AARoads:Rockland County Scenario

Rockland County Scenario
A subpage for the AARoads project

The Rockland County Scenario (RCS) is the traditional name for a method in use by the AARoads Wiki to handle coverage of short, low-importance, or otherwise minor routes. In the Rockland County Scenario, each article is merged to a single page, which is called an RCS list or listicle (the latter term is probably easier for new users to understand). Each highway is given its own section of the page, and each uses an instance of {{infobox road small}} to display the most vital statistics. The resulting page is then normally assessed as List-class. Usually it is desirable for the redirects to point directly to applicable section by the use of an anchor link.

In the case of applying, or initiating, the RCS to a very large route system, it may be necessary to split the listicle across several pages. This is normally done by exploiting some trait of the system, especially if the designations are issued by zones. Otherwise, the split may occur by arbitrary number ranges (e.g. 1–20, 21–40, etc.). The List of Texas farm-to-market roads is a good example of the result of initiating the Rockland County Scenario on a large route system.

The Rockland County Scenario is flexible enough to allow for expansion of the route articles on a case-by-case basis. If an editor has invested their life's work in improving a bannered route article, that article can be left independent, with a summary written in the list and a hatnote linking to it. The same thing can be done if a section gets expanded to the point that it threatens to overwhelm the listicle, or if research reveals enough information to make a few standalone articles on a particular batch of highways, but not all of them.

The Rockland County Scenario is most often used to deal with county route articles. However, with some creativity, it can be applied to any number of things, including bannered routes, spur routes, secondary routes, etc.

The name "Rockland County Scenario" is derived from the county route system of Rockland County, New York, which previously used the Scenario. The term "Rockland County Scenario" and the acronym "RCS" caught on as a way to refer to the trappings of such a system in IRC thereafter. Rockland County was not the first application of such a system, however; Michigan's County-Designated Highway system used it years prior to that, and bannered route lists like Special routes of U.S. Route 81 have existed prior to the RCS-ifying of Rockland County.

Examples of the Rockland County Scenario

• List of state highways in Maryland shorter than one mile: Maryland has hundreds of very short, unsigned highways that act as service roads, connectors, or sections of old alignment of more significant highways. Many of the highways have the same numbers with sections differentiated with suffixes. Most of these highways have not much more information available than where they go. All of those highways are put into a list with the criterion being the highway is shorter than one mile (1.6 km). Several highways have enough information available, such as several sentences of History, to warrant their own articles. Those highways are summarized in the list and a hatnote is provided in their portions of the list to the main article.
• Special routes of U.S. Route 13: List of all current and former special routes associated with U.S. Route 13, such as alternate, bypass, and business routes. This type of list should be used to list special routes for a specific U.S. Highway unless there are few enough to be presented in the main article, as is the case with U.S. Route 113. In addition, special routes with enough information may be split out from the list.
• Allegheny County belt system: Lists a system of color-coded beltways following surface roads around Pittsburgh.
• List of county routes in Rockland County, New York (1–38): The origin of the term RCS, lists county routes in Rockland County within the given number range. (Note: Rockland County's "RCS" lists have since been redirected to a standard USRD route list table, but this old diff illustrates what it looked like.)
• List of Saskatchewan municipal roads (600–699) and List of Saskatchewan municipal roads (700–799)