Early interstate documents

[Revive 755]

Found a site today that has scans of some of the early interstate documents (excerpts of which I've seen on other websites) but unfortunately in large, usually 20+ MB files:
http://mtcfilehost.net/transportationfortomorrow/final_report/historical_documents.htm

Regarding the Interregional Highways Report
http://mtcfilehost.net/transportationfortomorrow/final_report/pdf/volume_3/historical_documents/05_interregional_highways_1944.pdf (40 MB pdf)

* Page 52/108 has a picture showing a design for an at grade intersection which could be used on lower volume sections of highways.

* On Page 62/108 it recommended removing tolls from the Pennsylvania Turnpike, Merrit and Wilbur Cross Parkways in Connecticut if they were added to the interstate system.

* Page 97/108 recommended included the routes as US Routes.

* Page 98/108 has 20,000 being the daily volume for switching to a six lane urban facility from a four lane urban facility.

[ctsignguy]

Ahhh, if they knew then what we know now.....

Still it is interesting to note that many of these highways are pretty much where Interstates are now....maybe this document was used as a basis for planning such a system a decade later...

[J N Winkler]

Found a site today that has scans of some of the early interstate documents (excerpts of which I've seen on other websites) but unfortunately in large, usually 20+ MB files:
http://mtcfilehost.net/transportationfortomorrow/final_report/historical_documents.htm

Not "unfortunate" at all--it is good to have access to the unabridged documents without having to rely on someone else's eye for significant content.  These primary-source documents are very hard to find (very few government document depositories have them, for example), so it is good to have them online.  Many thanks for sharing this.

[Hot Rod Hootenanny]

Found a site today that has scans of some of the early interstate documents (excerpts of which I've seen on other websites) but unfortunately in large, usually 20+ MB files:
http://mtcfilehost.net/transportationfortomorrow/final_report/historical_documents.htm

Regarding the Interregional Highways Report
http://mtcfilehost.net/transportationfortomorrow/final_report/pdf/volume_3/historical_documents/05_interregional_highways_1944.pdf (40 MB pdf)

* Page 52/108 has a picture showing a design for an at grade intersection which could be used on lower volume sections of highways.

* On Page 62/108 it recommended removing tolls from the Pennsylvania Turnpike, Merrit and Wilbur Cross Parkways in Connecticut if they were added to the interstate system.

* Page 97/108 recommended included the routes as US Routes.

* Page 98/108 has 20,000 being the daily volume for switching to a six lane urban facility from a four lane urban facility.

Are any of those maps different than what I put on Roadfan a decade ago?
http://www.roadfan.com/intreg.html

[J N Winkler]

They are the maps and the accompanying reports--Roadfan has just the maps.

BTW, I wonder if Google Books has Collier-Burns.  It certainly has some old periodic state highway reports, including several from California.

[J N Winkler]

I have now downloaded the historic document PDFs and dumped the raster page images.  The page images are actually of fairly low resolution, though sufficient to allow screen reading of the text on a laptop.  A person wishing to study the graphics closely would actually be better off at Roadfan.com or Froggie's Yellow Book site, since the resolutions available are higher in those places.

The historic documents are presented as annexes to the National Surface Transportation Policy Commission final report.  This is the report which recommended, among other things, an immediate tripling of the fuel tax to meet transportation funding needs already existing and anticipated to arise in the future.  There is an option to download the final report as a single PDF file (140 MB), but this includes just Volumes I and II of three, not Volume III, which contains all the historic documents as well as a number of limited-scope policy studies which the Commission had prepared.

[agentsteel53]

the PDF format remains an unfortunate obscurity of history...

[J N Winkler]

the PDF format remains an unfortunate obscurity of history...

How so?

[agentsteel53]

the PDF format remains an unfortunate obscurity of history...

How so?

just its somewhat limited compatibility with web browsers.  that is a complaint more of the Adobe plugin than the format itself, but I always find myself irritated when

a) Firefox crashes, because I unfortunately have bitten down on a link that leads to a PDF,

b) I cannot use standard Firefox shortcuts when navigating said PDF (basics like CTRL+W for "close window" and CTRL+N for "new window" do not work, as an example),

c) such minor navigation hazards as being significantly more likely to need both horizontal and vertical browsing, as well as intermittent changes to the default zoom level to be able to display correctly

It stems from a parallel evolution of PDF viewers that stretches sufficiently far back to allow it to coexist with browsers despite its inherent insufficiency as a web-based viewing tool.  PDF is the extraordinarily lazy dump of a printed page to the screen format, one that people do when they are unwilling to actually re-format the document to web-based viewing... so they have the crutch of the PDF format to allow them to break every standard of viewing (see: scrolling and zooming every which way).  

the "unfortunate obscurity of history" is the fact that, around 1999, instead of browser manufacturers suddenly enforcing compliance with HTML standards when it came to documents originally manufactured for printing, they allowed this PDF format, which brought in many more bugaboos than it solved, with its parallel implementation.

nowadays the problem isn't quite as bad, as it was with IE 5-6-7 and FFox 2.x (which had an elegant tendency to crash upon attempting to load the PDF environment), but there still is a monster lag, and the navigational hazards I mentioned before are an innate "feature".

the fact that there exists a FFox plugin which simply labels links as "that's a PDF.  Click on it and die" should illustrate the level of the problem.

[J N Winkler]

Thanks for the explanation--I wasn't following you.

I don't object to the PDF standard as a substitute for paper.  I have had so many problems getting PDF viewing plugins and various PDF files to load on browsers that I have disabled the PDF plugin on Firefox (which is the browser I use the most) and I hate to see PDF links for content that could just as easily be in HTML--for example, construction contract advertisements, which are usually short and textual, and are already HTML for about a third of state DOTs.  On the other hand, for a construction plans set which has been scanned from paper or plotted directly from CAD and runs to many hundreds of megabytes, PDF is pretty much the gold standard for online distribution, largely because the PDF specification allows PDF files to serve as containers for diverse types of data and PDF viewers are both available free of charge and installed on computers more or less universally.  There are competing options for this purpose but they suffer defects of usability and accessibility.  CAD files themselves are not browsable and the reference files need to be present and slotted into the correct directory structure in order to obtain a true impression of the design, and while Irfanview is available as a free tool for browsing TIFF and JPEG sheet images, payware image browsers like ACDSee deliver noticeably better screen rendering.

A year ago Caltrans converted completely to PDF for its contract letting materials, which were formerly all in PDF with the exception of the construction plans, which were plotted to TIFF and packed into ZIP files for Web upload.  This prompted me (uncharacteristically) to stick my head above the parapet and ask Caltrans Office Engineer if it might be possible to go back to the TIFF sheet files, as I felt that was a more convenient way to screen construction plans for signing content.  The answer was No.  The functionaries I corresponded with said that while the large contractors never had problems with the TIFF plan sheets, the small contractors all wanted PDF because they already understood it and had viewing tools for it.  They did, however, address my other major concern about the new PDF plans sets, which was the length of time it took for the files to load from disk.  The two key variables involved were whether the title sheet was a raster and whether the PDF file as a whole had layers.  Since Caltrans has been moving to plans sets plotted directly from CAD, raster title sheets are less of a problem, and Caltrans has gotten much better at generating fast-loading layered PDFs.

I have been collecting highway construction plans for ten years now and have a collection of almost 50,000 sign design sheets.  Although more than 10,000 of them are from TxDOT alone and TxDOT has always used TIFF plan sheets packed into self-extracting ZIPs for distribution of letting plans, the remainder would have been impossible without a robust and widely used E-document technology like PDF.  For the Red de carreteras del Estado in Spain, I have almost 4400 sign design sheets, all of which came to me in PDF in the first instance.  For France (central government only) I have over 1000 sign design sheets, all in PDF in the first instance.  For Michigan DOT I have about 3000 sheets, almost all in PDF from MDOT's Eproposals site.

This is not to say that it is somehow acceptable that PDF is used as a lazy alternative to HTML conversion for data that would be more accessible in HTML, but every new technology encapsulates certain potentialities for abuse and these have to be accepted as the tradeoff for using that technology.  Inappropriate use of PDF links instead of straight HTML is just one facet of the problem; because PDF is a container format, conversion from PDF to other formats is often a nightmare, and PDF viewers (Acrobat family, FoxIt, etc.) tend to have screen rendering capabilities inferior to those of specialist single-purpose viewers.  But the price is right.  A PDF for free costs much less than 50c/sheet, is much easier to store, won't burn, and causes far less bloodshed than paper or Mylar.

P.S.  There are recipes all over the Web for disabling browser PDF plugins.  The method I use with Firefox leads to a dialog box being thrown up when I click on a PDF link (or a PHP or ASP link which ultimately results in a PDF file being served), which allows me to choose whether to save the file to disk or open it.  In both cases the file gets processed through Firefox's downloads dialog (so I can monitor download progress instead of staring at a blank screen and wondering if the plugin has crashed) and then loads in Acrobat in its entirety from the %TEMP% folder, so I don't have to wait for PDF pages to be fetched over the Web while I scroll through the file.  With large files I use Internet Download Manager (payware, but I have been a satisfied customer for over 10 years) to manage downloads.

[vdeane]

Adobe Reader is simply a piece of junk.  If not for the security issues, for its bloat.  FoxIt is a LOT faster, and Chrome's PDF viewer is even faster still.  Chrome's also doesn't have the zooming issues since it defaults to 100% rather than whatever the creator decided was a good fit (and almost always isn't).

[hobsini2]

A friend of mine tweeted this link of a US map in National Geographic circa 1966. It still looks cool to see the evolution. http://www.maps.com/map.aspx?pid=15790

[Brendan]

Adobe Reader is simply a piece of junk.  If not for the security issues, for its bloat.  FoxIt is a LOT faster, and Chrome's PDF viewer is even faster still.  Chrome's also doesn't have the zooming issues since it defaults to 100% rather than whatever the creator decided was a good fit (and almost always isn't).

the PDF format remains an unfortunate obscurity of history...

How so?

just its somewhat limited compatibility with web browsers.  that is a complaint more of the Adobe plugin than the format itself, but I always find myself irritated when

a) Firefox crashes, because I unfortunately have bitten down on a link that leads to a PDF,

b) I cannot use standard Firefox shortcuts when navigating said PDF (basics like CTRL+W for "close window" and CTRL+N for "new window" do not work, as an example),

c) such minor navigation hazards as being significantly more likely to need both horizontal and vertical browsing, as well as intermittent changes to the default zoom level to be able to display correctly

I have had the same issues.  As an option, you can disable the adobe plugin in FF.  This way, the PDF will open in the reader application instead of the browser.  http://kb.mozillazine.org/Adobe_Reader#Disabling_the_browser_plugin  Also, you can try Foxit (as deanej pointed out) as the reader instead of Adobe.

Brendan