You can tell where someone’s from in Texas by what they call that smaller road parallel to the highway. A Dallasite may call it a service road, a San Antonian might say access road, and every other Texan will tell you it’s a frontage road, except of course Houstonians who swear by feeder. Regardless of what you call it, it’s a ubiquitous thing across the urban areas of Texas. Everyone’s driven on ‘em.

So why are they so chaotically mapped? As it is right now, they’re typically mapped as highway=secondary throughout, switching to highway=primary or even highway=trunk when they’re part of a freeway exit for such a road. This happens regardless of the lack of any underlying changes to the frontage road itself. If I showed you a cropped image of a frontage road segment tagged highway=secondary and another nearby segment tagged highway=trunk, you probably wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.

This ends up looking kinda janky and ugly. But more importantly, it doesn’t do a good job of describing the roadway it’s supposed to represent. If you take out the freeway and leave just the frontage roads, it’s a wide boulevard with massive spacing in between median crossovers. That alone merits highway=trunk.

And, lo and behold: we already do that where the freeway hasn’t yet been built but its surrounding frontage roads have been. In good faith, I’m going to be changing most urban Texas frontage roads to highway=trunk. I hope this makes sense to people, and if you have any concerns, feel free to shoot me a message.

-Clay