In your copious free time, why not visit the state, DOT, and university libraries and dig through all the great stuff they have archived? Before you move 3,000 miles away?
And get a decent camera, learn basic photography, and take pictures.
(I think of all the places I've been, and never bothered to grab pictures... I-86 in CT, West Palm Beach area in FL, Illinois, Iowa, Oklahoma, New England...)
Quote from: kurumi on June 08, 2011, 11:59:44 AM
(I think of all the places I've been, and never bothered to grab pictures... I-86 in CT, West Palm Beach area in FL, Illinois, Iowa, Oklahoma, New England...)
indeed - there was an I-86 MA shield off exit 2 as late as 1987 or 1988 and did I grab a photo? why no, no I did not.
Mainly I'd just point myself to Upstate NY Roads sooner. Have some other stuff, but it mostly follows from stuff I figured out after being a part of the community.
Also I'd tell myself to keep track of more than just interstates on the clinched highway mapping site. It's a pain to try and figure it all out later on, and there's a lot of guesswork. There's probably some segments that I went on in driver's ed that I don't remember, and some segments alternated between clinched and not clinched while I tried to figure everything out.
I would have paid more attention and photographed/videotaped more state-named shields and older signs in general. That also goes for older traffic signals.
There were two of these posted on the approach to the Delaware Memorial Bridge on the southbound side:
(//www.aaroads.com/shields/img/NJ/NJ19550401i1.jpg)
I always noted them when we went by but never thought of them as rare. When I got my first film camera (1995), I convinced a friend of mine to pull over there and shot that sign. Stuff like this was more common in the early to mid 1990s, but I did not pay enough attention to it. There was an Ocean Highway trailblazer on a guide sign on I-295 that I always saw (even in the 1990s), but never documented for instance. The last state-named shield (1970 specs) on I-95 southbound was just after the merge of the DE-141 c/d roadway on southbound. Never got a photo of it and it barely shows up in a video I have. The square "Delaware 2" shield posted on Union Street (DE-2) eastbound after Pennsylvania Avenue (DE-52) was gone by the time I decided to get around to photograph it. And it goes on and on... :sleep:
I would tell my younger self to not get hopes up for US 101 getting modernized any time soon...LOL! CalTrans and ODOT are the epitome of footdragging bureaucracies when it comes to "my" highway.
For pix of what was around when I was young, I wish I had one of the "JUNCTION" sign over the older style US 101 shield on the road from Cape Blanco (westernmost point of the lower 48) to 101 since it dated from before WWII and also the really large 101 and state route 42 signs that used to be in this area back in the day.
Rick
The thread title raises an interesting question. These are the things I would tell my younger self:
* In 1998 I would have told myself, "This is the year Ohio DOT becomes the first state DOT to put plans on the Web. In ten years about half of the state DOTs will be doing this but you may find it becomes very expensive to try to get electronic plans in arrears through open records requests and the like. It is worth your while to set up harvesting mechanisms. In a year or two, TxDOT will start a major statewide freeway guide sign rehabilitation program, and this alone will produce thousands of pattern-accurate sign design sheets. You should get in on the ground floor."
* In April 2001, I would have told myself, "Nail the High Five plans."
* In 2000 I would have been able to give my younger self some perspective about dealing with my own native state DOT, Kansas DOT. In that year I wrote to ask about state-specific standards for design choices which were not addressed in the national
MUTCD. I was fishing for something like a Kansas supplement to
Standard Highway Signs which would have design details for the Kansas state route marker and a number of other signs which are used only in Kansas and are not in the national
MUTCD. At that time I didn't really understand about signing standard sheets, recurring special designs, and the like. I also wasn't really aware that construction on state highways is typically done by contract and that the contracting process revolves around sets of construction plans which do include design details for traffic signs and are public record.
The reply I got from a KDOT public affairs officer was extraordinarily nasty and rebarbative. It said that my email was the third time I had asked KDOT essentially the same question, and gave the dates of the previous two replies (going back to 1996) and the names of the KDOT employees who had written them. At the time I could not lay my hands on the previous emails, because my email archive from that time was (and still is) highly fragmented and lacks several months' worth of emails which were on a network disk that crashed before I had an opportunity to retrieve my data, but I am reasonably certain that the first reply had to do with "Give 'Em a Brake" signing while the second reply amounted to a bald statement that Kansas followed the national
MUTCD without a state supplement. (I did not receive a design sheet for the sunflower route marker on any of those occasions. It was not until 2006 or thereabouts that Richie Kennedy kindly pointed out the relevant traffic engineering standard plan sheets on KDOT's KART site.) The reply from the KDOT PAO said, "We will not be duplicating our work," thus implying that my inquiry was a bid to waste state employee time.
If I were able to travel back in time to this episode, I would tell myself: "You are not alone." I would then go on to say that KDOT's reflex is to see any contact from the public as nothing more than an attempt to waste KDOT employee time or to expose KDOT to tort liability, and that this is something that dates from State Highway Commission days and is fundamentally a factor of administrative culture which is not really specific to any KDOT secretary and is very hard for an agency head to exorcise. I would tell myself that I would, years later, be told a story about a traveller who visited KDOT in the early 1970's to examine highway signing plans, and was begrudged a table to lay them down on while he looked at them. This same traveller later had a lengthy but unsuccessful correspondence with a KDOT lawyer in the mid-1980's when KDOT instituted a policy of requiring that anyone looking at KDOT records on KDOT premises pay $20 per hour (minimum) for supervision.
Eleven years from now, I would tell myself, you will be reading the appellate decisions in the Garden City
Telegram case to get an idea of just how aggressive KDOT has been in resisting open records requests. In short, I would say, KDOT is among the five most difficult of the fifty state DOTs in terms of asking for information, and from this vantage point you are just unlucky that it happens to be your native state DOT. But in the future your contacts with KDOT will not be as antagonistic as this.
Quote from: kurumi on June 08, 2011, 11:59:44 AMIn your copious free time, why not visit the state, DOT, and university libraries and dig through all the great stuff they have archived? Before you move 3,000 miles away?
I don't have too many regrets on this front. I was looking at DOT-related documentation in the late 1990's in public and university libraries. I have also visited the NARA satellite in Kansas City and looked up highway-related archival records there. When I was in Britain and making regular trips to the National Archives, I knew I would not have unlimited time in the future to look at the records related to my main interest (traffic signing), but I was able at least to order and survey many of those records even though I never succeeded in my aim to get camera copies of the majority of them. I have visited the Davis transportation library on all but one of my past visits to Berkeley, and I have visited the Caltrans library every time I have gone to Sacramento. Kansas DOT has its own library, which I have yet to visit, but I am hoping to arrange a visit sometime in the next few months. (Since the library is not a repository of agency records, it
should be easier . . .)
QuoteAnd get a decent camera, learn basic photography, and take pictures.
I was a photographer before I was a road enthusiast--probably the only thing I would need to tell my past self is that, yes, signs are an appropriate subject for photography. But it takes time for an interest in highway-related things to develop.
Definitely take pictures. There were some old cutout Kentucky state route shields in my area well into my childhood. Wish I had gotten photos.
Quote from: hbelkins on June 08, 2011, 02:11:01 PM
Definitely take pictures. There were some old cutout Kentucky state route shields in my area well into my childhood. Wish I had gotten photos.
when did KY get away from the 16" cutouts? 1973 is what I've heard. basically, when they decided to implement the federal 1970 MUTCD, correct?
Wow, I had no idea KDOT was so...dickish. Who even keeps track of random members of the public who wrote them four years previously? I doubt my company has records of who all called the central switchboard in 2007 and who answered the phone. If their assumption was that I was out to waste employee time I would certainly ensure that I met that assumption by getting ahold of every supervisor and state representative I could. That is no way to treat a constituent.
I have never corresponded with KDOT but my two interactions with KTA were much, much more pleasant and successful at getting my questions answered than your early KDOT interactions.
Set your website up in a way that's not going to be so time consuming to maintain once you have thousands upon thousands of pages of content.
Take pictures and save newspaper articles about projects.
"Get into photography sooner so you can document the Springfield Interchange's construction and the transformation of the I-95 corridor in Northern Virginia."
I'd definitely tell myself to photograph I-495 (old signed routing) and SR 217 in Maine before those got deleted. Of course, for I-495, I'd be talking to my 9 year old self :sombrero:
I would go back and photograph and make a movie of the old Kentucky Turnpike before it was totally reconstructed in the 1980's.
However, I can pat myself on the back a little bit since I did record the movie of the southbound downgrade on Monteagle before that was reconstructed.
"Take pictures of road signs!" I'm old enough to have have gotten some great classics.
Definitely as other people have said, I would take pictures. I was afraid people would think I was really strange for wanting to take pictures of road signs, so I almost never did it. In fact, when I took a couple of sign pictures on a trip to California with a friend of mine when I was in college, I told him I was using them as title pictures for the areas we were seeing. All I got was a picture with "I-10 West Los Angeles" at the I-605 interchange and a picture with "US 101 North Hollywood" near downtown LA.
I would also have paid closer attention to the routes my family drove on family vacations at a younger age. As it was, I was fully aware of and in fact helped plan routes by the time I was 11, but I'm unsure of the routes we took on some vacations before that, so it makes it tougher when I am doing county collecting lists. I've just decided to start my lists from the time I remember, but that leaves out some that I've been to before.
Quote from: Scott5114 on June 08, 2011, 05:39:05 PMWow, I had no idea KDOT was so...dickish. Who even keeps track of random members of the public who wrote them four years previously? I doubt my company has records of who all called the central switchboard in 2007 and who answered the phone. If their assumption was that I was out to waste employee time I would certainly ensure that I met that assumption by getting ahold of every supervisor and state representative I could. That is no way to treat a constituent.
This happened in 2000, when I was still very new to the business of talking with state DOTs, and there was also very little traffic signing documentation online--I don't think the Millennium
MUTCD even came out until 2001, for example. If this imbroglio happened now, I would seriously consider (as you suggest) escalating the matter all the way to the agency head. But on the other hand, the information available on the Web now makes it much harder for a PAO to get away with shining on members of the public with vague references to the
MUTCD. That bit of stroppiness would thus be less likely to happen in the first place.
I learned many years later that KDOT has a
Highway Sign Manual which addresses pretty much all of the aspects of state highway signing which are specific to Kansas. But you will not find this manual anywhere on KDOT's website. At best a Google search turns up references to the
Highway Sign Manual in KDOT bidding proposals (which are put on the Web in PDF format, along with--since 2008--the construction plans). KDOT has its standard plans library, roadway design manual, bridge manual, etc. downloadable through KART, but not the
Highway Sign Manual. (In fairness to KDOT, its neighbor state DOT MoDOT also has a
Standard Sign Detail Manual which still has not made it onto the Web.)
KDOT used to have a FAQ page on its website which explained the criteria for choosing destinations on distance signs--next county seat, next town within 100 miles that is not a county seat but is incorporated with a population over 1000, etc. All of that information comes straight from the
Highway Sign Manual, not that KDOT ever said so in the FAQ.
My subsequent interactions with KDOT have been much more positive in tone, but I can confirm that they still require supervision when inspecting records in person and pursue other anti-transparency policies. In general I try to get what information I can out of the KDOT website without interacting with any KDOT employees. I still feel like I have to read the entire Kansas Open Records Act before I write any email to KDOT (not least because the legislature amended KORA several times in the noughties, making it worse each time), and when I get a reply and it looks like the dialogue will have to continue, I feel like I have to Google the responding KDOT employee. If it is a KDOT lawyer, I feel I have to do everything short of looking him or her up in Martindale-Hubbell to background him or her--my typical search includes, at minimum, the Kansas Courts database to see how he or she behaved when a KDOT case reached the appellate level. This consumes much mental and emotional energy.
Other state DOTs are much easier to deal with. Caltrans is everyone's favorite whipping boy (and I admit I have added a few lashes of my own where their freeway guide signing is concerned), but they have almost invariably been helpful when I have come seeking information.
QuoteI have never corresponded with KDOT but my two interactions with KTA were much, much more pleasant and successful at getting my questions answered than your early KDOT interactions.
They are a much smaller organization, which helps with the personal touch. They were very helpful when I called them back in February and asked to inspect the signing plans for the original Turnpike in person. (They haven't scanned any of their old as-builts, and when I saw the signing plans in person, I could see why--they are whiteprints on paper only a few shades lighter than grocery sacking, so they are almost impossible to scan bitonally without heavy "snow," and continuous-tone scans with usable resolution tend to have very large filesizes.)
Am I allowed to bring my younger self a digital camera and the equipment needed to offload and store all those images until the availability of affordable storage of that data?
But like others, I sure would like to have tons of pictures from the roads from many family vacations growing up and some of my earlier travels on my own. NY to Colorado in 1977. Many NY-Florida runs from 1978 on. Cross-country in 1985. Yellowstone in 1989.... Even my own 1999 cross country and 2001 Alaska trips, which did have some road shots, would have many, many more if I could do it again.
Quote from: J N Winkler on June 08, 2011, 09:34:35 PMCaltrans is everyone's favorite whipping boy (and I admit I have added a few lashes of my own where their freeway guide signing is concerned), but they have almost invariably been helpful when I have come seeking information.
Caltrans is the only official agency from whom I have ever requested information, and they were incredibly helpful - though it may have helped my cause that I had a friend (who has donated a few old highway signs to the Caltrans library to have on display in the entrance hall) make the initial accommodations on my behalf.
Quotethey are whiteprints on paper only a few shades lighter than grocery sacking, so they are almost impossible to scan bitonally without heavy "snow," and continuous-tone scans with usable resolution tend to have very large filesizes.)
maybe scan at continuous-tone and then drop to bitone after doing a contrast enhancement filter on the computer?
Quote from: agentsteel53 on June 08, 2011, 02:12:30 PM
Quote from: hbelkins on June 08, 2011, 02:11:01 PM
Definitely take pictures. There were some old cutout Kentucky state route shields in my area well into my childhood. Wish I had gotten photos.
when did KY get away from the 16" cutouts? 1973 is what I've heard. basically, when they decided to implement the federal 1970 MUTCD, correct?
I was born in 1961. My earliest recollections are of Kentucky using the 24 x 24 square blanks. (I grew up right at an intersection of signed state routes). The cutouts that were floating around even in the late 1960s were pretty rare so they were being phased out in the late '60s.
Michael Summa was certainly a visionary in this field, wasn't he?
the 1961 MUTCD specified the larger black square shields for junctions, and the smaller cutouts for reassurance, but a lot of states decided to use the black squares for both.
the 1970 MUTCD made black squares mandatory for every context, abolishing the small cutouts.
but a lot of states got rid of the smaller cutouts as early as the 1940s (Maryland, 24" minimum size as early as 1946) to as late as 1978 (Kansas, I believe the last state to use 16" state-named cutouts)
I remember a few noteworthy road signs from my childhood, but most of them are still around with one exception. In the mid-1990s, I went from Rochester to Canandaigua a lot - way too many times to count - often via NY 64 and passing by both ends of the now-former NY 20C. I don't really remember seeing signage for the route at its west end (NY 64), but I can remember seeing NY 20C shields at its east end (along the 5/20/64 overlap). I stopped going to Canandaigua around 1997 or 1998, and of course NY 20C was phased out in favor of NY 444 around that time. Knowing what I know now, I'd love to have taken just one photo of a NY 20C sign in the field while the route was still around.
I didn't start taking pictures until I found this forum. I'd have done more in the film camera era! Of course, it's easier now because the cost of a wasted picture is infinitesimal.
And, definitely get pictures of the all the center-tabbed, sequential numbered exit signs I could in PA! And, see if I could get a petition to Penn State not to work on Clearview!
I would have told myself in the late 80s"Get more old Connecticut wood...a lot of classic shields and signs i never got..." and bring a certain young lady with me on those trips so we could bond (we broke up by mistake (mine mostly), and she married someone else)
My inner roadgeek didn't fully awaken until just a few years ago -- my first big road trip was in 2006. But I was curious about the road stretching back to the mid 1980s -- much moreso about the old two-lane highways than Interstates. And so whenever I needed to drive somewhere I got out my paper maps and plotted a route on all the back highways. I wish I could go back in time and tell myself to invest in a decent camera and stop for photos along the way -- signage, little towns, and bridges (especially bridges). I'd die to be able to go back along some of those routes today and compare. jim
Quote from: agentsteel53 on June 08, 2011, 09:48:06 PMQuotethey are whiteprints on paper only a few shades lighter than grocery sacking, so they are almost impossible to scan bitonally without heavy "snow," and continuous-tone scans with usable resolution tend to have very large filesizes.)
maybe scan at continuous-tone and then drop to bitone after doing a contrast enhancement filter on the computer?
In principle this should work, but in practice the color tones of the paper and ink are so close together that aggressive noise reduction would be necessary as well.
Another consideration is that the KTA has little incentive to digitize its very old as-builts. The original Turnpike was built with about 220 contracts, each of which probably had no more than 50 sheets or so. (All of the original signing was done in a single contract, the plans for which had just 38 sheets.) This can be accommodated very comfortably in a smallish fileroom. The Turnpike was comprehensively reconstructed about twenty to thirty years after original construction because (1) the original pavement was too thin and (2) the up and down carriageways were so close together the Turnpike wanted to install continuous concrete median barrier for safety. So as-builts from the original 1955-56 construction don't really tell designers anything important about the present Turnpike except things about box culverts and the like which were left alone during the reconstruction. It tends to be the later stuff (Kansas River bridges and the like) which is readily available electronically because the plans were "born digital" in a CAD program.
"Hey old me, you know how you like to keep track of where you've driven on that one map? You should see if you can start driving all the state highways and stuff."
"Screw these pens & pencils, you should totally download your own copy of Adobe Illustrator. Same place you get music, dude."
Go with your buddies to Daytona. That gal is a trainwreck...
Me? Take pictures, damnit! You were on I-70 in Utah when it was 2 lanes. You were on Temp I-69. You were on the Borman before rebuilding began in the '80s. You were on I-55 when it had the sodium vapor lights. But you didn't have a camera and/or didn't think to take pictures.
Keep a journal of when major highways around town open and close. Those dates will make future research and analysis easier.