Weird, Contridictory, or what?

[Riverside Frwy]

I love highways, but equally love transit.

Go on places like the Skyscrapercity forum, and every once in the while you see car vs transit arguments, because you have people who frequent the Urban Transport Transit Forum colliding with the people who frequent the Highways and Autobahn forums.

I've also noticed some anti-transit posts on these boards. While I think highways are definitely under-funded in America, I also think highways get an unfair percentage of transportation funding. Instead of seeing a useless HOV lane lane that will do nothing to stop the congestion being added to the 405, I would have thought that money would have been better spent getting the Westside Subway to Santa Monica.

I get as much thrill as seeing a road sign or driving a new highway, as seeing and riding a new train or bus.

I love aircraft, highways, trains, and buses(I'm not much a fan of sea ships) and I think each form of transportation has their place.

This post will probably cause some to lose respect for me on this forum, but it was bothering me for the most part.

Am I just weird being into all sorts of forms of transportation?

[NE2]

Not weird. Being interested in roads, being interested in driving, and supporting highways are all different things. Not all railfans think we should subsidize passenger trains, and there's certainly a lot of argument on whether public-private partnerships that improve freight lines to take trucks off the highways are good.

Personally I think government subsidies are good for both roads and transit, and will use transit over driving even if it's slightly slower (because I'm an environmentally conscious douchebag who takes the time to turn off the lights when I leave a room).

[J N Winkler]

I like other modes of transport, but I haven't tried to get into them as systematically as I have gotten into roads.  I like travelling by rail, for example, but I have never been a trainspotter, nor have I spent a considerable amount of time photographing carriage markings.  In general I think it is at least an order of magnitude harder to be a railgeek's railgeek than it is to be a roadgeek's roadgeek.  With the roads, at least in the USA, you are usually dealing with civil engineering only, and you don't usually need to think past a fairly small collection of unitary public-sector agencies, most of which were organized well after the primacy of scientific management.  With railways you have not just civil, but also mechanical and electrical engineering (as well as some aeronautical engineering in the case of high-speed rail).  The business history of railways in general is also highly complex, with a multitude not just of joint-stock companies, but also rulebooks for chartering them and granting them powers to build and operate, as well as a mixture of public and private provision almost from the very beginning.  The accounting standards involved are complicated and have changed considerably in time.  This does not even include the rolling stock, which itself adds a whole other dimension of complexity.

[corco]

Eh, to each his own. When I started being an active roadgeek, I was doing it for the signs and the roads. Now, I do it just as much because I have a huge crush on Small Town America and rural landscapes as I do it for the roads.

Trains I never got into- probably because I haven't been exposed to them and haven't made effort to be exposed to them, but I imagine I'd be a big aviation fan if it weren't for accessibility/time constraints (it's easy to take a Sunday drive- a Sunday flight is a bit more expensive) and the fact that I find driving to be an inherently better form of transportation. The logistical/routing problems in aviation really appeal to my inner nerd though.

I suspect every single person on this forum has slightly different reasons why they love roads and that's a good thing. If we all looked at things exactly the same, this forum would be really boring.

[Riverside Frwy]

Well myself is the only person I've seen that can have a conversation about Highway standards and the MUTCD with a Civil Engineer from Caltrans and tell you how to get anywhere by road, but at the same time be able tell someone how to get anywhere by transit, know train and bus schedules by heart, and tell you that my favorite bus model is a NABI 40-LFW with a Detroit Diesel Series 50.

[english si]

I like travelling by rail, for example, but I have never been a trainspotter, nor have I spent a considerable amount of time photographing carriage markings.

But in the same way, are you a car spotter, or someone who photos licence plates?

There's more to railfanning than trains (for instance I like fantasy/future/old plans and the way the network(s) fit(s) together and works - I'm similar in my roadgeekery, but I'm more rounded when it comes to roads).

I have little care for buses as an enthusiasm - their routes have some interest to me, I guess, but not much. The actual vehicles, ditto bikes, cars, vans, trucks, etc I don't really care much about at all. Trains I do have some interest and knowledge, but it's limited mostly to trains used by London Underground.

[Duke87]

You're not alone. I'm into trains as well and there are definitely a few other people here who can say the same.

[J N Winkler]

I like travelling by rail, for example, but I have never been a trainspotter, nor have I spent a considerable amount of time photographing carriage markings.

But in the same way, are you a car spotter, or someone who photos licence plates?

Not really, but I have saved old license plates, and long ago when I was less interested in highway infrastructure than I am now, I was a "car guy."  There is a pronounced American bias in my car knowledge, however.  Even now I feel comfortable with US car models back to the mid-1970's but in Europe I basically know just enough to distinguish "common" from "rare" for current models, and to avoid the solecisms of confusing a DS with a CV2 or a Mini with a Morris Minor.

There's more to railfanning than trains (for instance I like fantasy/future/old plans and the way the network(s) fit(s) together and works - I'm similar in my roadgeekery, but I'm more rounded when it comes to roads).

I tend to gravitate toward infrastructure, but I have never felt comfortable ignoring rolling stock because the two are far more interdependent on railways than is the case for roads and the vehicles that operate on them.  Also, because of my background as an economic historian, I tend to look at infrastructure in general and ask, "Does it pay?"  In the case of railways this requires a more fine-grained look at the type, frequency, and economic capacity of the services that are operated on the infrastructure.  The general principle of access means that the road system provides a door-to-door service, no matter how underdeveloped it is, so in comparison valuing a highway investment is a much more conceptually straightforward process of aggregating the time savings per vehicle and comparing that to the cost of building and maintaining the highway.

I have little care for buses as an enthusiasm - their routes have some interest to me, I guess, but not much. The actual vehicles, ditto bikes, cars, vans, trucks, etc I don't really care much about at all. Trains I do have some interest and knowledge, but it's limited mostly to trains used by London Underground.

Personally, I detest buses.  I regard them as last-resort transport because they don't allow the same control over timing in urban areas as a bicycle, and they are inherently less comfortable than trains.  But as an economic historian I realize that buses have to be considered as one way of using the road system to produce transport services.  In Britain in particular, the frameworks that developed for taxing and regulating freight and passenger transport on the roads played a role in defining the types of highway infrastructure expansion that were provided and how they were paid for.  In the American context commercial road transportation and road expansion can usually be considered separately (to a good approximation) because the private motorist has paid the lion's share of the taxes, hypothecation has meant the majority of those taxes have gone to roads used by the private motorist, and highway administration in the US has been far more focused on capital construction because the American road system was far less developed at the beginning of the twentieth century than was the case in industrialized countries in western Europe.

[NE2]

I like travelling by rail, for example, but I have never been a trainspotter, nor have I spent a considerable amount of time photographing carriage markings.

Same here, yet I'd still call myself a railfan, as I have done a bunch of amateur research into railroad history.

[huskeroadgeek]

I like certain aspects of rail, but I wouldn't call myself a railfan. I'm interested more in where trains go-not the trains themselves. When I cross a major rail line, I like to know where the line goes. I've never taken an intercity train trip, and one reason why is because it's hard to know where you're at all the time when you're traveling by train. The thing I like most about roads are reading the signs and experiencing the towns and cities that a road goes through. Since there are almost no signs along railroads, save for one sign in most cities indicating the name of the city you are passing through, and the area around railroads in most cities is not very aesthetically pleasing, it's not the best way to experience the places they pass through. Also, there are no state or county line markers, another thing which I would miss. I would like though to take a long train trip sometime for the experience, and there are areas(particularly in the Rockies) that Amtrak passes through that are not easily reachable by road, so it would be a different experience than traveling through by road.

I do find myself a little more interested in local rail in some of the larger cities, especially the ones with long histories like New York and Chicago. There are websites that talk about the lines and their history with pages on each station which I find very interesting.

Somebody else mentioned buses and not liking them-I actually like buses. In fact, traveling by bus is my favorite way to travel-not so much as a means of mass transit(although I don't mind them), but for intercity travel.

[cjk374]

I've been railfanning for a very long time...and I've been working for a railroad the last 9 years.  I always tell people that I'm getting paid to play.     I've always enjoyed the history, rolling stock, abandoned rights-of-way, and lots of other aspects of railroading.

I also enjoy highways, the towns they pass thru, and the scenery in between.  I love going places and traveling roads I've never seen before (next week for example:  I-59 from Slidell to Meridian, then US 45 from Meridian to Tupelo, MS).  It hasn't been until I joined this forum a year or two ago that I found out others enjoyed roads as much as I.  I had never even heard of "conquering counties" or "clinching highways" either...but it gave me more to enjoy about this hobby.

A day that goes by without learning something new is a day wasted.

[Riverside Frwy]

Yea, there is importance in separating the vehicles from infrastructure.

I love Highways, signs, and traffic signals but I have absolute no interest in cars. I love mass transit buses, but don't really care for intercity buses. I like both rail and rolling stock, though I'm a mass transit person(for example I love subway systems, their stations, rolling stock and I have a weakness for light rail, its rolling stock, and overhead catenary systems in general) with some commuter train thrown in. Intercity I don't really care for, and I hate freight trains. I love aircraft and don't really care for the airports themselves.

[Kacie Jane]

I am definitely a transit-geek as well as a roadgeek.  (I don't see it as contradictory, mainly because I don't really care for the politics of it one way or the other.  They both need funding, and hopefully not at the cost of each other.)

I think mainly it comes from being a map-geek, and whether the lines show roads, bus lines, rapid transit, or intercity trains; whether the numbers are in interstate shields or the colored bullets the NYC Subway uses, doesn't make much difference to me, they're all appealing.