Road types of Ùzje

Navigation in the roads of Ùzje is made easier with road numbers and route shields. Beyond the mundane M, A and B numbers, there’s a whole host of other route numbers that assist drivers and other road users in different and complementary ways.

AH1 M3 A21(M) A10 M3(A) B230 C2201 Q30 V60 D3 45 X1 A list of all the shield types available in Ùzje, in text form.

Overview

All road numbers in Ùzje come in the form of a one- or two-letter prefix, followed by one to five digits, optionally ending with a potentially-bracketed letter and a heading direction in brackets. With the exception of the Asian Highway prefix AH, all prefices are one letter long. As of yet there are no five-digit-long numbers in the whole of Ùzje, nor any suffices that are not bracketed, but any such sequences are reserved by the Department for Roads and Transport to be used upon their discretion.

Each letter has its own namespace: the A222 may not necessarily refer to the same road as the B222. In particular, the AH1 is not related to the M1. However, some specific regions might voluntarily ban number collisions; this is done in the case of M, A, B and C numbers in Boan Isle, which restricts them to numbers with 1, 2, 3 and 4 digits respectively.

Road designations are unique on the national level; there is only one M4, A40 and B400 in the entirety of the territory. However, this is not guaranteed for the city numbers that start with Q, V and D. Those are only guaranteed to be unique within the city.

In writing, ideally the number designation is to be separated from the letters on either side with a quarter-space. However this is not commonly done, not even on official road signage; instead the common practice is to not separate the numbers and the letters with any space, even if there are brackets around the suffix.

National numbers: M, A, B and C

Motorways: M and A(M)

A shield for the M8

Motorways were first built in 1950 as an testing ground for eventually building them in the UK, which at the time did not have much experience with motorways. As with most similar roads in the world, the road always has the following restrictions placed on it, unless otherwise modified:

Only motor vehicles are allowed. The vehicle must be able to travel faster than 50 km/h. Furthermore, there is a minimum speed limit of 30 km/h which applies as long as one is able to do so safely. No learner drivers carrying class A permits.

Unlike in the UK, where motorways are blue, Ùzje motorways are associated with the colour green. This is mainly to conform to the colour scheme of nearby countries, which also use green for their motorway-like roads.

Motorway numbers are assigned in a grid: odd numbers go north-south, even numbers go east-west. Small motorways, like the M30, take their parent motorway’s number as the first digit, and some arbitrary digit placed on the units digit. Various circumstances prevent another major motorway from being built, and there is yet to be a situation where there isn’t an obvious parent motorway.

A shield for the A21(M)

Sometimes A roads can be upgraded into a motorway. if they are, then they are motorways in every sense of the word, even if their name merely gains an (M) suffix. This particularly ugly designation was copied directly from the UK, which had since then decided on that format and just copied it wholesale for when similar things happened in Ùzje. As with other motorways, they have a green background.

Service roads: M(A)

A shield for the M8(A)

Where a new road was built specifically in a motorway, sometimes a bit of all-purpose road is placed next to the motorway in order to allow for some of the benefits of the new road to be given to non-motorway traffic and also to reduce the amount of junctions required for an urban motorway. When this happens the new all-purpose road, which is invariably an A road, is given the M number but with an (A) suffixed.

Fortunately, it is not allowed for a road like the A21(M) to have a service road called the A21(M)(A). That’d be far too silly; instead it retains the old number, which means that it is quite sensibly called the A21.

First-class roads: A

A shield for the A46

A first class road is the major road that’s usable for everyone, including bicycles, pedestrians and (theoretically) equestrians. For this purpose they are also called “all-purpose roads”.

The quality of A roads vary greatly, from motorway-in-all-but-name to simply one lane in each direction in a single carriageway. In urban areas, they often have traffic lights control junctions, whereas outside of them they tend to have priority over other roads. They are associated with the colour blue.

A roads generally have two or three digits. There are, by law, no A roads with a single digit. Numbering of them are coördinated with B and C roads into zones, which are defined more-or-less arbitrarily and divide the entire territory into seven zones:

Namfuŋ / Näqveq, otherwise known as Boan Isle Lokcəxn Peninsula The Goŋ Hundred The Backhill Ajü Ajł and Zəxjü Wuqoj Isle Zone 7

Three of these zones (2, 3 and 4) divide the mainland to give lots of A road numbers to it, and the rest divides up all the island, with Boan Isle getting 1, Ajü and Zəxjü getting 5, the four island cluster of Wuqoj getting 6, and 7 mopping up everything else. It is also dictated that for three digit numbers and higher, numbers starting with 20 belong to the central peninsula north to zone 4, 21 are reserved for roads that cross these sub-zone boundaries, the remaining odd numbers (230 ~ 239, 250 ~ 259, &c.) belong to the Qàjscit to the west of the Terəq, and the remaining even numbers (220 ~ 229, 240 ~ 249, &c.) belong to Sixteen Tails, i.e. east of the Terəq.

Second-class roads: B

A shield for the B357

B roads are secondary route to A roads, but they otherwise have the qualities of an A road. They normally aren’t as high-quality, however, and they don’t expect a large amount of traffic. It is expected that most drivers use this road to move around a district or as an alternative on rural roads.

B roads must have three or more digits and, unlike most other places, are associated with the colour purple.

Unclassified roads: C

A shield for the C2010, if it were ever shown.

C roads are named “unclassified” roads because originally it was planned that these roads don’t have numbers at all. But later on, it was decided that every road needs a national number, so any road that doesn’t have one already are then assigned a 4-digit C road, which also follow the zoning that A roads follow.

Unclassified roads are even diverse in quality than B roads, because they can also use the dreaded S1 standard: a single track road with one lane serving both directions. There is a provision in the traffic laws that you may drive on the right if the edge of the road is an insufficiently protected drop down a cliff, but that kind of road will never be granted an official number, hence they are “unclassified”.

This number is still not put on road signs or street markers. However, the public can still see the numbers – one of the reasons for the Every Road A Number scheme was that street lights can now have a consistent serial number for everyone. Unclassified roads are associated with white.

International highways: AH

A shield for the AH1

The Asian Highway network is a series of highways that, like its more famous European counterpart, attempts to make Asia more interconnected by overlaying a new network on top of existing roads.

In Ùzje they are not signed, but a shield was drawn for it all the same. However, as with the specification, the colour of the text must be white, and not yellow as with most of the other shields in Ùzje.

City grid streets: Q, V and D

New Cities are built with a grid layout in mind. Some of these cities decided to number their roads as well, resulting in the Q, V, D system of city-wide numbering. But because these numbers are uncoördinated, duplicates can and do occur in different cities. Three cities have these numbers, Boan City, Ð’TÞEK and Concept City.

Regular shields, used by Boan and a number of other cities (above), and “light bulb”-shaped shields, used by Ð’TÞEK and Concept City (below). Ð’TÞEK does not use the diagonal (green) shield.

Boan City uses rectangle-shaped shields, with the prefices placed in the standard way. The vertical streets are associated with the colour teal, whereas the horizontal roads are associated with yellow. Yellow is also associated with temporary signage, which is some cause for concern, but so far there had been no objections raised to this colour convention. Other New Cities also use this scheme.

Ð’TÞEK and Concept City, being both self-proclaimed “cities of the future”, eschew the standard European cartouche and instead use a shield that’s shaped like a lightbulb. It is formed with a rectangular stalk, with a screw thread of the opposite colour, placed below a circle.

While Ð’TÞEK is well-organised enough to avoid non-orthogonal streets altogether and so it has no use for the diagonal shield, all other cities have streets that don’t line up with the grid properly. In most cases they are squeezed into the Q-V paradigm anyway, but Concept City decided that won’t do and instead uses the green light bulbs to indicate streets that run diagonally, essentially making the grid a triangular grid rather than a rectangular one. This was not done without some controversy, as green is already used for motorways, but in the end not much came of it and the green stayed.

Like the national numbers city numbers are allocated in zones. These zones are also the responsibility of the city. An example of the zone practice can be seen in Boan City, and is seen in the figure below. One quirk of the system there is that “horizontal” means “along the coast” and “vertical” means “perpendicular to the coast”, so it looks strange on a north-oriented map.





The horizontal (left) and vertical (right) zones of Boan City are arranged so that they are bounded by roads that are either major, classified roads or by other Q-V roads that have a units digit of 0.

Within each zone there are usually attempts to have the numbers appear in order, which means that as one goes further south in Boan the V numbers increase. An interesting consequence is that a zone can run out of numbers even if there are still many available otherwise, resulting in the only road number in the world that is not an integer: the Bohən Vescit, otherwise known as the V62½.

Different arrangements are made in different cities. In Ð’TÞEK the roads are just numbered from the southwest corner without any zoning, so the it has the Q1 and the V1 and the numbers increase from there. Meanwhile in Concept City, the normal zone layout is used, but roads that can’t be reliably classed as horizontal or vertical get D numbers instead, which are given based on the numbers of the roads near them. Numbers have up to three digits.

Finally, city numbers do not show up on road signs, but they do show up on street signs, where they appear below the street nameplate in the case of the rectangular shields, or on top of a pole in the case of the light bulb-shaped shields.

Cycle routes: J

A shield for cycle route 45

Ùzje has a network of cycle routes. The network is largely designed for short-distance travel, with some long-distance routes available where cars can’t reach.

Regardless of the density of the network, it is indicated using a (somewhat cartoonish) bike-shaped shield with exaggerated wheels that hold one digit each. Because there’s more than 100 cycle paths in the territory, a third digit is shoved in to the shield in an even goofier fashion that defies any reasonable explanation. In short, the third wheel is always smaller, and is either the front or the back wheel depending on the orientation of the bike, and the bike is “upgraded” to become a tandem bike (even though no tandem bikes actually use three wheels.)

The change of icon reflects the additional difficulty of the cycle route, because two-digit cycle paths are routes that are easy yet useful and three-digit numbers are assigned to more challenging or longer paths. Specifically, the allocation scheme requires cycle route numbers with two digits to be unique only within a single highway zone, whereas three-digit numbers have to be unique across the territory. Three-digit paths are usually cross-zone and require water crossings such as major bridges and ferries.

There are no one digit cycle paths as they are all prepended with 0. However, there is a 00, which is considered the most important cycle route of them all within the highway zone.

Example shields for 3-digit cycle routes

As can be seen by the shield on the road sign and the text-based shields above, the “J” designation is completely theoretical; it does not show up anywhere on the map. However the law that describes the legal existence of these routes does say that the letter “J” is associated with cycle routes, as well as the colour pale green.

Diversions: X

A shield for diversion route 1

When road works or other temporary changes in the road network comes along, these yellow-on-red shields are used to guide users back to the original path after they have passed the temporary change.

Diversion paths can be permanent or temporary. When motorways are constructed, some thought was given as to what to do when the motorway is closed, and all-purpose roads are chosen to give an adequate alternative to this contingency. These are given numbers with two or three digits, and are unique within the territory.

Else, the numbers 1 to 9 are used to respond to specific incidents, and generally are not unique or even permanent; each temporary arrangement uses these numbers in an ad-hoc manner and they vanish as soon as the temporary arrangement ends.