Talk:Beltway

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Reading the definition of the US term Beltway, I am sure that a ring road is not the same thing, at least in the UK usage of the term. A beltway is an orbital motorway, yes, but not a ring road.

Many UK ring roads are not in fact purpose built roads, such as the M25 motorway, but are a series of existing roads that have been strung together to provide a circular route around a city centre. Frequently, these routes are not even on the edge or outside of the city built up area ( as I understand a beltway to be from this article ) but are fact inside the city. For example, Cambridge has a ring road that has been in existance for many years now. It is certainly not a beltway.

Cambridge ring road: Chesterton Road, Elizabeth Way, East Road, Gonville Place, Lensfield Road, Fen Causeway, Queens Road (the backs), Northampton St., Chesterton Place

Therefore I propose either starting a new article for ring road (and a separate article again for those who like listing such things), unless there is strength of opinion for padding out this existing article to cover for ring roads in addition to beltways.JRL 02:36, 10 August 2005 (UTC)

Ringstraße of Vienna is also just a street. It is far from being a highway (or a beltway).


Contents

[edit] Full or Partial Loop

I'm wondering if we should only list full loops (like I-410 in San Antonio, or I-610 in Houston), instead of partial loops (like I-495 in Massachusetts). It does not seem like a partial loop really forms a 'ring' (as in ring road) or a 'belt.' Is there a formal definition (e.g., a regulation of a state or country) that anyone knows of to help clear this up? Or is this just semantics? 24.175.64.6

Massachusetts' I-495 is a partial loop mostly because if it were a complete loop, a goodly portion of it would be in the Atlantic Ocean. It functions in a similar way to those beltways in places whose geography allows the circle to be closed. Rockhopper10r 18:23, 4 June 2006 (UTC)
Agreed for I-495 in Mass. However, there are several highways on this list which aren't circumferential, and in no way were ever designed to be circumferential-- even accounting for the limits of geography. Florida's Interstate 275 is an example: How can people say this is a beltway, when it goes straight through the city? -- SwissCelt 22:42, 16 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Which city

It seems that most of the beltways named here note the city they bypass, even if it does not pass within the corporate limits of the city. For example, I-495 in Massachusetts passes nowhere near Boston, but it is considered Boston's outer beltway. Likewise, Texas State Highway 99 would be a beltway for Houston, although it passes nowhere near its city limits. If this is what we're doing, let's be consistent about it, please. Thank you. Rockhopper10r 21:30, 23 March 2006 (UTC)

I don't mean to start an edit war here, but it has been the standard on this page that the city listed is the city for which the beltway serves as a bypass. State Highway 99 is not a loop around Baytown or Sugar Land. It is a (partial) loop around Houston to connect its suburbs (and yes, Sugar Land and Baytown, though mentioned in the metro area name by the US Census are still ancilliary cities to Houston). Similar entries in Nevada (for the loop that passes around Las Vegas) and as, mentioned above I-495 in Massachusetts refer to the cities they "orbit". If we're using metro area, that should apply to every state. Thank you.Rockhopper10r 00:04, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Interstate 405 is not a beltway

Interstate 405 in Southern California is not considered a beltway. It is more of a loop route to Interstate 5. Also, their interchanges with each other do not provide ramps that reverse direction (north to south, south to north), and a beltway is circles the inner city (Los Angeles). However, if Interstate 210 ever connected with Interstate 710, that plus part of 405 might be a beltway enclosing the western LA metropolitan area.

A possible candidate for a partial beltway might be the inclusion of Interstates 280 and 680 as they surround the inner San Francisco Bay Area in a J shape. No beltway could actually enclose the entire city of San Francisco along with its vicinity, though (the Pacific Ocean limits this)...

--Geopgeop 02:33, 4 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Non-global viewpoint

The following section is not accurate for Ireland at least, and I am sure only partly applies in the UK:

Ring road may sometimes refer to a beltway-style road, but more commonly indicates a road or series of roads within a city or town that have been joined together by town planners to form an orbital distributor style road, but where the standard of road could be anything from an ordinary city street up to an expressway level. The principal difference is that a ring road is an orbital distributor road system designed from already existing roads, as opposed to a beltway which is designed from new as such a road system. A ring road designation also implies a more inner-city road designed to route traffic around a city centre, as opposed to routing traffic around a larger conurbation.

Here "ring road" is used even for the likes of the M50 motorway in Dublin, and brand new outer ring roads of dual carriageway elsewhere in the country (e.g. N7 Limerick Southern Ring Road).

As regards inner-city road vs. outer road, well, the terms inner ring road and outer ring road are common.

I'm not sure how to correct this section, it might be best to just remove it (rather than have an extensive qualification of what different places mean by the term "ring road"). The current piece is simply wrong without further qualification though.


zoney ♣ talk 23:06, 18 October 2006 (UTC)

I agree, as for us non english speaking, in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland and Germany ( at least) the translation to english would be ring road not beltway. We use this both for motorways built as a ring or innercity streets together forming a ring. In nordic and german signs ring roads are written "ring 1" or "O 1" Before I wisited this page I had never herd the expression beltway. Maybe the headline should be switched to ringroad instead of beltway?213.66.61.20 14:41, 27 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Content of the article

I am no expert on transportation or beltways, and came across this article because I was interested to know some transportation facts - and found none. I think this article should be more concerned with the applications and advantages/disadvantages of beltways than with examples of beltways around the world (the entire list can be moved to a new articles - List of beltways). If there are any experts on this issue here, please fix the article :) I hope there will be great results. -- Ynhockey (Talk) 15:51, 25 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Argentine Beltways

I expanded the list of beltways in Argentina. If you need to verify the source it is a YPF map I am using to locate these roads.

[edit] Split

I believe this article should be split into the article itself, as well as List of beltways. When I came to this article, I wanted to read about what a beltway is, and the ideas behind the concept, but in fact the page is cluttered with the list which takes up far more space than the actual article and slows the page down for people who probably don't want to read the list, and can easily access it in a see also page. -- Ynhockey (Talk) 18:25, 9 March 2008 (UTC)

Holy ****, just realized I posted on this very article's talk page not long ago and requested the exact same thing! Anyway, now I put up the actual template on the page, hopefully there will be some comments, because I hate doing things unilaterally on Wikipedia. -- Ynhockey (Talk) 18:26, 9 March 2008 (UTC)