Wikipedia:WikiProject U.S. Roads/Newsletter/Issues/Volume01/Issue17

Introduction The editors of the newsletter wish our readers and fellow members a safe and happy holiday season and a Happy New Year. In this final issue of our first volume, rains in Washington lead to mass flooding that brings the road network to a standstill, projects are made for Tennessee and Louisiana state highways, and planning begins for an inaugural road meet.
Featured story In this issue Rains in Washington State cause massive road closures By Rschen7754 Flooding near Chehalis During the first few days of this month, a series of storms caused flooding throughout much of Western Washington. Many houses near the towns of Chehalis and Centralia were flooded, with the waters rising over six feet in some locations. The flooding devastated the regional road network and disrupted transportation for several days. Twenty miles of Interstate 5 in Washington were closed from December 4 to December 6 as the freeway was flooded; in some places, the water was ten feet deep. The recommended detour was on Interstate 84, Interstate 82, and Interstate 90, which resulted in a delay of seven hours to travel the extra 440 miles. The freeway would have remained closed for a longer period of time had a nearby dike that water had come over not been breached. There were several other roads that were closed due to the storm. U.S. Route 101 was closed in several locations, and the portion paralleling Hood Canal is still closed, cutting off the main transportation route in that area and forcing drivers to go around the other side of the Olympic Peninsula to reach Port Angeles. Some towns were cut off from the rest of Washington due to the floods, including Aberdeen. In all, 72 sections of road were closed due to the storms and the related flooding and mudslides; all but two of these sections have since reopened barely a week later. Sources: December 2007 Pacific Northwest storms, Interstate 5 in Washington and several WSDOT pages: [1], [2], [3], [4], [5]
State and national updates
Leaderboard In this issue, we introduce a new regular feature for the USRD newsletter, a listing of the top ten projects by Ω. So without further ado, the leaderboard for December 15, 2007: Rank State FA A GA B Start Stub ω Ω 1 (Alaska) 0 0   0 0 18 4 92 4.182 2 New York 0 0 6 138 187 343 2889 4.286 3 North Carolina 0 0 0 10 73 55 597 4.326 4 California 1 1 0 24 171 148 1497 4.339 5 Connecticut 0 0 0 3 61 46 483 4.391 6 Oregon 0 0 0 5 73 70 657 4.439 7 Alabama 0 0 0 0 71 58 574 4.450 8 Oklahoma 0 0 1 21 42 100 730 4.470 9 Kansas 1 0 0 3 15 42 279 4.574 10 New Jersey 1 0 2 28 57 213 1381 4.588 States in parenthesis have assessment statistics but no project. States listed in italics are task forces. Here are the statistics for the national projects. Project FA A GA B Start Stub ω Ω USRD 3 5 21 426 1941 6518 41679 4.676 IH 1 2 7 95 244 234 2447 4.197 USH 0 0 3 56 212 2511 2277 4.362 If your favorite project isn't listed, you can find it at Wikipedia:WikiProject U.S. Roads/Assessment/Subprojects. Congratulations to Alaska, New York, North Carolina, California, Connecticut, Oregon, Alabama, Oklahoma, Kansas, and New Jersey on their achievements! These ten projects are leading the way to USRD's future.	Project reports WP:CASH Currently, there has been a drive to improve California articles. History sections have been added and revised, entire routes (such as 3,4, 7, and I-8) have been improved, and many maps have been added to Southern California routes. CA is 5th in the nation in terms of Wikiwork, which is excellent considering that it includes WP:CACR as well. WP:NYSR All articles within the scope of NYSR were recently reassessed for quality as part of the efforts to improve all B-Class articles, resulting in the demotion of roughly 70 articles by at least one level on the quality scale. To help reduce the now overwhelming number of stubs and starts, an Article Improvement Drive dedicated to NYSR was established. The first collaboration, New York State Route 22, was extremely successful; work continues on a two-article, two-week collaboration dedicated to Interstate 90 in New York and the New York State Thruway as of press time. Two articles, New York State Route 146 and New York State Route 306, were promoted to Good Articles. WP:NJSCR After 6 months from being delisted at Wikipedia:Good articles, New Jersey Route 18 is back to GA status. WP:OKSH Oklahoma articles are slowly but surely being brought up to the B-class standard. Work is progressing county-by-county, with all routes that pass through each county being upgraded to B-class before proceeding to the next. As more of the state is covered, this will become easier and easier due to the spillover between counties. The project is starting with McClain County (ODOT County #44), which currently has 1 GA, 11 B, 2 starts, no stubs, and one as-yet unwritten article. The next county will be Adair County (#1), which has 2 B, 1 start, 1 stub, and one needed article. Thereafter, work will continue in alphabetical order/ascending county number. WP:PASH Pennsylvania route articles are currently in the process of going from stubs to Start-class. Pennsylvania currently has 400 stubs as articles. The project is working on improving these articles to Start-class level. Pennsylvania has 82 Start-class articles and 56 B-class articles. Also, Pennsylvania has 4 GA-class articles (the third most of the subprojects) and 3 A-class articles, the most of all subprojects. Pennsylvania currently does not have any FA-class articles. In other news, JA10 created List of Minor Routes in Pennsylvania in September for state routes that are 1 to 10 miles in length. Quadrant routes are not a part of this list. User:PYLrulz has helped out with the process of creating this list also. WP:WIH Efforts are now underway to clean up Wisconsin highway articles. Articles will be restructured to firmly comply with various USRD policies. For example, Exit lists and Infobox Junction lists are being redone using {{jct}}. Articles will be expanded or combined into a list depending on how much information is available about the routes. The first article to receive an expansion was Interstate 794 which - despite being de-stubbed - still needs further history research and copyediting. Wisconsin has currently 159 stubs. A few articles may be submitted for GA review later next month.
Project news Nominations and votes are needed for January's selected article and selected picture. The creation of new state highway subprojects are strongly discouraged. Instead, consider helping to fix the five projects currently demoted to task forces - Alabama, Louisiana, Nevada, South Carolina, and Utah. The scope of WP:USRD has been changed; see the project page. There are only 29 articles above Good Article status within the scope of WikiProject U.S. Roads, only 0.3% of all assessed articles. Meanwhile, there are about 6500 stubs - almost three-quarters of all assessed articles. Please help improve the articles! The following articles are currently being peer-reviewed at WP:HWY/PR: Interstate 70 in Utah Utah State Route 128 U.S. Route 491 Pennsylvania Route 73 Article Improvement Drive The current U.S. Roads Article Improvement Drive article is Interstate 96. Last collaboration was: Interstate 79. Join the contest to receive a barnstar!	Deletion debates An archive of all previous debates. Closed At Articles for deletion: Interstate 76 in Colorado and Interstate 76 in Nebraska were merged into Interstate 76 (west). Roadgeek was kept with the mandate that it be cleaned up. Bear Valley Road (Mojave Desert region, California) was deleted. Others: County Route 4 (Columbia County, New York) was deleted via proposed deletion. Image:Washington State Route 531 map.png was deleted at WP:IFD. Ongoing Haverford Avenue
Featured member: Lpangelrob Rob (talk) has been a Wikipedia editor since June 1 2004. With over 5,000 edits, he has worked hard to maintain articles in the mid-west area, especially for the Illinois wikiproject. He has recently worked very hard to bring Interstate 355 (currently a FAC) first to GA class then to A-class. Thank you, Lpangelrob, for all of your hard work! Know of an editor who goes the extra mile? Nominate him or her at WP:USRD/NEWS for the next issue. Editors can only be nominated once a year.
News
In 2008, all roads will lead to Chicago! By DanTheMan474 Roadfans, I need your help. Following the success of the first U.S. National Roads Meet in 2006 in Pittsburgh (see http://www.millenniumhwy.net/National_Meet_Events/National_Meet_Events.html for some details and pictures from the gathering), I am already beginning the process of laying the groundwork for the first ever North American Roads Gathering! While there has been many a roads meet in parts of the U.S. and Canada for the last decade or so, along with various Wikipedia editor meet-ups here and there, apart from the Pittsburgh gathering there has never been a dedicated weekend-long event to highlight the many Projects and Roads that help to improve a region's mobility. The 2008 North American Roads Gathering will be taking place in an area that has not yet had any sort of roads gathering: Greater Chicagoland. Many projects have taken place there in the last couple of years: the recently completed $1B Dan Ryan (I-90/94) rebuild; the recently completed I-80/94/294/IL 394 interchange rebuild (in conjunction w/ the new SPUI at US 6/IL 83); the soon-to-be-opened I-355 extension from I-55 south to I-80; plus in nearby Milwaukee, the Marquette interchange (I-43/94/794/US 41) re-build, and much more. A weekend has already been selected for the event: June 13-15, 2008. We would start with lunch on Friday, with a goal of visiting the Newberry Library (http://www.newberry.org), and viewing one of the largest map collections one has ever seen. Between Friday and concluding with lunch on Sunday, we would incorporate a couple of different tours around the region. Also in the evenings, we might plan some side events to check out what Chicago has to offer...Navy Pier, maybe a White Sox game, and much more. If you have never been to a roads gathering, by the way, you will be in for what promises to be a fun time. I would like to get a preliminary idea at this time of who might be interested in participating in the event, along with taking any thoughts or suggestions you may have for the gathering; whether there is something you wanted to know more about on the highways out there, or something in Chicago that you have wanted to do (when it comes to the evening gatherings). Over the next couple of months, I will take a look at the suggestions and we will start to put things into place from there. If you would like to contribute to the planning of the event, or would even like to be directly involved in organizing something as a part of it, please contact me via my Talk Page. Thanks in advance for your input. I hope to see some of you next year for the 2008 North American Roads Meet in the Chicago!	Louisiana and Tennessee projects started; Louisiana demoted By Rschen7754 On October 25, 2007, Wikipedia:WikiProject Louisiana Highways was started. However, the rest of USRD was not aware of the creation of the project until November 10, 2007, when TwinsMetsFan demoted the project to a task force since it was malformed. After a restructuring of the project page, there has been little activity at the Louisiana task force. In late November, a Tennessee project was proposed at WP:USRD/SUB. On December 10, Wikipedia:WikiProject Tennessee State Routes was founded, and has been started with an effective structure. This project holds potential for the months as it has active users. Tthe four other task forces (Alabama, Nevada, South Carolina, and Utah) currently remain mostly inactive, and some of these task forces have been inactive for weeks. However, Utah has seen some activity lately. Sources: WP:USRD/SUB, WP:LASH, WP:TNSH
From the editors Be part of the turnaround... become part of the solution! Become active in highways again. Let's save the articles from being inactive and destroyed. The editors of the newsletter would like to hear from you, the reader. What do you like about the current format? What should be changed? Removed? Added? Your comments are needed. Lastly, remember that this is your newsletter and you can be involved in the creation of the next issue released on January 19. Any and all contributions are welcome. Simply let yourself be known to any of the undersigned, or just start editing!	Contributors to this issue O (editor, distributor) JohnnyAlbert10 (editor) Mitchazenia (editor) Rschen7754 (editor) TwinsMetsFan (editor) DanTheMan474 (contributor) Master son (contributor) NASCAR Fan24 (contributor) Scott5114 (contributor) Son (contributor)

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