If you could go back in time, what would you tell your younger roadgeek self?

[J N Winkler]

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.)

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.

[triplemultiplex]

"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."

[Burt]

Go with your buddies to Daytona. That gal is a trainwreck...

[Brandon]

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.

[vtk]

Keep a journal of when major highways around town open and close.  Those dates will make future research and analysis easier.