and "high-speed controlled access road," and all three run into the requirement that Wikipedia article titles should be in common use. See official policy WP:NAME.--Coolcaesar 21:08, 21 December 2006 (UTC)


[edit] Fun to drive an uncongested freeway?

Many rural expressways offer unrelieved monotony. Unless such a highway is in a scenic area it can hardly be "fun" to drive. Easy and swift? Sure. But most are much flatter than the roads that they supplant, much straighter, and of course without the courses through town, one sees little local character. Even the commercial development along freeways is homogenized.

I thus removed the "some find driving an uncongested freeway fun" concept from the freeway article. One ordinarily uses a freeway to get from one place to another quickly, and the highway is rarely a destination in itself. Shunpiking simply to avoid a monotonous stetch of bland expressway happens. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Paul from Michigan (talk • contribs) 06:59, 3 January 2007 (UTC).

I dispute your deletion. I just opened a similar dispute with another editor over the Transportation in Los Angeles article. I believe both disputes can be resolved with a citation to the L.A. Freeway book by David Brodsly. The book is widely available (see WorldCat) so I should be able to get to a copy and get the page cite in a couple of weeks. --Coolcaesar 11:10, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Bad bad quote, why I took it out

“

" 'Freeway' is a highway in respect to which the owners of abutting lands have no right or easement of access to or from their abutting lands or in respect to which such owners have only limited or restricted right or easement of access." - California Civic Code 332 as of 2006

 ”

I just deleted the above text from the lead paragraphs. This is totally inappropriate. First of all, Streets & Highways Code section 257 (which is already cited in the right place in the article) is the more appropriate code section. Second, we should not be leading the article with a section that represents only one part of the United States when we are trying to take a worldwide view on Wikipedia. The article, as I've drafted it, already cites and discusses the MUTCD federal definition, which is much broader and more widely accepted. We should move from the general (federal) to the specific (state), not start with a very state-specific quote and then waffle back and forth between the specific and the general. --Coolcaesar 07:32, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Use of the word freeway in Canada and Taiwan

The word "freeway" [...] is currently in regular use in Canada, Taiwan, Australia, and the United States.

[edit] Canada

I think the use of the word in Canada is fairly restricted. The Gage Canadian Dictionary gives the word freeway the label Esp.U.S.. Personally, — I'm from Quebec — I've never heard anyone use anything other than expressway and autoroute. I think people in Western Canada use it, but the most common word in Canada, when people don't just say highway, is definitely expressway. I think "Canada" should probably be changed to "parts of Canada". Joeldl 16:24, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Taiwan

What does this even mean? Is freeway pronounceable in Chinese? If this just means that they borrowed the word from English, then I would say that the word they use is whatever the pinyin for it is. Joeldl 16:24, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Generalising

I note my name mentioned a few times above. I'd like to offer input on this again. I think this article should restrict itself (and therefore be more coherent) to addressing what a Freeway is in countries that use that terminology.

I do agree that a general piece about "Freeway-like" roads makes sense, and I would suggest that somewhere on Wikipedia there should be content with a summary paragraph each about Freeways (in US, etc.), Motorways, Autobahns, etc and then a comparison section. Considering you would have difficulty finding a generic term for such roads (there is enough complication defining the roads within countries that we have large discussion on Freeway, Motorway, etc. as is) that is why I suggest using Types of road. That article could do with *major* work as it is essentially just a list. A decent taxonomy would be far better, and would be a sort of parent article for this (Freeway) article and others such as Motorway.

zoney ♣ talk 16:23, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

  • Well since Types of road was rewritten to kind of serve that purpose, it sounds reasonable. As I recall, the original rewrite to the current form was mostly a gutting to remove a lot of the editorial issues with the previous versions of the article. As you say, the current simple lists could be expanded to tables that included information like the countries where those types of roads are found and other useful comparison data. Since the table would retain the link to the main article, only data worth comparing against other similar roads would need to be included. If you want to try a version of the table on one of these, give it a try. Vegaswikian 18:52, 23 March 2007 (UTC)
Sorry, I'm really too busy. I thought it might be of some use nevertheless to leave some more up to date comments here. zoney ♣ talk 19:02, 23 March 2007 (UTC)
The current division between motorway/freeway/expressway is silly. There is no more of a connection between a freeway in Australia and a freeway in the U.S. than there is between a freeway in the U.S. and an expressway in Canada. In fact, the last two are likely to be more similar. These multiple articles seem to all have an initial segment about major highways in general, and then delve into country-specific information. I think there should be a single article covering this type of road in general, in which country-specific information is brief and serves to illustrate the general notion, and country-specific articles elsewhere. There would likely be disagreement about which word to use for the title and in the text, since there seems to be no solution here like fixed-wing aircraft instead of airplane and aeroplane. But I think Wikipedia policy favours the variety of English of the first contributor for non-country-related articles, so the idea would be to go back and see which of the three articles freeway, expressway or motorway was created first, and that would be the word chosen for the "international" part. Otherwise just pick one randomly, because the current division is entirely artificial, as I think the Australia-U.S.-Canada example shows. Joeldl 02:40, 24 March 2007 (UTC)
Is it really possible to have a general section rather than summaries of the main country-specific features? Surely anything that attempts to talk about general features will be a mess of "except for" and "termed X in country Y", and so on. I understand your point about different countries with "Freeways", perhaps there should be "Freeways in country X" for each one, and this article would have summary sections for each? The introduction would refer to the countries using roads called freeways and mention some general characteristics (this would be more possible as you have less "cases" as you are only dealing with the group of countries using "freeways"). zoney ♣ talk 13:12, 24 March 2007 (UTC)
Yes, there is no doubt that there should be individual country pages containing most of the country-specific information. I think it's possible for experts to talk about expressways in general (e.g. history, effect on traffic, effect on neighbourhoods, etc.) in a way that is general. Also, including a limited amount of country-specific information is not a bad thing if it illustrates the general concept. It will be up to others to determine what goes on that page, but the principle will be that it's an "international" one. As I said, we'd have to go to the first contributor rule WP:ENGVAR to determine which word to use. The current setup also excludes countries that don't have an official English word (so they won't be covered in any "overview" page) and I think the argument about there being fewer countries per page is a bit artificial, because there is nothing really relating the roads in these countries except the word. The current division is too focused on avoiding conflict about the choice of word at the expense of content. Joeldl 17:09, 24 March 2007 (UTC)
I agree with Zoney that a lot of the non-freeway stuff needs to be purged from the article and I disagree with Joeldl's position. The problem is that there are so many terms in use in English, and with such subtle distinctions between them, that it is nearly impossible to create a single article that takes a worldwide view and fully covers the general category of controlled-access divided highways. The situation with expressway is particularly messy since the U.S. MUTCD and seven states (including my own) define expressways as an intermediate category between arterial roads and freeways, and several states prefer expressway altogether instead of freeway. The mess in British English with classification v. type of road means that the definition of a motorway is difficult to reconcile with the freeway/expressway pigpen. So the result of Joeldl's proposed merge would probably be a 50K unreadable mess, which would immediately cause some editors to demand that it be split up, and we'd be right back where we started. --Coolcaesar 10:15, 25 March 2007 (UTC)
If it was made clear in what sense the word expressway was used from the very start (if that word were chosen), it would not be any more confusing for people from those U.S. states where an expressway is something less than a freeway than it is when an American sees "football" for the hundredth time in Football (soccer). I really think that it's been less a matter of being worried that people could actually be confused than each nationality complaining about using the other's words. There is no need to define freeways, expressways, etc. precisely in the international article (except in brief country-specific paragraphs referring to full articles elsewhere, perhaps), since the role of these roads has a lot in common in all countries. My point earlier was that whatever subtle U.S. distinction you make between freeway and expressway, that's not going to carry over to Australia or Canada in exactly the same way, so even on a page like Expressway or Freeway you can't really try to draw that distinction except doing it in a different way for each country. Currently, Freeway contains information about Autobahns. Why does Freeway get to do this instead of Motorway? In fact, is there something about German Autobahns that allows them to be talked about here that Irish motorways don't have? If we consider all the local words that exist around the world in non-English-speaking countries, are we going to decide to have 50 pages, but talk about Portuguese and Brazilian ones together because they have the same name, even if the roads turn out to be very different? I am proposing a merger but also a split, so in the end it will be quite a manageable length. The country-specific information would need to be cut down considerably (summary and illustrative examples) on the international page, and most of it sent to pages like Motorways of New Zealand, Autobahns of Germany, Autobahns of Austria, etc.Joeldl 11:25, 25 March 2007 (UTC) I should add Freeways of the United States and Motorways of the United Kingdom. Joeldl 11:35, 25 March 2007 (UTC)
Well, if we were to use "expressway," we would offend half the U.S. audience (including a substantial portion of the American civil engineering and law enforcement communities, who are all required to learn the federal MUTCD as part of their training) and the other half if we use "freeway." So there really is no satisfactory way to merge the terms.
I've been editing Wikipedia for about three years now (go look at my contributions) and I've seen freeway and expressway merged and split up in various edit wars because there is no easy way to satisfy the other half of the U.S. population that prefers their definition. Plus a lot of the freeway/expressway content went off to Types of road for a while per Zoney's suggestion, but that really didn't work very well, so I brought some of it back. --Coolcaesar 00:35, 26 March 2007 (UTC)
  • Just in case the following hasn't already been suggested:
How about having an article with a jurisdiction independent name like controlled-access divided highways for the international material? Aliases whose meaning varies by jurisdiction (such as freeway, expressway, motorway, etc.) could be redirected to it. Detailed material could then be broken out by jurisdiction into separate articles as needed.--Wiley 13:23, 25 March 2007 (UTC)
That has been suggested at least three separate times. I opposed it in the past, but after watching all the road geeks fighting over these terminology issues for three years, I think it is the only compromise everyone can live with. I would support your suggested merge and use of redirects. --Coolcaesar 00:35, 26 March 2007 (UTC)
Don't some of those terms apply in some countries to roads that aren't controlled access? And not necessarily divided highways? The only common factor seems to be that they are a type or class of road usually used for high volumes of traffic. How to have an article solely on that premise? I suggest sticking to Types of road and providing more detail there. zoney ♣ talk 15:08, 27 March 2007 (UTC)
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