North Dakota/Highway Classification

General guidelines

These are largely based on my opinion and should be discussed with the ND mapping community prior to being applied to the map. Thus, if you're still seeing this written here, do not use these as active guidelines for adjusting highway classifications in North Dakota!

• highway=motorway - This should only apply to high-speed, limited-access highways that aren't isolated motorway islands.
  • On US-2, this should exclude the partially-limited-access portions around Minot and Grand Forks Air Force Base.
• highway=trunk - This should apply to high-speed divided highways, but only the segments that connect major population centers.
  • We may consider broadening the use of this tag to include both high-speed divided highways along with undivided, lower-speed US highways that connect major population centers (e.g. US 52 from Jamestown to Minot).
• highway=primary - This should be used for any remaining US highways along with the most important state highways.
• highway=secondary - This should be used for most of the remaining state highways along with unusually important county roads.
  • For example, this should exclude ND-10 since it is just a frontage road for I-94 but include CR-81 south of Grand Forks since it is a major connection from I-29 to South Washington Street.
• highway=tertiary - This should be used for most county roads.

Population centers

The following is a list of the twenty largest cities in North Dakota, along with their populations as of the 2020 United States census and the major highways that serve them. Some of these are suburbs of other cities on this list, and many likely shouldn't be deemed as "important" cities regardless, but all are listed here for consideration.

Next is a very incomplete collection of notable "nearby" cities to North Dakota and their populations, along with a distance along a route from a sensible ND terminus (e.g. Fargo to Minneapolis rather than Grand Forks to Minneapolis or Wahpeton to Minneapolis).

Finally, to get an idea for how important each border crossing is at the US-Canada border, I've collected some statistics for the various ports of entry (BTS public domain data), colored with proposed classifications based on these statistics (red for trunk, green for primary, yellow for secondary, and blue for tertiary):

Inventory and proposals

In all tables below, a city name in bold as a terminus denotes that the highway classification reaches its terminus at the state border.

Resources

I've found a variety of useful resources for this project:

• FHWA NHS North Dakota Map: May be useful for classification consideration.
• Manitoba Provincial Highways Functional Classification Map: Useful for border classification disputes.
• MDT Highway Functional Classification - Similar to the NDDOT classification map, but for Montana (for considering border highway disputes). Doesn't exactly line up with the North Dakota system.
• MnDOT Functional Classification - Similar to the NDDOT classification map, but for Minnesota (for considering border highway disputes). Doesn't exactly line up with the North Dakota system.
• NDDOT Highway Performance Classification System - The NDDOT classifies the state's highways on a five-level system. This is a useful resource (especially since it was recently updated for 2021), but since we have to restrict the majority of the state's highways down to a four-level system (since the tertiary tag arguably belongs to county roads), there are some differences:
  • Interstate - consists only of I-29 and I-94 and is an exact match to the motorway tag for North Dakota.
  • Interregional - roughly translates to the trunk highway tag, but is a bit more inclusive as it contains US highways that connect to minor cities in South Dakota and Montana.
  • State Corridor - roughly corresponds to the primary tag, but may lead to inconsistencies across the state borders.
  • District Corridor - roughly corresponds to the secondary tag
  • District Collector - roughly corresponds to the secondary tag, but are less important roads.
• NDDOT Route and Mileage Map - Map of all of North Dakota's state-operated highways.
• NDDOT Traffic Information Map (interactive) - Lots of useful stuff here, including performance classifications, functional classification, speed limits, traffic counts, and more.
• Saskatchewan Functional Classification of Provincial Highways Map - An old map (and not a secure link), but may be useful for border classification disputes.
• SDDOT Highway Classification - Similar to the NDDOT classification map, but for South Dakota (for considering border highway disputes). Doesn't exactly line up with the North Dakota system.

Neighboring projects

For North Dakota's three neighboring states:

• Minnesota - Initial set of roads to reclassify agreed upon.
• Montana - No known project.
• South Dakota - Draft.

North Dakota's neighboring Canadian provinces are not part of the United States reclassification project, but there should be some consideration about the classification of highways that cross the northern border into Manitoba or Saskatchewan. There are efforts in Canada to update road classification to agree with changes here in the United States.

• Manitoba – No known project.
• Saskatchewan – Draft.