The disagreement here is whether Ely counts as a "major population center" in the sense that it will induce the main E/W route to 'trunk'. In my opinion, maybe, but probably not. We're talking about upgrading 400+ miles of highway to 'trunk' on account of one town with less than 4,000 people. This is a super duper edge case with respect to the trunk definition given in the 2021 Highway Classification wiki page, which has had a considerable amount of voices in developing.

I'm not 100% opposed to this being upgraded, but the discussion needs to happen first and with more voices than just you and I, given the "edgeness" of it. Until that happens, yes, I am insisting that this keeps the same classification it has had for the last 12 years.

Yes, Ely is a "major" stop on the route between Las Vegas and Twin Falls - US 93 is a "trunk" because it is the best route between Las Vegas and Twin Falls, Boise, etc; not because Ely is a stop on the way. US 50 through NV carries *regional* traffic to regionally important population centers, but definitely not traffic between any two major metropolitan areas.

My objection is that one of the things settled on with the 2021 reclassification guidelines is that 'trunk' routes should be used to denote the "best" routes connecting major population centers. US 50 through Nevada isn't used preferentially to connect any two major population centers - I don't really agree that Ely counts as a 'trunk'-level destination, but I'm willing to hear others' perspectives on that specifically.

My point in bringing up the classification guidelines is that the bigger the change, the more there needs to be an effort to get some consensus. The point of making the effort to document all this (and to generally stick with the decisions made) is so other mappers can see the logic as to why a certain piece of road was decided on belong to a certain class, give a framework to discuss with other mappers if there's a disagreement, and hopefully, most importantly, stop switching road classifications back and forth ad nauseum.