South-West Scotland Enquiries

[DanT97]

Would anyone be willing to create an article for the Ayrshire town of Cumnock? There isn’t one already for some strange reason, and I’m not sure how to create one myself.

Also, would anyone happen to know what C number Portree Terrace in Portpatrick is? I would also like an article to be created for this road as well.

Thank you for your time.

[Steven]

The Wiki Guides step you through the process of creating new pages on the SABRE Wiki.

[KeithW]

Would anyone be willing to create an article for the Ayrshire town of Cumnock? There isn’t one already for some strange reason, and I’m not sure how to create one myself.

Also, would anyone happen to know what C number Portree Terrace in Portpatrick is? I would also like an article to be created for this road as well.

Thank you for your time.

Google found this for Cumknock
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumnock
https://www.cumnockchronicle.com/
https://www.visitscotland.com/info/town ... ck-p243111

Portree Terrace does not seem to appear on the list of Dumfries and Galloway roads
https://www.dumgal.gov.uk/media/18023/L ... 5759870000

I looked at the list in Sabre but the link went nowhere
https://www.sabre-roads.org.uk/wiki/ind ... sh_C_Roads
Sabre Member rileyrob compiled the list , you could try sending him a Private Message

[Owain]

... would anyone happen to know what C number Portree Terrace in Portpatrick is? I would also like an article to be created for this road as well.

Portree Terrace does not seem to appear on the list of Dumfries and Galloway roads
https://www.dumgal.gov.uk/media/18023/L ... 5759870000

I looked at the list in Sabre but the link went nowhere
https://www.sabre-roads.org.uk/wiki/ind ... sh_C_Roads
Sabre Member rileyrob compiled the list , you could try sending him a Private Message

By far the quickest thing to do is to look at SABRE Maps' OpenStreetMap.

This suggests that the only numbered road in Portpatrick is the A77 (with the B738 branching off to the north). Portree Terrace has no number:

[KeithW]

By far the quickest thing to do is to look at SABRE Maps' OpenStreetMap.

This suggests that the only numbered road in Portpatrick is the A77 (with the B738 branching off to the north). Portree Terrace has no number:


Portpatrick.jpg

I had already tried that in fact but I know that it doesn't always show the C Numbers as I know the road north of Hutton-Le-Hole in North Yorkshire is the C20.
https://www.northyorks.gov.uk/sites/def ... n_2012.pdf

[Steven]

All Class III road information held on the SABRE Wiki can be found by going to the relevant highway authority page, and following the link held there to that authority's Class III subpage.

That's by far the simplest way of looking for the information.

[ravenbluemoon]

On rare occasions the "Find My Street" website will show the road numbers, but will at least show whether it is Class III/C road or not. This only seems to work for England and Wales however.

All Class III road information held on the SABRE Wiki can be found by going to the relevant highway authority page, and following the link held there to that authority's Class III subpage.

That's by far the simplest way of looking for the information.

I was waiting for a "sheesh"

I had already tried that in fact but I know that it doesn't always show the C Numbers as I know the road north of Hutton-Le-Hole in North Yorkshire is the C20.
https://www.northyorks.gov.uk/sites/def ... n_2012.pdf

Keith - you might find this page interesting: North Yorks Class III Roads- if you hover over the road traces on the map (laptop only, I think) you'll see what the numbers are. I've also managed to do the same for the Teesside councils, most of Yorkshire and a swathe down through the Midlands.

[KeithW]

On rare occasions the "Find My Street" website will show the road numbers, but will at least show whether it is Class III/C road or not. This only seems to work for England and Wales however.

All Class III road information held on the SABRE Wiki can be found by going to the relevant highway authority page, and following the link held there to that authority's Class III subpage.

That's by far the simplest way of looking for the information.

I was waiting for a "sheesh"

I had already tried that in fact but I know that it doesn't always show the C Numbers as I know the road north of Hutton-Le-Hole in North Yorkshire is the C20.
https://www.northyorks.gov.uk/sites/def ... n_2012.pdf

Keith - you might find this page interesting: North Yorks Class III Roads- if you hover over the road traces on the map (laptop only, I think) you'll see what the numbers are. I've also managed to do the same for the Teesside councils, most of Yorkshire and a swathe down through the Midlands.

I know that's how I found out

[DanT97]

Would someone please create the Cumnock article? It would be a very good idea to do it. I’ll start it off, but I’ll need help to complete it. Article is here: Cumnock

Also, shouldn’t all roads have numbers? How else is Portree Terrace supposed to be recorded in official documents and roadworks orders?

[Big L]

…shouldn’t all roads have numbers? How else is Portree Terrace supposed to be recorded in official documents and roadworks orders?

Very occasionally you will see signs, usually advance warning of Road closures / roadworks, referencing road numbers starting D or U. A few road signs, and there is a discussion on these boards about it, reference roads with C numbers. Generally, only M, A and B numbers are referenced routinely on signs.

[DanT97]

…shouldn’t all roads have numbers? How else is Portree Terrace supposed to be recorded in official documents and roadworks orders?

Very occasionally you will see signs, usually advance warning of Road closures / roadworks, referencing road numbers starting D or U. A few road signs, and there is a discussion on these boards about it, reference roads with C numbers. Generally, only M, A and B numbers are referenced routinely on signs.

In that case, I would recommend that there be a programme of sending out freedom of information requests to all local authorities, in order to obtain listings of C, D and U roads. It would a good idea to prepare a standard email template that can be sent to all of them. Hopefully, we can get more information this way. After all, the work on C roads thus far is great, but there are gaps to plug in a couple of areas, and I would also like to see similar work being undertaken on D and U roads.

Also, I appreciate the additions to the Cumnock article. They help a lot.

[ravenbluemoon]

In that case, I would recommend that there be a programme of sending out freedom of information requests to all local authorities, in order to obtain listings of C, D and U roads. It would a good idea to prepare a standard email template that can be sent to all of them. Hopefully, we can get more information this way. After all, the work on C roads thus far is great, but there are gaps to plug in a couple of areas, and I would also like to see similar work being undertaken on D and U roads.

The WhatDoTheyKnow website is best for this. Member James Carter did a whole load of them a few years ago - they are linked on the Wiki on the Great C Road Hunt page. I've managed to fill in some of the gaps in Yorkshire and the East Midlands with some new requests this year - some councils didn't provide the numbers and I managed to prise that out of them all so far. I reckon I'll have the whole of the north east and the east midlands nailed down by the end of the year.

There's still plenty of gaps in our coverage - Scotland seems pretty well covered (thanks to RileyRob), but Wales is looking sparse, and there's areas of England that have nothing. Sometimes we have the data (see the wiki page above) and sometimes we don't. You might find the associated forum page useful too as there's a bit of discussion about C Roads we've found, and progress so far.

[DanT97]

In that case, I would recommend that there be a programme of sending out freedom of information requests to all local authorities, in order to obtain listings of C, D and U roads. It would a good idea to prepare a standard email template that can be sent to all of them. Hopefully, we can get more information this way. After all, the work on C roads thus far is great, but there are gaps to plug in a couple of areas, and I would also like to see similar work being undertaken on D and U roads.

The WhatDoTheyKnow website is best for this. Member James Carter did a whole load of them a few years ago - they are linked on the Wiki on the Great C Road Hunt page. I've managed to fill in some of the gaps in Yorkshire and the East Midlands with some new requests this year - some councils didn't provide the numbers and I managed to prise that out of them all so far. I reckon I'll have the whole of the north east and the east midlands nailed down by the end of the year.

There's still plenty of gaps in our coverage - Scotland seems pretty well covered (thanks to RileyRob), but Wales is looking sparse, and there's areas of England that have nothing. Sometimes we have the data (see the wiki page above) and sometimes we don't. You might find the associated forum page useful too as there's a bit of discussion about C Roads we've found, and progress so far.

Once the C road thing is complete, you should turn to D roads and U roads.

[rileyrob]

It's not just D and U roads, pretty much every letter of the alphabet appears to have been used somewhere across the country. Some authorities have two prefix letters - I think Edinburgh were using ZC at one point for instance, and routes that have moved authority can have odd prefixes or suffixes too.

The problem with going further than Class III routes, which are normally numbered with C prefixes, is that every single road in the country has some form of identifier given to it by the local council, and it is very rare that the only identifier is the street name. Some councils are sensible and give a number to long routes, and maybe include some short cul-de-sacs as spurs, others will give a different number to each sector of a route (normally between junctions). I know that a couple of Scottish Authorities have done this for Urban C roads, so presume they have for other routes and I think the Isle of Man have too. We don't have the time or other resources to create a wiki page for all of them - there could be several million in total.
Not only that, but as we are finding with the C roads, the councils aren't always very forthcoming with exactly which route has which number, and can be pretty vague and just say which routes are Class III and maybe which numbers are used, and let us try to piece the two together. In Scotland the only authority that didn't have route lists properly identified on their own websites was Glasgow. I haven't checked recently to see if this has changed, and I know that some of the other authorities have changed the way the data was published, so it is either clearer or less helpful than when we went through and did the wiki pages a few years ago. I haven't got round to updating them yet.

[coneman]

Found it ! U64(w) on page 76 of D&G Council public roads list.

Now something members here might not know about - the (w) after the number.

This goes back to the local government reorganisation in Scotland in 1974 when the three former counties of Dumfriesshire, Kircudbrightshire and Wigtownshire were formed into Dumfries & Galloway Region and then split again into four districts of Annandale & Eskdale, Nithsdale, Stewartry and Wigtown.
The problem then arose about the numbering of the C & U class roads as there was for example now three C1's - Wigtown, Stewartry & Nithsdale all in different locations in the new region so rather than have a wholesale renumbering the roads dept simply put a small case lettter after the District name ie w for roads in Wigtown District , s for Stewartry etc etc so then you had C1w , C1s and C1n - it was the same for U class roads. There was no problem as regards A & B roads as they were numbered nationally.

[DanT97]

It's not just D and U roads, pretty much every letter of the alphabet appears to have been used somewhere across the country. Some authorities have two prefix letters - I think Edinburgh were using ZC at one point for instance, and routes that have moved authority can have odd prefixes or suffixes too.

The problem with going further than Class III routes, which are normally numbered with C prefixes, is that every single road in the country has some form of identifier given to it by the local council, and it is very rare that the only identifier is the street name. Some councils are sensible and give a number to long routes, and maybe include some short cul-de-sacs as spurs, others will give a different number to each sector of a route (normally between junctions). I know that a couple of Scottish Authorities have done this for Urban C roads, so presume they have for other routes and I think the Isle of Man have too. We don't have the time or other resources to create a wiki page for all of them - there could be several million in total.
Not only that, but as we are finding with the C roads, the councils aren't always very forthcoming with exactly which route has which number, and can be pretty vague and just say which routes are Class III and maybe which numbers are used, and let us try to piece the two together. In Scotland the only authority that didn't have route lists properly identified on their own websites was Glasgow. I haven't checked recently to see if this has changed, and I know that some of the other authorities have changed the way the data was published, so it is either clearer or less helpful than when we went through and did the wiki pages a few years ago. I haven't got round to updating them yet.

That’s why you need Freedom of Information requests. Local authorities are required to answer these by law, so they shouldn’t fail to get you your info. There are exemptions to the FOI act, but none of the, should apply to road numbering. If you word your request properly, it should do well. A suggested wording would be this:

“I would like to request a full listing of C, D & U roads in your jurisdiction, and I would like their termini and numbers to be tabulated for easy reading.”

I do believe that D & U roads could be placed on list articles. Taking my local authority as an example, you could have something like “List of U roads in East Ayrshire”. This would contain a table with the road numbers and termini.

Also, Coneman, do you have the number for the Mull of Galloway road? If you do, then let me know. Also, your profile picture isn’t very clear, as I don’t recognise what it means.

[Steven]

Once the C road thing is complete, you should turn to D roads and U roads.

Why don't you do this rather than taking the easy option of telling other people that they have to spend their time doing a huge task? If you think it's of value, then no-one is stopping you from having a go.

We've never bothered with unclassified roads (which these are) as they're, well, unclassified and some authorities number them for their own purposes, including footpaths and bridlepaths, whilst other authorities do not number below Class III. As has been pointed out, the number of unclassified roads is well into the many millions; and we are better off doing things that are more achievable first.

The SABRE Wiki is also not set up to handle unclassified roads, so you'd need to get involved with helping to make sure that it does too.

[ravenbluemoon]

That’s why you need Freedom of Information requests. Local authorities are required to answer these by law, so they shouldn’t fail to get you your info. There are exemptions to the FOI act, but none of the, should apply to road numbering. If you word your request properly, it should do well. A suggested wording would be this:

“I would like to request a full listing of C, D & U roads in your jurisdiction, and I would like their termini and numbers to be tabulated for easy reading.”

Something like the wording in my recent requests, which have had a 10.5*/12 success rate? https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/ ... ng-2333509 - based on the James Carter emails but with more emphasis on wanting C road numbers.

I do believe that D & U roads could be placed on list articles. Taking my local authority as an example, you could have something like “List of U roads in East Ayrshire”. This would contain a table with the road numbers and termini.

If you want to do it, then knock yerself out... for guidance, I've just spent the entire weekend tracing the C roads in County Durham on SABRE Maps. There's about 120 roads I need to create pages for, so that's probably 10 evenings of cut and paste fun. I've completed 3 counties of Yorkshire, Notts, ex-Cleveland, and have started up on Leics, Warks and Lincs. That took 6 months of my spare time - and I reckon I have 1200 pages to create for those last three counties + Durham, so add another 2 months.

Minor roads beyond C are whole new ball game... I mentioned in the C-road thread that there are ca. 12,000 unclassified roads in the Borough of Leeds alone! IIRC they don't have a lettered class in Leeds, but just use the USRN that’s held in the National Street Gazetteer.


*N. Lincs only provided numbers but no routes (so I spent a weekend piecing them together from other sources) and East Yorkshire (legally) refused as they're relaunching their online map soon, so I'm waiting (im)patiently.

[rileyrob]

Scotland will be easier to do as most of the councils have lists published online. This is D&G: https://www.dumgal.gov.uk/media/18023/L ... 5759870000 with around 3200 U roads, and 200 F footpaths.
And here is East Ayrshire: https://www.ayrshireroadsalliance.org/R ... -05-03.pdf with the highest number being the U766. However, as you will see there are a huge number of routes where the route column is marked '-'. This doesn't necessarily mean that the council haven't given it a number, just that they haven't identified it on the list, and the fact that so many of the 766 U numbers are missing would suggest that a lot of the '-' are actually Uxxx. North & South Ayshire have too many distant duplicates to believe that Ayrshire still have one set of U numbers across the county.

Highland Council appear to have 4754 U roads
Aberdeenshire have their data spread across several documents: http://publications.aberdeenshire.gov.u ... blic-roads The Highways Lists appear to give about 6-700 U class routes, but go into the Settlement reports and I spotted a U 1072. There are also lots of apparently un-numbered streets in the towns, and footpaths and lanes, which I think had numbers on previous versions of the lists.

So a snapshot - 4 of Scotland's 32 council areas have yielded around 10,000 'Unclassified' route numbers, but only two council have given fully numbered lists. Across Scotland as a whole there could be 80-100,000 routes to try and find, and the councils will probably not be as helpful as you would expect - in some cases they are not even sure themselves, or the old paper records are not fully digitised.

FOI requests can be refused if they are likely to be too expensive or time consuming, or if the bulk of the data is already in the public domain, just not in the format you want it in. Dundee for instance no longer have a text list, just a map https://www.dundeecity.gov.uk/service-a ... s-map-lopr where USRN is the Unique Street Reference Number; not necessarily a U number, as A, B and C routes also have USRNs.

[KeithW]

If you want to do it, then knock yerself out... for guidance, I've just spent the entire weekend tracing the C roads in County Durham on SABRE Maps. There's about 120 roads I need to create pages for, so that's probably 10 evenings of cut and paste fun. I've completed 3 counties of Yorkshire, Notts, ex-Cleveland, and have started up on Leics, Warks and Lincs. That took 6 months of my spare time - and I reckon I have 1200 pages to create for those last three counties + Durham, so add another 2 months.

Minor roads beyond C are whole new ball game... I mentioned in the C-road thread that there are ca. 12,000 unclassified roads in the Borough of Leeds alone! IIRC they don't have a lettered class in Leeds, but just use the USRN that’s held in the National Street Gazetteer.


*N. Lincs only provided numbers but no routes (so I spent a weekend piecing them together from other sources) and East Yorkshire (legally) refused as they're relaunching their online map soon, so I'm waiting (im)patiently.

Consider the following from the Department For Transport

All roads - 245.7 thousand miles
2.3 thousand miles of motorway
5.3 thousand miles of trunk ‘A’ road
23.8 thousand miles of principal ‘A’ road
18.8 thousand miles of ‘B’ road
195.6 thousand miles of ‘C’ and ‘U’ road

U Roads can be anything from a farm track to a broad surface road through an industrial estate and may vary in length from 100 yards to many miles and many are very likely only listed by the local authority based on the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000 which was required to be published by 2008. There are also of course byways which may be restricted. These lists are maintained by councils, some are available on line but others require a physical visit to the archives held by the county.

Here is the map for Cambridgeshire
https://www.cambridgeshire.gov.uk/resid ... hts-of-way

For North Yorkshire
https://maps.northyorks.gov.uk/connect/ ... _and_About

This believe it or not does not have a road number, Stockton On Tees Borough Council do have a definitive road map but it does not appear to be available on line.
https://www.google.com/maps/@54.5288371 ... &entry=ttu