History of Roadgeeking

[Roadgeekteen]

So what was roadgeeking like back in the 80s and 90s? Obviously, no Google Maps or GPS back then, and no AAroads forum. When was MTR founded? What was it like having that around? How was the hobby different back then than it is now? Do you prefer it now or back then? For me, I've been a roadgeek since around 2010-2012ish and when I was a kid I would fawn over Rand McNally atlases I would get for my birthday. I stopped getting those around 2019-2020ish and now do most roadgeeking over google maps and google street view, just lost interest.

[Max Rockatansky]

Got me regarding the 20th century and this being a "hobby."  My observation was that it was kind of regular thing for dudes to go out for recreational driving and look for stuff like old highway signs.  My dad and I certainly were always into highway stuff.  I've talked about it before, but he preferred driving over flying on business trips and I would often go with him.  We just flash cameras and/or Polaroids to take pictures.  Usually, the photos would end up in a physical album such as the 1993 which we took CA 1 from San Francisco to Santa Monica.

[kphoger]

when I was a kid I would fawn over Rand McNally atlases I would get for my birthday.

I was all over the road atlas too.  By the time I was moving from junior high into school, I was the one planning the driving route for family vacations.

Toward the end of the 1990s, we also had nationwide street atlas on CD-ROM.  I don't remember now which one it was.

[pderocco]

In the early 70s, I found that Mass DOT sold a book of street maps for the entire state, at 1inch = 1mile scale, mostly one town per page rather than on a grid. I was so thrilled to get something that listed every road, not just the big ones, although it turned out that it hadn't been updated since 1963. It started to fall apart from heavy use, so I cut the towns out and taped them to a wall to make one big map.

In the 90s, I was obsessed with Thomas Guides, and had all of them for California, Oregon, and Washington, because I spent a lot of time in those states. Eventually, they came out with Massachusetts too. But soon thereafter I got map programs like DeLorme on CD, but I couldn't carry my Pentium desktop machine with me in the car. In 2000, I finally got a laptop, and used to use it in the car (with a noisy inverter powering it) running Microsoft Streets & Trips.

Now all these things feel like dial phones, floppy drives, carburetors, and TVs with channel knobs. I don't miss the technology of paper maps, although I'm grateful for the information on scans of old maps, however limited the technology was.

[Scott5114]

I only found the community in the mid-2000s or so, at the tail end of the MTR era. The Wikipedia road articles were still being built (I think there were only three Oklahoma articles before I started on that project). Many states did have roadgeek-run websites with at least the termini and length info (and there was even a software package someone wrote and shared around that would generate route logs for a given state; I remember route56's Kansas site used that). There were few state map archives available, so if you had a history question that wasn't answered by the random maps roadgeeks had accrued at antique stores, you were kind of up a creek.

One thing that I sort of miss about that era is that there was no GSV, so if someone had a question about a road or a sign, the easiest way to get it was to go out there, take a picture on your digital camera, and then come report back to everyone else. There were a lot of independent roadgeek websites sites where people would post the photos they took, usually with snarky commentary, which meant that you kind of got to know the other roadgeeks through their photo captions as much as their posts.

[Dirt Roads]

I starting collecting state maps back in the late-1960s, when much of the Interstate system was still yet to be completed.  The nation was also less populous, so those maps were much easier to memorize.  As more highways got upgraded, it was fairly easy to add them to the memory banks.  I was pretty much focused on all of West Virginia, all of Eastern Kentucky, most of Virginia, most of Southeastern Ohio, most of Southwestern Pennsylvania, and most of Maryland.  Once I got out of college, I added the rest of Virginia, all of North Carolina, all of South Carolina, and most of Georgia; as well as a bunch of different pieces of Florida. 

Back in the 1980s, it was wild to hop on an airplane and as soon as I had a clear view I could tell exactly where I was in the Southeast.  The last time I tried this, there are just too many newer highway corridors to distinguish them from the air (unless you are running along a major Interstate or you see a big landmark).

-----

I think my first venture onto M.T.R. was in 1995, and I became semi-regular in late 1996.  M.T.R. was well-established sometime before then.  I found it through a cross-thread from M.T.U-T (misc.transport.urban-transit), which I wasn't supposed to post on.  However, I was permitted to post on misc.transport.rail.americas (M.T.R.A.).  All of these got too unwieldy about mid-1999 when they got hammered with bots generating 95% of the posts.  I check about every 5 years and they don't seem much different.

[Henry]

when I was a kid I would fawn over Rand McNally atlases I would get for my birthday.

I was all over the road atlas too.  By the time I was moving from junior high into school, I was the one planning the driving route for family vacations.

Toward the end of the 1990s, we also had nationwide street atlas on CD-ROM.  I don't remember now which one it was.

From the time I learned to read, I've always had an obsession with atlases. Whenever my father got a new Rand McNally (which he did every few years), he'd give me the old one, with which I was free to do whatever I wanted to, including marking it up with new roads, both real and created. It also helped that we would take long trips out of Chicago every summer so we could see different parts of the country.

[froggie]

Long story short, prior to the internet it was all paper maps and take-your-own-photos.  And a lot more individualized.

After a quick history search, looks like misc.transport.road was created in late 1995.  As I recall, it was split off from the misc.transport.urban.transit newsgroup.  The first MTR post I can positively identify using Google as a search was dated 12/5/95 by Brent White.  Some early MTR users whose names I recall from my own MTR start include Colin Leech, Richard Moeur, and "Exile on Market Street" who IIRC was Philly-based.

[kphoger]

Tell me I'm not the only one who used to buy paper fold-out road maps at Barnes & Noble, of foreign countries I had no plan to actually visit.

[Max Rockatansky]

I'd look at them when we visited stores.  I don't recall if I ever convinced my parents to buy one.  I usually kept my dad's Rand McNally Atlas until it was needed. 

[1995hoo]

Long story short, prior to the internet it was all paper maps and take-your-own-photos.  And a lot more individualized.

....

In this vein, our younger forum members might want to note that digital cameras were still relatively uncommon, and considered either oddities or a luxury camera, for the first couple of years after 2000. I remember when my now-wife got her first one in late 2001 (she won it as a prize at her office Christmas party), whenever she handed it to someone else to take a picture of us they were often somewhat confounded by it and she had to tell them it was a digital camera and show them what to press.

The relevance of that here is that it helps explain why there are so many fewer old pictures available. The use of film cameras meant you had to be more judicious about whether something was worthy of a photo because you were limited by how many frames the film allowed (for a 35 mm camera, typically it was 24 or 36, though you could sometimes squeeze in one more if you were careful). And using those photos nowadays means either scanning the printed photo itself or using a negative scanner to scan the negatives or the slides (if you used slide film instead of print film). You also have to know where you have all those old photos stored.

I have in mind to get a negative scanner to scan all my old negatives and all of my late father's slides. But it would be a gargantuan task that would take a long time, and I'm not sure there's a lot of practical reason to do it because I suspect nobody would want any of it after I die.

[bmorrill]

Tell me I'm not the only one who used to buy paper fold-out road maps at Barnes & Noble, of foreign countries I had no plan to actually visit.

You aren't. 

[hbelkins]

Long story short, prior to the internet it was all paper maps and take-your-own-photos.  And a lot more individualized.

....

In this vein, our younger forum members might want to note that digital cameras were still relatively uncommon, and considered either oddities or a luxury camera, for the first couple of years after 2000. I remember when my now-wife got her first one in late 2001 (she won it as a prize at her office Christmas party), whenever she handed it to someone else to take a picture of us they were often somewhat confounded by it and she had to tell them it was a digital camera and show them what to press.

The relevance of that here is that it helps explain why there are so many fewer old pictures available. The use of film cameras meant you had to be more judicious about whether something was worthy of a photo because you were limited by how many frames the film allowed (for a 35 mm camera, typically it was 24 or 36, though you could sometimes squeeze in one more if you were careful). And using those photos nowadays means either scanning the printed photo itself or using a negative scanner to scan the negatives or the slides (if you used slide film instead of print film). You also have to know where you have all those old photos stored.

I have in mind to get a negative scanner to scan all my old negatives and all of my late father's slides. But it would be a gargantuan task that would take a long time, and I'm not sure there's a lot of practical reason to do it because I suspect nobody would want any of it after I die.

That's why Michael Summa was such a legend in this hobby. He took gobs of film photos, had them developed and printed, and then scanned them in when digital technology became prevalent.

Back in the late 90s, I was able to take a number of photos while driving operating a Minolta SLR camera with a 135mm lens. I ended up scanning a large number of photos and negatives. I wouldn't attempt to take a picture with a viewfinder camera now. That's why I have stuck to my Canon faux-DSLR camera with a viewscreen for road trip photography instead of using the Nikon DSLR my brother gave me.

[kurumi]

In the old days, before online maps, highway logs, articles, publications:
* buying old maps on eBay -- old maps being one of the early primary sources of highway history. Even with their mistakes, time lags, etc.
* buying a map of a bordering state because it might show a few miles of your state's roads from 70 years ago
* spending an afternoon in a library (CT state, DOT, Berkeley, etc.) taking notes and copying stuff
* not knowing what a new project might look like until you drive down there to see it (US 7 / CT 15 interchange in 1992 ... ugh)
* difficulty in verifying information because there's no corroborating (or invalidating) second source. Example: SR 921 in Bloomfield turned out to be true, eventually; while SR 585 on Portland Road in Marlborough (seen once) was eventually confirmed false.

[Hot Rod Hootenanny]

And imagination.
I would draw maps of neighborhoods we lived in, or visited, and that eventually morphed into me drawing imaginary maps of real locations (and making things more complicated than what really existed)

[Roadgeekteen]

And imagination.
I would draw maps of neighborhoods we lived in, or visited, and that eventually morphed into me drawing imaginary maps of real locations (and making things more complicated than what really existed)

On an old Rand McNally, I drew fictional interstates on the map as a kid. It was a very FritzOwl-like map. Unlike other users, part of my childhood was as an active member of this forum, and some of the low-quality maps on the forum I posted back in 2017 showed.

[dlsterner]

So what was roadgeeking like back in the 80s and 90s? ...

Roadgeekteen, you're making me feel old with that comment!  I started an interest in maps and where we were going on trips since the late 1960s (Always by car; we never flew).

My father would - every year - get a shipment of maps from AAA covering our upcoming trip.  Back then, the Interstate system was still piecemeal.  I would pore over those maps and get excited when I saw a newly opened section of Interstate that we could use.

Also, for motel reservations (we favored Holiday Inn) we would grab paper directories that were in each room.  Reservations for future night were made by actually going to the registration desk and asking the clerk to make them.

[MikeTheActuary]

One of the best things about my grandfather coming to visit, growing up in the 80's, was being taken to AAA to get maps.

I also got Rand McNally road atlases every year for my birthday, and my father passed along his county-counting hobby to me in junior high, when my mom got both of us large county-outline maps of the US.

Although I was active on USENET from 1990 on, I didn't discover mtr until 1995 or 1996, when it got a mention in a WSJ A-hed column.

[kphoger]

I still use highlighters to trace routes in my Rand McNally road atlas.  I just do it in the previous edition once I get a new one.  The new one stays unmarked until later replaced.

Also, for motel reservations (we favored Holiday Inn) we would grab paper directories that were in each room.

Yes, I remember my parents using a booklet of motel locations and then calling the number to make a reservation.

Also, back before the internet days, the big blue service signs along the Interstate were actually useful because they provided information you didn't already know.

[Henry]

And imagination.
I would draw maps of neighborhoods we lived in, or visited, and that eventually morphed into me drawing imaginary maps of real locations (and making things more complicated than what really existed)

On an old Rand McNally, I drew fictional interstates on the map as a kid. It was a very FritzOwl-like map. Unlike other users, part of my childhood was as an active member of this forum, and some of the low-quality maps on the forum I posted back in 2017 showed.

I can't begin to imagine how much more outlandish your creations were compared to mine! At least some of mine were actually built in the decades that followed, such as I-22, I-49, the western I-88 (which was I-82 in my early plans, and noncontiguous with the one in WA and OR), and the eastern extension of I-40, which I labeled as I-97 (the real one in MD initially did not get a number at all, then became a rerouted I-83 after its original route was cancelled).

[Flint1979]

I used to collect maps from every state and had atlases. I remember early on before the internet there was a program on the computer called Automap and it was kind of like a GPS but it only showed major roads not really like Google Maps but it was there. I actually learned my way around Detroit before GPS systems were out and would always go there every weekend and ride around the city. I would collect city maps too and still have a Detroit city map on a wall. I would go for rides and get lost at times but always found my way back and I always could back track my route easily. I remember the first time I went to Cleveland I had a Rand McNally atlas with me that was kind of funny.

[Scott5114]

Richard Moeur

Fun fact, if you go look at the current set of Arizona DOT standard sign specifications, his name is on every single one of them. (My wife saw me looking at them once and thought it was absolutely hysterical that for example text, he used "Destination" and "Destinbtion".)

[formulanone]

On the plus side, gas was seen as a relatively cheap expense until the mid-2000s, as long as you got 25-30 mpg. Which helped if you drove around a lot.

Recent maps were not very expensive or even free. I went to libraries to see older or more types of maps.

So in some ways, this hobby could be a cheap thrill if you had a car and some extra time on your hands.

I probably took one photo per roll that might even come close to being related to this hobby. So maybe just a few per year, but that varied as film development cost more. I took a lot of black-and-white in the 1990s because I had access to a darkroom for a few years and the costs were half as much as color film. (That ended around 1995, as both "labs" were becoming the same prices in process costs.)

[1995hoo]

And imagination.
I would draw maps of neighborhoods we lived in, or visited, and that eventually morphed into me drawing imaginary maps of real locations (and making things more complicated than what really existed)

I traced the map of the neighborhood from the school phone directory but filled in missing segments where I felt areas should have been connected (such as where the ends of two cul-de-sacs essentially faced each other). Eventually that morphed into giving every road an Interstate number.

I personally took all those "maps" to the landfill (as opposed to just putting them in the trash) before I left for college lest my parents find them and ridicule me. I kind of wish I still had some of the wilder variants to post on this forum, but what can you do.

[Max Rockatansky]

I used to draw road and infrastructure stuff also when I was a kid.  I had a pretty kick ass Lego city going through high school.  I often would repurpose some of the building for east A grades on projects.  Pretty much all of this got thrown out the window and/or abandoned once I graduated high school.  Adult life started fast once I packed up and moved to Phoenix.