Talk:Interstate 94 in Indiana

Exit list and sections
The subsections "Borman Expressway" and "Gary to Michigan City" are not required, but on Interstate 90 in Illinois they are used to make the exit list more legible and easier to comprehend. &mdash; Rob (  talk  ) 18:27, 14 August 2007 (UTC)

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Proposed merge with Borman Expressway
I would like to propose merging Borman Expressway into this article. All of the expressway is part of I-94, so it doesn't make any sense here to have three articles (US 6 covers most of the Borman also) to cover the same stretch of road. The Borman Expressway article is currently a GA, but probably would not pass a GAR with the small route description section.--Detcin (talk) 19:18, 19 November 2013 (UTC)
 * Support, as it just makes sense. Yes, we lose a GA, but in the end the good stuff in the Borman gets merged with the good stuff already here, and the good stuff to come, to make a great article.  Imzadi 1979  →   23:13, 19 November 2013 (UTC)
 * Support - Merger makes sense.  Dough 48  72  05:40, 24 January 2014 (UTC)
 * Support  V C  03:01, 19 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Support because the Borman Expressway, which has a relatively short article, is entirely a part of I-94. Two things, though, it is a GA, and it also carries I-80, so these will need to be fixed. Epicgenius (talk) 20:13, 18 November 2014 (UTC)
 * I-80 isn't an issue. That Interstate does not run independently in the state of Indiana: it either follows the Borman (I-94) or the Indiana Toll Road (I-90), so Interstate 80 in Indiana is a set index article pointing readers to either of the other articles.  Imzadi 1979  →   23:14, 18 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Thanks for clarifying, Imzadi1979. Now that I think about it, the Indiana Toll Road is entirely concurrent with I-90 in Indiana and vice versa, but there are no problems with the mentions of I-80 there. Now all we have to do is to find out how to merge this GA without there being major problems in the list of GAs or in other places. Epicgenius (talk) 23:31, 18 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Past precedent is pretty clear. If merged out of existence as a stand-alone article (in other words, it's converted to a redirect), then the article has to be delisted as a GA. This is what happened when Interstate 8 in Arizona was merged into Interstate 8. If, at a later time, the target article is improved, it can be nominated on its own for GA, just like Interstate 8 was.  Imzadi 1979  →   23:41, 18 November 2014 (UTC)
 * I see. Thank you. Epicgenius (talk) 23:51, 18 November 2014 (UTC)

Multi-vehicle accidents
Wikipedia is not a newspaper. These sorts of crashes happen every year or so along I-94 between Chicago and Kalamazoo. The freeway is heavily with Chicago–Detroit traffic, the Interstate is fairly close to Lake Michigan so it gets white-out conditions caused by lake-effect snow, and yet there is no lasting impact related to these individual accidents.

That is not to say that this event is not tragic. However, our policies on article content require that information be placed into context. In a couple of days when this accident falls out of the national news, it will be undue weight. There is no other historical content about the development of I-94 in the state of Indiana. A single accident, when there have been several in the decades since I-94 was built, and there will be many more in the future. Unless this accident prompts design changes, it's not notable.  Imzadi 1979  →   05:46, 24 January 2014 (UTC)
 * Exactly; I removed the section (again) before I noticed this posting. --Rschen7754 06:28, 24 January 2014 (UTC)
 * Coincidentally I just updated Multiple-vehicle collision with the same information. Of note, though, is that the number of vehicles after revisions is approaching 50, which is above the minimum of 40 vehicles in the table in that article. I'm making a big assumption that that's a parameter, but it seems reasonable (I'll ask on that talk page after this), which means that by that standard the wreck would be notable from NPOV and therefore circumvent NOTNEWS, at least in a truncated form, such as not being its own section. Mapsax (talk) 14:25, 24 January 2014 (UTC)
 * While I understand both sides of this discussion, I can't see this as relevant to the I-94 article. We simply cannot list every multi-car or fatal car accident that happens on every road.  If we did, road articles would be nothing but accident listings.  Here are a couple instances when we should mention accidents. 1) Have large accidents happened in the same spot under the same conditions?  If this accident were the fifth multi-car accident to happen in that exact location after a winter storm, sure, they should all probably be mentioned.  2) Was the road damaged as a result of the accident?  If a gasoline tanker hits a bridge and its haul ignites and destroys the bridge, yeah, we should mention that.  But if the carnage is cleaned up and the road resumes normal operations, it's probably not notable long-term.  Like Imzadi said, it's tragic but our policies require context. –Fredddie™ 17:14, 12 February 2014 (UTC)
 * My rationalization is quantity. Fifty-vehicle pile-ups will always be notable, unless, say, by chance, 100-vehicle pile-ups become commonplace. Therefore by extension the highways on which these large pile-ups happen should include a mention of them, if minimal, such as my pared-down version. Looking at the table that I referenced, there really aren't that many, lending more credence that they're notable, because they're rare, incomplete information relevant to table notwithstanding.
 * As an aside, your point about frequency may come into play here because I-94 there is known locally for bad driving conditions due to lake-effect streamers traversing the length of Lake Michigan occuring there most winters. However, I can't recall an accident quite as large as the one in January happening there in the past so there'd be nothing sourced at this point. Mapsax (talk) 17:26, 12 February 2014 (UTC)
 * This is good. Mentioning lake-effect snow gives us the context that was missing.  If we find a few more big accidents, we could say that I-94 is affected by lake-effect snow and give a handful of examples.  Otherwise the January pileup looks like an isolated incident. –Fredddie™ 17:36, 12 February 2014 (UTC)
 * I'm glad that you agree with the microclimate angle, and I'm happy to have been of assistance, but I still feel that the accident could stand on its own. Let me put it this way: The largest pile-up in the history of motorized vehicles, whatever it may be, should be mentioned somewhere on WP, at least in the article of the highway on which it happened, if not in its own article. Someone slipping on the pavement and ending up in the ditch should not. There's a line in there somewhere. I feel that the January accident falls on the side of the line of being noted, if barely. Let me reiterate, though, that, no matter what the outcome, it should be secondary to the details of the highway itself (construction timeline, etc.). That's why I threw in the OR line above it, for balance, since I recall some of the history but don't have the relevant resources at hand to expand, hence the section template. Mapsax (talk) 17:50, 12 February 2014 (UTC)
 * If you look at the multiple-vehicle collisions list, you'll see there are some articles for crashes that occurred in the UK. I haven't looked at them yet to see if they're worth copying, I just hovered over the link to see if they were redirects; they're not. –Fredddie™ 01:06, 14 February 2014 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure how those relate to the I-94 pileup, since that's probably not notable enough to have its own article (though incidentally it seems more notable than some of the UK examples which do). Mentions of the UK pileups on the respective highway article pages could simply be under "See also", without disruption to the article text. Were you proposing to create an article for the January pileup? That would seem counter to your position above. Mapsax (talk) 17:29, 14 February 2014 (UTC)

Let's assume there's a pattern of these crashes. We would need a source that discusses the fact there is a pattern to them. In that case, we have a very valid topic for inclusion in the article. We shouldn't fashion this pattern out of individual sources on separate accidents if none of those sources discuss the others.

Otherwise, we need some historical significance, to the roadway, to include individual crashes. Are the powers that be looking to change the layout of I-94 because of this recent crash? Was someone famous killed in it? Is signage going to be changed as a result of the crash? Are any changes coming to motor vehicle laws as a result of this crash? If none of these questions have a yes answer, there is no historical significance, and the event can be dropped. International news coverage that lasted a day or so is not historical significance. In this day of the 24-hour news cycle and global news on the Internet, making the news in other countries on a single day doesn't evidence notability.  Imzadi 1979  →   03:51, 18 February 2014 (UTC)
 * In short, I believe this is too limiting. I'm restarting this discussion at USRD because it's drifting a bit from the particular highway. Mapsax (talk) 02:24, 19 February 2014 (UTC)

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"Cornfield Roadblock"
I've been trying to find a RS for the term "Cornfield Roadblock" which until just now I had only seen at the Michigan Highways website (M-239 entry) and in related discussions. A search of the archive of a local newspaper from 1963 to 1971, the latter being the year that I-94 was opened into Michigan, turned up nothing, including in the article announcing the opening. A subsequent search including the archive of that newspaper's successor did turn up an article which used it; however, it's dated November 14, 2010, well after the Michigan Highways website had been put online, so it might be a case of WP:CIRCULAR (the 2010 article cites only the Michigan DOT but it sure does read like the I-94 entry at Michigan Highways, as does the main article from the same day which the other one supplements). Use the 2010 article as a RS or delete the term? N.B. Older versions of the I-94 entry at Michigan Highways also used the term (example) but the current extensively-rewritten one does not. Mapsax (talk) 19:09, 15 February 2019 (UTC)