This datalayer is a polyline coverage displaying major roads throughout Massachusetts. This layer was derived from the Massachusetts Electronic Atlas (MEA) which was a collaborative project to provides access, via the Internet, to data about the Commonwealth, its thirteen regional planning agency districts and 351 cities and towns. This dataset is now only available via The Harvard Geospatial Library. The data here were originally produced by MassGIS. MassGIS has defined major roads as roads that are part of the INTERSTATE, US, or STATE highway systems. The datalayer, called MAJ_RD, contains approximately 64,000 vertices, 1,900 arcs, and 1500 pieces of annotation. MassGIS is maintaining the original datalayer as described on their website: 'A datalayer notebook is being maintained by the Mass GIS. Any updates or corrections sent to Mass GIS will be recorded, and datalayer modifications will be made as required. A major update by the Massachusetts Highway Department and Central Transportation Planning Staff is currently underway. The coding will include road width, vehicle miles, pavement condition and other road attributes.'
