This layer represents all the public and many of the private roadways in Massachusetts, including designations for Interstate, U.S. and State routes.

Formerly known as the Massachusetts Highway Department (MHD) Roads, then the Executive Office of Transportation - Office of Transportation Planning (EOT-OTP) Roads, the MassDOT roads layer includes linework from the 1:5,000 road and rail centerlines data that were interpreted as part of the 1990s Black and White Digital Orthophoto project. The Massachusetts Department of Transportation - Office of Transportation Planning, which maintains this layer, continues to add linework from municipal and other sources and update existing linework using the most recent color ortho imagery as a base. The attribute table includes many "road inventory" items maintained in MassDOT's linear referencing system.

The data layer published in November 2018 is based on the MassDOT 2017 year-end Road Inventory layer and results of a 2014-2015 MassDOT-Central Transportation Planning Staff project to conflate street names and other attributes from MassGIS' "base streets" to the MassDOT Road Inventory linework. The base streets are continually maintained by MassGIS as part of the NextGen 911 and Master Address Database projects. MassGIS staff reviewed the conflated layer and added many base street arcs digitized after the completion of the conflation work. MassGIS added several fields to support legacy symbology and labeling. Other edits included modifying some linework in areas of recent construction and roadway reconfiguration to align to 2017-2018 Google ortho imagery, and making minor fixes to attributes and linework.

MassGIS made additional edits in 2021 and May 2022.

In ArcSDE this layer is named EOTROADS_ARC.

From this data layer MassGIS extracted the Major Roads and Major Highway Routes layers.