Minor things that bother you

[jakeroot]

Looking it up Japan has three different names for the US it appears.

Colloquially they refer to us as "Amerika" transliterated (which surely won't annoy non-US North American people who hate when the US is shorthanded to "America")

The slightly more formal name used in the media is "Beikoki".

There's also an official US government name as well used by the Japanese.

Having lived there for a long time and worked with translators who worked for the Japanese government: the only name used is "a-me-ri-ka" ("アメリカ").

I'm not saying the other two aren't also translations, but there's a lot of Japanese words that are not used at all. I suspect those are them.

[vdeane]

The main thing I have against the TM scope creep is that they want to include international bridges. Do I look like I want to go to the US in order to clinch Ontario? It wouldn't be safe for me, or many others in the hobby, to do so.

That's a good point, and I share the frustration, but the issue already existed in every jurisdiction that isn't Ontario and maybe Québec - I haven't checked to see if there are any QC border crossings that are arguably unclinchable by turning around with the border post in site due to distance, turns, or lack of turnaround opportunities, although each person's tolerance for those is different; I wouldn't be comfortable clinching QC 133/hopefully still future A-35 without crossing, for instance.  And it's even more common for routes in the US to go all the way to the border - NY couldn't be clinched without border crossings or cheating even before this system came about.

Attending meets based on whether or not someone else is going to be there is sorta weird.

But are you saying you didn't want the guy to do that? Because the only reason I actually have an account on the TM forum is because there was a turn that we made at the Natchez meet that didn't have a waypoint, so I asked for it. They were quite happy to add it, given that the waypoint would be potentially useful for a few people besides myself, since the meet tour turned there. The project likes helping people map their travels more accurately, so I think asking for points to help with that, especially when they could be of use for multiple people, is just using the project as intended.

Unless you're saying you only attend meets that this guy goes to so you can benefit, in which case I ask, why don't you do it yourself?

I meant that whether this person attends shapes how I drive outside of the meet tour; if he's not there, I'll just go off the existing TM data, but if he is, I'll assume that points get set for every single turn on the tour on routes in TM and plan accordingly.  But then, I've been a bit of an odd duck where I've been deliberately exploiting where the points are to have the map look good, so if a travel wouldn't make the map look good but it doesn't fill a complete segment on TM, I just would not worry about it since it wouldn't be marked as clinched.

This is one of those weird philosophical differences between CHM and TM - on CHM, Tim would tend to jump down your throat for suggesting more points, and there were very strict criteria for when they would be included since he used some kind of image generating program for the maps, and that and the database would get bogged down with too much stuff.  TM, on the other had, is used for CS lab work concerning graphs, so it has an incentive to be much more inclusive.

This also gets weird around border crossings.  With the precision that TM tends to have, that means I have to mark segments I've never driven in to claim clinches of I-95, I-91, and US 5, and I don't think most people would argue with the typical "drive to the border and turn around" approach for clinching those (well, aside from sticklers who say that you much cross the border to clinch any route that ends at a border).  And then there's I-89 and I-95, which makes me even less comfortable (especially I-89), but it's still possible to see to the border from the overpass at the last interchange, so it is sight clinchable - still, I prefer to limit sight clinches to within segments that I've driven in, not to segments that I've never driven in, but in these cases, I have little choice - customs wouldn't be amused with "I wanted to clinch the road" and Liliana's concerns are valid, especially these days.

I'm starting to come up with plans for how to handle the interstate bridge fallout (though it will involve deferring a clinch of Champlain Parkway to next year, most likely); I think I can reasonably connect Portland-Columbia and clinch/connect Roebling's (and I already have the NY side of Cochecton with no marking of the PA segment thanks to a roadmeet), but I can't think of how to handle Hackcock-Lake Como, as the roadway configuration would lead to clinching a segment of PA 191, but there's no way to connect that segment to the rest of my PA clinches without going way out of the way of other routes I'd be driving on in the same trip (it's easiest to add it to a drive to fill in/update my NY 17 photos, and I have no interest in taking a separate trip to clinch a bunch of routes in that part of PA, especially as it's quite isolated).

Not to mention all of the "secret" Institutional Roads. Some of these state highways are in difficult to access places like prisons. The governor might be able to set up trips to some of these places, but it would be pretty much impossible for a normal person to clinch all of them. The governor is also an idiot. It would be enough of a pain in the ass to clinch all of the signed routes with all of the dangling ends on the system. Many Institutional Routes are not open to vehicular traffic at all, and must be clinched by foot. College campuses are the best examples of these state highways.

That might be why unsigned routes that aren't interstates aren't included in TM, at least in North America.

[TheHighwayMan3561]

As for the dangling ends, that's a consequence of me always pulling maps by region, so if I pull up PA, and the bridges with NY appear, they'd be disconnected from anything else because I have little interest in clinching random PA routes so those bridges would be clinched by turning around at the first opportunity in PA.

So, uh...don't turn around at the first opportunity in PA? There is not a dichotomy between "clinching everything in Pennsylvania" and "just getting this one bridge and immediately leaving", you know.

I tend to not just turn around at state lines, not because it bothers me what the map looks like, but rather that I dislike knowing that I was on a bit of road but not having any way to record it on TM because I didn't do a whole segment. With it lying on a state line it's more awkward because I usually only load one map at a time, so it's harder to remember "Oh yeah, I went to the state line and overshot a little bit". So my map has a lot of things like this on it:



As it turns out, the north-south road here did get me a clinch (NM 406), but I obviously made no attempt to clinch the other two roads leading into and out of NM (NM 456 and US 64). It will probably be a long time, if ever, until I clinch these. But the map is accurate to my actual experience, which is the most important thing, and it looks tidy too. It also gives me the benefit of spending thirty minutes or so in another state enjoying highway practices different than my home state's, which is my favorite thing about crossing a state line.

Heck, there was a point where I was planning clinches at roadmeets based entirely on whether one specific person would be attending, because he has a habit of requesting points at locations where the tour turned, so I couldn't rely on a tour avoiding clinching a whole mapped section to avoid eventually having to mark the section as clinched.

Attending meets based on whether or not someone else is going to be there is sorta weird.

But are you saying you didn't want the guy to do that? Because the only reason I actually have an account on the TM forum is because there was a turn that we made at the Natchez meet that didn't have a waypoint, so I asked for it. They were quite happy to add it, given that the waypoint would be potentially useful for a few people besides myself, since the meet tour turned there. The project likes helping people map their travels more accurately, so I think asking for points to help with that, especially when they could be of use for multiple people, is just using the project as intended.

Unless you're saying you only attend meets that this guy goes to so you can benefit, in which case I ask, why don't you do it yourself?

i mean, maybe I'm misunderstanding the problem, but I get hesitant that the ultimate devolution of a hypothetical TM user this picky about waypoints would be people requesting waypoints for something like a McDonald's driveway in Aberdeen, South Dakota because it would bother them that much that a small strip of road was marked inaccurately (whether too much or too little).

[Rothman]

*glad he sticks to just clinching Interstates on TM*

[TheCatalyst31]

Judging by the dozens of river crossing threads on this forum, there's clearly some appetite for tracking bridge clinches. Whether TM is the right place to do that is a different question, but it looks like the bridge system is still very early in development. I'm not sure how I feel about it, but I do like the idea of having bridges that are a state route on one half and not the other, because those make my map look weird as it is.

I was surprised that it went to preview that quickly.  It also looks like they're taking a more liberal definition of how close it need to be to a TM route than they did for the international bridges; when the international bridges were added, I never imagined bridges between two parallel routes in the system, rather than just where one route ends at the border and the other side doesn't have a route.

I also don't love how they implemented that, because some of the route connections are a little spurious. It's one thing if the bridge leads directly to a numbered highway, but when it intersects minor city streets before the highway or the highway doesn't have a proper interchange for the bridge, I'm not sure that's in the spirit of TM anymore.

[1995hoo]

Seems to me the service is free and provided by volunteers. I don't think it's in my place to complain or tell them how to run it.

[Scott5114]

i mean, maybe I'm misunderstanding the problem, but I get hesitant that the ultimate devolution of a hypothetical TM user this picky about waypoints would be people requesting waypoints for something like a McDonald's driveway in Aberdeen, South Dakota because it would bother them that much that a small strip of road was marked inaccurately (whether too much or too little).

I don't want to give the impression that I'm really all that picky about waypoints—if my travels don't mesh up with the waypoints I just give myself credit for all finished segments and then use a comment to denote my actual turnoff point for my own records. If I don't turn off at a TM waypoint, that's my problem, not TM's. (My making a loop out of state line crossings rather than turning back is more due to a general dislike of traversing the same road twice on a trip rather than using different routes on the way there and back.)

[JayhawkCO]

i mean, maybe I'm misunderstanding the problem, but I get hesitant that the ultimate devolution of a hypothetical TM user this picky about waypoints would be people requesting waypoints for something like a McDonald's driveway in Aberdeen, South Dakota because it would bother them that much that a small strip of road was marked inaccurately (whether too much or too little).

I don't want to give the impression that I'm really all that picky about waypoints—if my travels don't mesh up with the waypoints I just give myself credit for all finished segments and then use a comment to denote my actual turnoff point for my own records. If I don't turn off at a TM waypoint, that's my problem, not TM's. (My making a loop out of state line crossings rather than turning back is more due to a general dislike of traversing the same road twice on a trip rather than using different routes on the way there and back.)

That's how I am too. I'm not going to ask for a waypoint 100 feet into a county line or something. I'm just going to pick the closest waypoint to where I've been. Given that the mileage isn't accurate anyway given that the waypoints don't follow a smooth curve, I'm not too worried about it.

[Scott5114]

Given that the mileage isn't accurate anyway given that the waypoints don't follow a smooth curve, I'm not too worried about it.

I always assumed that TM had actual road distance between waypoints stored somewhere and wasn't just using as-the-crow-flies distances between waypoints.

[JayhawkCO]

Given that the mileage isn't accurate anyway given that the waypoints don't follow a smooth curve, I'm not too worried about it.

I always assumed that TM had actual road distance between waypoints stored somewhere and wasn't just using as-the-crow-flies distances between waypoints.

Don't think so. That's why on the stretches without obvious turn offs, they have some dummy waypoints to more closely model the curves.

[Max Rockatansky]

Seems to me the service is free and provided by volunteers. I don't think it's in my place to complain or tell them how to run it.

Or don't let a site dictate to you what your highway travel itinerary is.  I don't know, this whole recent exchange just affirms my already existing stance on why trying to keep track of self-data like this is a burden not worth the hassle. 

[JayhawkCO]

Seems to me the service is free and provided by volunteers. I don't think it's in my place to complain or tell them how to run it.

Or don't let a site dictate to you what your highway travel itinerary is.  I don't know, this whole recent exchange just affirms my already existing stance on why trying to keep track of self-data like this is a burden not worth the hassle.

It hardly dictates. But I think a lot of us track our travels at least mentally. It's nice having a place you can do it visually as well.

[Max Rockatansky]

Seems to me the service is free and provided by volunteers. I don't think it's in my place to complain or tell them how to run it.

Or don't let a site dictate to you what your highway travel itinerary is.  I don't know, this whole recent exchange just affirms my already existing stance on why trying to keep track of self-data like this is a burden not worth the hassle.

It hardly dictates. But I think a lot of us track our travels at least mentally. It's nice having a place you can do it visually as well.

It sounds like fun until it begins to weigh you down like what is being discussed.  The complaint above is about the criteria of what TM considers a "full state clinch" and how it effects stats changing.  It sounds to me as though there are a fair number of people who take TM as gospel on what should be driven.   

[vdeane]

I also don't love how they implemented that, because some of the route connections are a little spurious. It's one thing if the bridge leads directly to a numbered highway, but when it intersects minor city streets before the highway or the highway doesn't have a proper interchange for the bridge, I'm not sure that's in the spirit of TM anymore.

Yeah, that's what I thought it was going to be based on the initial discussions around Ontario and compensating for MTO's strange habit of having 400-series numbers stop before the border (contrary to practically every other jurisdiction along the US/Canadian border).  Even that became bigger than that, I think because they didn't want it to be a "compensate for Ontario" system (they didn't even realize there were applicable bridges along the ME/NB border until I pointed it out), so they decided to expand it to the US/Mexico border, and since Mexico has a bunch of urban centers on the border and the federal routes end well before the border, it became bigger.  And then they included one in NB that probably shouldn't have been, but "those roads really should be 1PPI but unfortunately we only do that for freeway interchanges", and then they decided to extend that logic to a bunch of bridges between state lines (and briefly it seemed like they were even going to add intrastate bridges).

The tourist routes and "national historic trails" have been another interesting example of scope creep.  Just last week I was wrangling my brain trying to remember the exact route I drove through Baltimore on the way to a meet in 2016 to figure out if I needed to mark something after another trail got added.  At some point, I'm not sure I'm going to remember if I've been on a newly added route or not.  I'm already missing a bit of ON 401 that I'm reasonably sure I've been on but can't say for certain, much less exact endpoints, because my age was in single digits at the time and my memory is fuzzy on the details.

[oscar]

i mean, maybe I'm misunderstanding the problem, but I get hesitant that the ultimate devolution of a hypothetical TM user this picky about waypoints would be people requesting waypoints for something like a McDonald's driveway in Aberdeen, South Dakota because it would bother them that much that a small strip of road was marked inaccurately (whether too much or too little).

What happens to that hypothetical TM user might be that the maintainer for that region will ignore or turn down such a request (especially if it's coming from a complete stranger), since it can mean work for the maintainer out of proportion to any possible benefit for other users. (You know, us maintainers have lives, too!) I don't bother with making such point requests, even in regions I maintain (which are really "point self-requests", but never mind). When I have made small-ish point requests in regions I don't maintain, such as to add a mile or two to my map, sometimes I get turned down, even though my request is for a favor from one maintainer to another.

Do I look like I want to go to the US in order to clinch Ontario? It wouldn't be safe for me, or many others in the hobby, to do so.

So accept just a 99% clinch of Ontario, until the country on the other side of the border changes its policies?

[kphoger]

The Times is the most pretentious newspaper name.  It isn't the Times of something (which is a normal name), but just The Times.  Like it's the only one.

Also:  The Open.

I get it that, historically, it was the original open tournament in golf.  But there are a lot more of them now.  So I find the R&A's recent initiative to stop people from calling it "The British Open" especially pretentious.

[JayhawkCO]

Seems to me the service is free and provided by volunteers. I don't think it's in my place to complain or tell them how to run it.

Or don't let a site dictate to you what your highway travel itinerary is.  I don't know, this whole recent exchange just affirms my already existing stance on why trying to keep track of self-data like this is a burden not worth the hassle.

It hardly dictates. But I think a lot of us track our travels at least mentally. It's nice having a place you can do it visually as well.

It sounds like fun until it begins to weigh you down like what is being discussed.  The complaint above is about the criteria of what TM considers a "full state clinch" and how it effects stats changing.  It sounds to me as though there are a fair number of people who take TM as gospel on what should be driven.   

I guess I just tend to be less concerned overall with minutiae. It's a much healthier way to live IMO.

[kphoger]

As it turns out, the north-south road here did get me a clinch (NM 406), but I obviously made no attempt to clinch the other two roads leading into and out of NM (NM 456 and US 64).

By the way, when I was looking into taking a family trip to that area a few months ago, I appreciated the route shield photos you posted on Wikipedia from those routes.

[kphoger]

Do I look like I want to go to the US in order to clinch Ontario? It wouldn't be safe for me, or many others in the hobby, to do so.

It would be safe for you to do so.

[hotdogPi]

Do I look like I want to go to the US in order to clinch Ontario? It wouldn't be safe for me, or many others in the hobby, to do so.

It would be safe for you to do so.

Agreed, at least for you. The states across the border from Québec and eastern Ontario are in favor of transgender rights (except New Hampshire which is mixed but most of their laws against transgender people don't affect visitors), and the whole "illegal immigrant" thing shouldn't be an issue visiting for a few days because that's not immigration (not that deporting a tourist hasn't happened, but it's a lot rarer).

[kphoger]

The states across the border from Québec and eastern Ontario are in favor of transgender rights (except New Hampshire which is mixed but most of their laws against transgender people don't affect visitors) ...

And, even in states with bathroom gender laws, are there any states in which the ban applies to private property rather than just government-owned facilities?

[hotdogPi]

The states across the border from Québec and eastern Ontario are in favor of transgender rights (except New Hampshire which is mixed but most of their laws against transgender people don't affect visitors) ...

And, even in states with bathroom gender laws, are there any states in which the ban applies to private property rather than just government-owned facilities?

The bill that the New Hampshire legislature is trying to push would allow each business to make their own decision on whether to enact a ban. The governor (who is a moderate Republican) has vetoed it multiple times. I imagine other states that have passed this type of law might do it the same way.

[kphoger]

The bill that the New Hampshire legislature is trying to push would allow each business to make their own decision on whether to enact a ban. The governor (who is a moderate Republican) has vetoed it multiple times. I imagine other states that have passed this type of law might do it the same way.

I meant actually, as in, as things stand now.

(Can't businesses already typically set their own policies on their own property—that is, absent any nondiscrimination statute that specifically prevents that?)

[TheHighwayMan3561]

I think we're missing the real point of that comment.

[vdeane]

Do I look like I want to go to the US in order to clinch Ontario? It wouldn't be safe for me, or many others in the hobby, to do so.

It would be safe for you to do so.

Agreed, at least for you. The states across the border from Québec and eastern Ontario are in favor of transgender rights (except New Hampshire which is mixed but most of their laws against transgender people don't affect visitors), and the whole "illegal immigrant" thing shouldn't be an issue visiting for a few days because that's not immigration (not that deporting a tourist hasn't happened, but it's a lot rarer).

The federal government, however, is extremely anti-trans, to the point where they consider travel documents that don't reflect sex assigned at birth as fraudulent.  They're also very quick to detain people for any perceived violation of our laws, no matter how minor; the days of just turning people around at the border are over.

The states across the border from Québec and eastern Ontario are in favor of transgender rights (except New Hampshire which is mixed but most of their laws against transgender people don't affect visitors) ...

And, even in states with bathroom gender laws, are there any states in which the ban applies to private property rather than just government-owned facilities?

Kansas does; warning for first offense, $1000 fine on second, misdemeanor on the third.  Idaho as well; misdemeanor on first offense, felony (!) on second.  At least one city (IIRC, Odessa) in Texas has passed a "bounty hunter" law where private citizens can sue anyone they suspect of being trans in the bathroom for $10,000.

And honestly, even in the states with bans "only" in government buildings, who wants to deal with that?  Any amount of discrimination experienced is too much, and those bans do include things like rest areas and airports - facilities that travelers would have a particular interest in using.

The bill that the New Hampshire legislature is trying to push would allow each business to make their own decision on whether to enact a ban. The governor (who is a moderate Republican) has vetoed it multiple times. I imagine other states that have passed this type of law might do it the same way.

I meant actually, as in, as things stand now.

(Can't businesses already typically set their own policies on their own property—that is, absent any nondiscrimination statute that specifically prevents that?)

In the case of New Hampshire, they're trying to revoke an existing non-discrimination law.