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Arguments with older non-roadgeeks when kids

Started by Roadgeekteen, March 31, 2022, 01:39:32 AM

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Roadgeekteen

In this topic, I'm looking for examples of adults dismissing your road knowledge because you were a kid or young at the time.

When I was little I argued with my grandfather who still thought MA 128 ended at the Braintree Split.

My Great-Aunt from Cincinnati was unaware of the existence of the Ohio Turnpike, I was unable to convince her that the road existed. When she got home she looked it up and found out that it did exist and she actually apologized to me. Do people in Southern Ohio not know about the Turnpike?
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SkyPesos

#1
Quote from: Roadgeekteen on March 31, 2022, 01:39:32 AM
Do people in Southern Ohio not know about the Turnpike?
It's irrelevant to most of us, as a Northern Ohio E-W route. I only used the Turnpike once, and had to go a bit out of my way to do so. I bet that I-64 and I-65 are more used by southern Ohioans than the Turnpike despite the former two not entering the state. Definitely the case for me.

Scott5114

When KDOT reconstructed I-35 between Emporia and Kansas City, they also changed the text of several of the guide signs (several signs reading just "County Road" got changed to specify the name of the county road, the LeLoup/Baldwin exit was changed to Tennessee Road, etc.) I commented on our first trip after the new signs went up that a lot of the signs were different from the last time we had been there. My dad angrily shot back that they couldn't have just built all these new roads since the last time we'd been to Kansas. (Well, no shit, they were always there, the exits were just called something different.)
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TheHighwayMan3561

My mom (whose sense of direction sucks ass) hated taking directions from me and typically would rather get lost than let me show her up.
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DandyDan

#4
One argument I remember having was with one of my aunts who is a dingbat no matter what the topic is. When she and my uncle lived in Plymouth, MN, they lived right off of MN 55 and I told her we took Highway 55 twice to get there from our home in Cottage Grove and she told me I was wrong because Highway 55 ends in Minneapolis.
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webny99

Quote from: TheHighwayMan394 on March 31, 2022, 03:34:44 AM
My mom (whose sense of direction sucks ass) hated taking directions from me and typically would rather get lost than let me show her up.

I had the opposite problem - I was known from a young age as the family roads/directions consultant, so my parents were (and still are) generally very trusting of me when it came to directions. I say "problem" because I'm not perfect either - one time I accidentally routed us the wrong way down NY 33 and we ended up on city streets in the heart of downtown Buffalo - great for seeing new sights, but not so great for getting home.  :-D

Max Rockatansky

I had a great many with Grandpa who was an infamous back seat driver despite being even more infamously bad at navigating. 

JoePCool14

I didn't really have many arguments. My parents trusted me well enough and even granted me "wishes" if I sometimes wanted to see a different road, even if it was a bit out of the way.

It's been people my age who I actually argue with more. They just put on directions on their navigation app and then if I say there's a better (or cooler) way, I'm often dismissed. For the times I'm not, I'm on a knife edge, because if I get something wrong, even just once...  :ded:

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Buck87

I remember having an argument with an older cousin who would not believe me that this 4 way concurrency in Bucyrus, Ohio existed and kept insisting that all 4 of those routes had their own street.   

jmacswimmer

I think I told this story before in the "when did you know you were a roadgeek?" (or something along those lines) thread, but it's also relevant here:

2001, a few months after moving to Maryland, we were exploring DC & Northern Virginia.  Heading home, we were on VA 7 West heading out of Falls Church approaching I-66, where my parents figured they could hop on I-66 West for one exit and then get on I-495 North to the Legion Bridge & beyond.  Well, as they're about to take the ramp for I-66 West from VA 7 West, 5-year-old me starts screaming from the backseat: "DON'T DO IT YOU CAN'T GET ON 495 NORTH FROM 66 WEST IT'S NOT GONNA WORK, KEEP GOING!!!" (As in, stay straight on VA 7 directly to I-495 in a few more miles.)  My parents, as you could reasonably expect, were not prepared for their 5-year-old to be frantically screaming directions at them from the backseat, so they got on I-66 West anyway.

One minute later, upon reaching the I-495 interchange and discovering there was only a ramp to I-495 South, my parents realized their mistake, and had to continue to VA 243 and make a U-Turn there.  Meanwhile, 5-year-old me from the backseat waited for the perfect moment before dropping a smug "I told you."

My navigational abilities were never questioned again after that day.
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kevinb1994

Because there's lots of back roads in NJ, there's not usually a wrong way to get from home to a relative's house and back. It would annoy my mother, though, but who cares.

1995hoo

My parents noted when I was quite young that I knew where we were going and had an excellent sense of direction, so I seldom argued with them. But I do remember on a Cub Scout (technically Webelos) camping trip to Lake Fairfax Park in Reston, we took Hunter Mill Road across Fairfax County. I knew–because we had family friends who lived in Reston–that Hunter Mill made a 90° right turn at one intersection, and I told my father to turn right. He expressed skepticism and I pointed out that of our family friends who lived off the road that we would be on if we went straight (Sunrise Valley Drive, for those who know the area), one was a work colleague of his,* so he should know well where we were. He then conceded I was right and the hard part was getting the other fathers in the other cars to follow us because there was no advance sign reflecting the right turn, but they did follow and we got there correctly. (Two years later, the same sort of thing happened on a Boy Scout trip to Fort Hunt Park in southern Fairfax County–Fort Hunt Road makes a 90° left turn–and that time my father was not the driver, but thankfully that time someone had put up a handwritten sign saying "BOY SCOUTS" with an arrow pointing left, so there wasn't too much argument.)

Aside from those occasional sorts of things, the main sort of argument I remember was with people who were emphatic that the entire New Jersey Turnpike was I-95. Some people were (maybe still are) absolutely convinced of that, probably because the most common route north to New York from Fairfax County is to take I-95 up through Baltimore to Delaware and then people just don't pay attention to the signs that show I-95 splitting left through Wilmington to Philadelphia.

*The work colleague had been a law school classmate of his and so I've known their family my entire life. He later sold me my first car when I was 16. He died a few months before my father did and, talk about a small world, they are inurned on opposite sides of the same columbarium wall at Arlington National Cemetery.
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roadman65

My mom was driving US 202 south between Boonton and Parsippany in NJ where the US route changes alignment from Parsippany Blvd. south to Intervale Road west. I saw the shield pointing to the right saying 202 turns, but my mom continued straight anyway saying " I know my way around here as I used to travel this road when I lived with your aunt nearby."  So she continued only to find the road end at a cul de sac at I-287.

I then was happy to say " See I told you so"  to her. However, she did point out that the cul de sac wasn't there at one point in history that really is true.  As pre I-287 Parsippany Blvd. was continuous across where I -287 is at the cul de sac so I could easily empathize with her as always a lot can change over years especially when my mom regularly drove it before the freeway was built.
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kkt

Quote from: TheHighwayMan394 on March 31, 2022, 03:34:44 AM
My mom (whose sense of direction sucks ass) hated taking directions from me and typically would rather get lost than let me show her up.

Oh, is that ever familiar.  I got good at reading maps in self-defense, so that when Dad got us thoroughly lost I could find our way, once he became desperate enough to accept advice.

chrisdiaz

Telling my uncle that the New Jersey Turnpike was not the same as I-95 in South Jersey.

lepidopteran

As a kid, I once definitively stated that traffic lights were yellow, green, and black.  The adult nearby corrected me, that traffic signals are red, yellow, and green.  It was settled when I explained that I talking about the steel part (the casing) of the traffic light.

JayhawkCO

Kind of related. When driving back from Arizona to Minnesota when I was six, I told my dad to exit the Kansas Turnpike at Emporia to save time. He dismissed me and added another hour plus more tolls. Then when he wanted to stop for the night in Topeka, all of the hotels were sold out for the Miss Kansas pageant so we had to drive onward another hour before we could stop.

MCRoads

Lol, basically my entire childhood. However, most were related to attempting to give my parents directions, and then saying "GPS knows best!"  Thank god they didn't drive big rigs...

Most memorable was in Port Author, TX. I don't remember why, but my parents insisted that they needed to take one exit, when they should have taken the other. They then proceeded to get lost, and I had to tell them what they did wrong. Only after I told them where to go to get back on the freeway, and they took the correct exit did they realize I was right, lol. Probably the most impressive part of this is, this was before smartphones, iirc 2006-07. So, I had to memorize the google earth pictures of Port Arthur, and where we needed to go, and retain that information all the way from Florida.
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epzik8

I had to explain to a friend's mom that MD 165 becomes PA 74 at the Mason-Dixon Line.
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english si

I had an argument with my high school geography teacher about a case study we were looking at. The village of Castleton in the middle of the Peak District.

https://www.streetmap.co.uk/map?x=415084&y=383026&z=120 <- here's a contemporary version of the map we were looking at (albeit not quite cropped enough)

He wondered why there was an A road to this small village and cited the quarry as the reason why this small place had a A road sent to dead end there. The quarry is the reason for the little freight branch of the railway, but the A road doesn't go to the quarry. It even goes beyond the village. It's not really there for either. I had memories of maps showing the A road continue the other side of the pass, but couldn't show it in class as I didn't have a slightly-out-of-date road atlas with me at school, nor was this well documented on the internet at the time (even if I could access it in class). I was right, the A625 running either side of Mam Tor (where it used to run until it fell down the hillside enough times for them to give up trying to have a road there), had only been renumbered a year before with the section west of the pass (which wasn't on our cropped OS map of the area, which, IIRC, still had the A625 number) downgraded. I pointed out that I was pretty sure that it was the remnant of a Trans-Pennine route that had had a landslide and that the quarry that it didn't really serve had nothing to do with it being an A road.

The official reason why it remained an A road, I learnt later, was the tourist destinations west of the village. Of course, they weren't on our cropped map, and while we talked a little about the tourism in the heart of a National Park, it wasn't what the textbook wanted to talk about.

It didn't matter what the reality was. It was meant to be an example of an A road existing for the purpose of serving heavy industry in a rural area. There's a few examples of rural roads that are A roads that exist mostly because they serve a single heavy industry site, but they are through roads and aren't easy to glean that purpose from a map. It's not something we Brits do, though other countries do it. If it ended at a railway station or a dock - that's British road numbering...



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