Signed highways with no known photos

[TBKS1]

This is probably a very bizarre thought that I had, but I thought it would be an interesting idea to bring up to this board.

On January 3rd, 2021, I went to Woodruff County and followed along AR 33 south of Augusta to AR 38. There's three highways that the route intersects three signed highways, AR 339, AR 260 and AR 262. It's possible that a picture of AR 339 already exists due to it being entirely within the city limits of Augusta (and it's just right off of US 64 too), but I have looked very far and wide and have literally never come across a picture of AR 260 or AR 262 prior to the pictures I took of the routes myself. Both routes are very obscure, averaging probably around 100 vehicles per day. The section of AR 33 between AR 38 and Augusta isn't traveled on much either.



That does make me wonder though, are there any highways that almost certainly have no photos taken of them? It's not exactly an easy question to ask given that some people (myself included) don't have our photo logs public. I do have a spreadsheet of every signed highway I have a picture of, which I can go ahead and link here. Another thing is that Google Street View imagery probably already exists of some of these routes, but for all intensive purposes it would be better to look at actual pictures taken by real people rather than a spinning camera. A couple of routes I've personally never seen photos for include AR 188 north of Mount Ida, as well as AR 346 and 347 located on AR 84 between Bismarck and Amity in Hot Spring county.

Not sure what other examples exist out there, probably quite a lot given that there's a lot of obscure state highways that can be inconvenient to access normally. For all intensive purposes, I would exclude county roads and Virginia secondary roads due to the sheer amount of them.

[Rothman]

KY has a ton, I'm sure, if we're not counting DOT photologs.

[formulanone]

Travel Mapping lets you know how many other fellow users have used the route (or even a segment of it) which is a starting point. But that's out of approximately 300 users, which would cover a decent number of us in the hobby, but a flyspeck in the grand scheme of things. From there, you could probably average that about half of the TM members take route photos. If a non-roadgeek is going to take photos of routes/shields, it's going to be for a very specific purpose (DOTs, press, engineering), with greater concentrations around larger cities, and some end points of significant routes.

While there's a number of specialized websites focusing on an individual state, I don't think every state is represented, so that's where to start. I'd guess that a route which doesn't directly connect two cities would be great candidates for "missing" photos, and those with no posted Street View images. After that, individual road articles on Wikipedia.

[vdeane]

Of course, TM isn't perfect.  There's a segment of Québec where I'm shown as the only traveler on the route, despite the fact that I clinched that section during a roadmeet and there was at least one other TM user in the car.

[Max Rockatansky]

There wasn't any (GSV and other) for the balance of Tulare County Route J37 north of the North Fork Tule River until I took them. 

[TBKS1]

KY has a ton, I'm sure, if we're not counting DOT photologs.

I forgot that exists. Yeah for all intensive purposes we could probably exclude them.

Travel Mapping lets you know how many other fellow users have used the route (or even a segment of it) which is a starting point. But that's out of approximately 300 users, which would cover a decent number of us in the hobby, but a flyspeck in the grand scheme of things. From there, you could probably average that about half of the TM members take route photos. If a non-roadgeek is going to take photos of routes/shields, it's going to be for a very specific purpose (DOTs, press, engineering), with greater concentrations around larger cities, and some end points of significant routes.

While there's a number of specialized websites focusing on an individual state, I don't think every state is represented, so that's where to start. I'd guess that a route which doesn't directly connect two cities would be great candidates for "missing" photos, and those with no posted Street View images. After that, individual road articles on Wikipedia.

Yeah I'd say this is a great way to find candidates and just really obscure highways in general with barely any traffic. Especially with Arkansas, there's a lot of really short spur routes that are only a few miles long (if not even shorter) that mostly just go to parks and recreational areas. Some of those are connected to routes that hardly anybody travels on to begin with. The other thing too is that many state highways in Arkansas don't have Wikipedia pages on them either, and there isn't a website as far as I know that represents Arkansas highways, so it's not like people are going out to take pictures of these routes to contribute to anything other than just to have them.

A couple of other candidates I can think of in Arkansas include AR 314 in the middle of the Ouachita National Forest and AR 387 at White Oak Lake State Park. I do personally have photos of AR 320 west of Searcy and AR 398 in Logan County.

[kphoger]

for all intensive purposes it would be better to look at actual pictures taken by real people

for all intensive purposes we could probably exclude them

How much concentrated effort do your purposes require?   

[Rothman]

for all intensive purposes it would be better to look at actual pictures taken by real people

for all intensive purposes we could probably exclude them

How much concentrated effort do your purposes require?   

I prefer relaxed purposes.

[TBKS1]

for all intensive purposes it would be better to look at actual pictures taken by real people

for all intensive purposes we could probably exclude them

How much concentrated effort do your purposes require?   

I'll be honest I didn't really think of this when I wrote the initial post. When an area has GSV coverage, that technically does mean imagery of it exists. Same goes with the KYTC photo log, which I completely forgot existed. We could probably just exclude GSV from this topic, or include GSV as having imagery of the route itself, even if there isn't any photos outside of it. There's a thread that already exists of routes that aren't covered by GSV.

When I was initially writing this up, I was mostly just thinking about seeing specific routes on GSV and wondered if any imagery actually existed outside of GSV for those specific routes.

[kphoger]