Just how much of a roadfan are you really?

[NE2]

I'm a roadgeek, not a roadfan. Stop offending me.

I'm mostly interested in history and how things got to how they are now. I'd have a blast spending a day in a park tracing a now-abandoned 19th century turnpike.

As for actual driving, I prefer a slower rural road (e.g. Deen Still Road between Orlando and Lakeland) to a busy freeway, but fuck sprawl.

[Zeffy]

Hmm...

One of my biggest things I love about roads is their design. Something about how roads are designed just intrigues me. When it comes to specific highway systems, my greatest area of interest is in the NJ-NY-CT-PA regions, but I have taken the time to look over the other states as well. I'd be more interested in history if my brain could actually remember it all. Memorizing things is a tall task for me, and even harder thanks to my severe ADD. I love everything about road signs (minus the improper use of Clearview) which is how I got to AARoads in the first place, but as time passed I generally started to care more about other things than the signs themselves. That being said, I still love signs, but I love other aspects (number systems, design, etc) about roads as well.

When it comes to actually driving roads, nothing beats a Sunday drive on a large amount of New Jersey's County Roads (specifically Hunterdon and Somerset Counties) compared to the relatively boring Interstates and the sometimes horrible (*cough* US 206) US Highways in this state. That being said, if I'm driving to somewhere where I want to get there decently quick, I'm never hesitant on Interstates or other freeways. I do appreciate US Highways though because some of them are in fact very scenic and go through cities where Interstates don't.

While I don't own any maps, I have a blast looking at them and following the routings of highways throughout each state.

[Duke87]

Just how much detail I care about varies from state to state. The more familiar I am with an area, the more particularly interested I'm going to be in the history and intricacies of the roads. I know a lot about locally maintained roads in New York City and the town in Connecticut where I grew up, but not really anywhere else. I know a lot about state highways in this area but outside of the northeast my knowledge is more general and less specific.

Meanwhile I will always insist that county routes are weeds and have the same standing as locally maintained roads in terms of my level of interest.

[bing101]

I like the city owned expressways and forest routes

Examples are Capitol expressway,  San Jose, Ca
and Mormon emigrant trail forest route 5 near Pollack pines, California.

[myosh_tino]

I like the city owned expressways and forest routes

Examples are Capitol expressway,  San Jose, Ca

Technically, those expressways are "owned" by Santa Clara County and are patrolled by the California Highway Patrol.

[cpzilliacus]

I enjoy all sorts of roads, but probably freeway-class roads the most.  And I have ever since I watched the Capital Beltway under construction in the early 1960's in the suburbs of Washington, D.C.

I very much like looking at the engineering of large bridges (even though I am not a civil engineer by education), as well as underwater and mountain tunnels and mountain cuts of various kinds, even modest ones that can be found along I-70 in the Flint Hills area of Kansas.

[bing101]

I like the city owned expressways and forest routes

Examples are Capitol expressway,  San Jose, Ca

Technically, those expressways are "owned" by Santa Clara County and are patrolled by the California Highway Patrol.

True Santa Clara County, CA owns The Expressways.


and there is a city owned Expressway in Fairfield ,CA Air base Parkway.

[J N Winkler]

These kinds of things blow up my skirt:

[hotdogPi]

These kinds of things blow up my skirt:

They should have made the sign look like 24% (it looks like about 30%-35% or so). Can someone give the grade of the sign?

[jeffandnicole]

These kinds of things blow up my skirt:

They should have made the sign look like 24% (it looks like about 30%-35% or so). Can someone give the grade of the sign?

The graphic doesn't vary, regardless if the grade is 6%, 24% or 90%.  That's why the number is posted.  Just like a curve sign is a curve sign, not a 'well, it's kinda about this sharp of a curve'. 

[mrsman]

In my case, I'd say that I'm most interested in what happens on streets and local roads because there are so many possibilities as to what can be placed there.  The decisions of whether an intersection should be served with two-way stops, four-ways stops, signals, left arrows, etc.   Whether roads should be narrowed, have bike lanes added, speed bumps, roundabouts.  Whether at-grade intersections should be replaced with an interchange and the type.

I am most interested certainly in areas that I'm familiar with, which essentially is California, and the area between DC and NYC, but I can certainly appreciate other areas of the country, even if I've only visited the area only a few times (Las Vegas, Phoenix, Tucson, Boston, Pittsburgh, Seattle, Chicago, Atlanta, South Florida) or never been there (the rest of the USA and the rest of the world).