GRLevelX Road Shape Files

First off, thanks to Taylor Wright for tipping me off about these new Shapefiles! I’ve been using RedTeamWx Shapefiles for a long time. They are really great, honestly, all organized neatly by state. But recently when I learned of Shapefiles from Iowa State, that were about 5 years newer (2015 vs 2010), so I wanted to try them out.

Be sure to check out RedTeamWx anyways for their other cool Placefiles! I use a lot of their stuff.

Anyways, these new roads are highly detailed and the style file they include delineates road size very well with different colors…

1. Primary 4-lane Roads With Limited Access
2. Primary 4-lane Roads Without Limited Access
3. Primary 2-lane Roads (usually Federal Highways)
4. Secondary Roads (usually State Highways)
5. Tertiary Roads (usually County or Local Highways)
6. Local Roads (usually city streets)

The “down side” is that they are organized by WFO Radar Site, not by state (thus OUN is in here as TLX, etc). But this can be an upside because loading them in takes less time (less CPU needed), you just may have to do more of them.

Links:

Here is the link to the shapefiles

Here is a link to the style file

You will need to download each radar site that you want to be able to import. Also, I like to do this now, so that I am not up in Wyoming one day realizing I didn’t download something and there is no data to do so 🙂

Now, one thing I really like is being able to mouseover a road and see the readout of the road name at the bottom left. Then I can call it out to others etc. Out of the box, the style file that is included with these shape files did not have that, but I made one minor mod to include it.. See below

The image below is the output of the style file. I made one mod, which is highlighted in the code and is here below.

Status: name ref type\

After that, my road name/info began showing up. You could also easily modify the RGB colors for any of the roads to your liking too, but I was happy out of the box.

Enjoy and share with others!