btwhite92 (2022-01-25 02:50:27+00:00): These are "drafts" in the sense that they are incomplete and that many routes and areas are still under discussion, not in the sense that every road or area needs to undergo a formal voting process. The linked documentation is the summarization of months of discussion and debate involving more US mappers than I have seen in any debate over this on the mailing lists in years past. While I am the one who ultimately changed the 'highway' tag in this region, these changes were not undiscussed nor unilateral. It isn't a mass, automated re-tagging if I'm also local to the region and am familiar with many of these roads. CA 299 is the road I am least familiar with of my proposed routes, but my justifications for thinking this should be a 'trunk' route are further down.

The vast majority of the roads I personally proposed are north of I-80 and Sacramento, and most are roads I have driven personally. I put them up towards the largest active discussion I could find regarding road classification with one issue north of Alturas that was resolved after some discussion. I think it would be a bit absurd to put this to a wiki vote; you'd be lucky to have more than two mappers local to  northern CA proper participate in a wiki vote. Establishing consensus in areas where there are only a low single-digit number of active, local mappers is going to be difficult and I wouldn't consider a wiki vote of three people authoritative either. Likewise, sending a list of 8 or so roads I propose to bump up to 'trunk' to the mailing list doesn't seem to be appropriate either. The only other CA mapper that is active there but not on Slack is SteveA, who I wouldn't necessarily consider "local" to northern CA.

Most mappers who are concerned with improving US highway classification and are trying to productively reach a consensus have been discussing this on Slack, which is why my "proposal" was posted there. It seems to me that you're upset you haven't been involved with discussions, but the options I've seen are:
1. Private DM, not useful for public discussion - this is a long-contentious topic that concerns more than just you and I.
2. Changeset comments, too decentralized and impossible to keep track of to be of much usefulness for public discussion and consensus building. I will cross-link this changeset to the local-california Slack channel so they are aware of your objection and can participate here.
3. Mailing lists, which have an unfortunate extended history of being unproductive regarding highway class discussion.
4. Wiki, which is fairly useful for discussion, but you cannot participate on by admission.
5. Slack, where there has been active daily discussion about road classes with mostly productive results.

I'm not on the Discord, but if there are similar discussions going on there that are active and productive I'd be more than happy to participate. 

My reasoning for this highway being 'trunk' is that it is more important than neighboring primary roads. It is the best route connecting Eureka (greater CSA of pop 45k) to Redding and through to Reno/Carson. This road is an ex-US highway, has more open geometry than nearby roads supporting faster traffic, and has frequent passing lanes which other nearby highways to my knowledge don't have nearly as frequently. If this road is to be 'primary' (only regionally important), I think CA 3, 36, and 96 would need to be discussed as well since it seems these play a less important role in the highway network than CA 299. This is corroborated with Caltrans AADT counts (https://dot.ca.gov/programs/traffic-operations/census), which shows higher minimum counts on CA 299 than on other nearby highways. 

I'm happy to revert this if discussion pans out to determine that this road ought to be 'primary', but it should be done so on the merit of discussion rather than turf. If you have "zero urge" to participate in discussion I'm not sure what to say here. Why specifically do you think this road isn't appropriate to be 'trunk'? Do you disagree with tagging important inter-regional highways as 'trunk'? If so, why?

Bradley