European collections

[Chris]

I have my own Flickr account totalling about 12,000 pictures at the moment from mainly western Europe (excluding the Netherlands).

http://www.flickr.com/photos/chriszwolle/collections/

Each set includes one route. I skipped the Netherlands since many Dutch roadgeeks already photographed every freeway sign, so I decided to make youtube movies. http://youtube.com/user/aswchris

So far I have;

Sweden 1 set
Denmark 10 sets
Andorra 1 set
Spain 5 sets
France 23 sets
Luxembourg 4 sets
Belgium 12 sets
Germany 27 sets

enjoy! 

[agentsteel53]

Denmark uses a lot of white/red guide signs - is that just because of the national colors, or are those in some way special and needing of red?

[Chris]

Freeways: green signage
other roads: mostly red/white, but sometimes on blue on more important roads.

The red letters on white signs is quite uncommon in Europe, I can't remember any other country that signs that way.

[austrini]

I had been working on Europe.aaroads.com
I would love it if you would ever consider contributing

I cant really add anything more as I do not have the airfare money to go back anytime soon

dank u wel
Justin

[Chris]

I would be honored if I could contribute

[austrini]

That wegenforum.nl shirt on your blog is really awesome, btw.

I really liked the freeways of Rotterdam, but I never made it north of Den Haag... so maybe Amsterdam's are really great too. I liked Rotterdam a lot better than any of the other European cities I visited, likely because it was dirty and I like dirty cities much better than spotless ones. A good friend of mine is Flemish (he lives here but he's from Brugge) and I made him drive me all around Rotterdam so I could see the motorways.

If you'd like to contribute, i'll message you when I find my Europe road stuff.

[Chris]

I did a small roadtrip of just over 200 miles saturday to the north of the Netherlands.

You can find the sets, totalling 552 pictures here on Flickr.

Examples:

[ctsignguy]

Nice piccys, but incredibly dumb question...

Next to the last piccy, i see what i guess are A, E and N routes...am i right or what do the letters stand for?

[yanksfan6129]

"E" routes are European Cross-Continental Routes as defined by the EU

[Chris]

E-routes are similar to the I-numbers in the U.S., but hardly used in practice in Europe. In my opinion, they should be removed from the signs. However, some countries have E-numbers only (Denmark, Belgium, Sweden, Finland, Norway) for their freeways.

A-routes are "autosnelwegen" (that's plural), meaning freeways. The A-prefix is pretty common throughout Europe, although D and M are also used, depending on the language of a country.

N-routes are National Roads. Nx/Nxx numbers are owned by the state government, Nxxx numbers are owned by the respective provinces. They are similar to the B-roads in Germany or the RN roads in France. I have to note nearly all N-routes follow old trails, and are underdeveloped in road design and mostly in no way an alternative for the freeways.

[Chris]

I did an 685 mile or 1100 kilometer  5-country roadtrip during the easter long weekend. I'm not gonna post all 950 pictures here, but I'll give some links, in the order of my route. Every link links to a set of photos on Flickr.

Germany:
A59 Duisburg - Düsseldorf - Köln - Bonn

B9 Bonn - Koblenz - Bingen

A60 Bingen - Mainz

A63 Mainz - Kaiserslautern

A6 Kaiserslautern - Saarbrücken (French border)

France:

A320 German border - Forbach - St. Avold

A4 St. Avold - Metz

A31 Metz - Luxembourg border

Luxembourg:

A3 French border - Luxembourg-city

A6 Luxembourg-city - Belgian border

Belgium:

N4 Arlon - Marche

N63 Marche - Liège

And I made 9 videos. You can visit them on my youtube page, some of you might already have seen them.
Youtube.com/aswchris

[Chris]

I did another roadtrip on Friday, by visiting the Ruhr area.

Although the "Ruhr area" may not sound very well-known to Americans, it is one of the biggest urban agglomerations of Europe, comparable in size to Chicagoland. The Ruhr area is a polycentric urban area with no single city dominating. The whole Rhine-Ruhr agglomeration contains over 10 million people. The Ruhr used to be dominated by heavy industries, and is still one of the largest industrial areas in the world.

I did this trip to visit some "hidden" expressways, there are a lot of expressways in Germany (Gelbe Autobahn, Yellow freeway) that are not signed as Autobahns, but are freeway-grade roads, they can be numbered as B-roads (federal highways) or L and K-roads, those roadnumbers are not signed.

A43 Autobahn: Münster - Wuppertal

A535 Autobahn: Wuppertal - Essen

B227 expressway: Velbert - Essen

L74 expressway: Wuppertal - Solingen

L141n expressway: Solingen

L418 expressway: Wuppertal (eastbound)

L418 expressway: Wuppertal (westbound)

[austrini]

ooh I have always wanted to see the Ruhr area. I think it is the third largest urban area in Europe.... top 5 i'm sure.