I rejoice at road signs. I pore over planning maps. I sit for hours at a time and draw my own maps, with intricate streets and freeways and interchanges. I play with SignMaker at kurumi.com all the time. I spend even more time at the websites of Departments of Transportation, looking at engineering maps of new roads and freeways. I take old maps and draw on them, putting roads and freeways where I think they should be.
I think it started when I was a kid, about six years old, and I got SimCity. I was instantly addicted, and I’ve kept up through the ages, always building as big of a city with as complex of a freeway system as I could manage.
Well, I’m only a road fan, but I hear you. When I was a child, my reading material of choice was atlases – I loved to trace roads across the US, doodle in new roads, what have you. I’m still known to study atlases from time to time – the more detailed, the merrier, that way I can memorize how to get anywhere. A site of interest – my newest roads addiction is Arizona Roads.
I spend lots of time poring over atlases as well, but my real obsession is topo maps. I can look at one for hours, then when I am actually at the place, it feels as if I had already been there!
I wouldn’t call myself a roadgeek, but one of my favorite things about trips is the planning of the trip.
Pulling out the atlas and seeing where things are, what towns I’m going to pass through, or even just imagining trips and thinking about the places I could see. The road trips themselves are fun, but just as much fun is the planning of the trip.
I’m not exactly a roadgeek, but when you’re on long trip, there isn’t much else to do but look at the road signs. I’ve seen way too many deer crossing signs where someone has added a red nose to the deer to count.
The most memorable was one (acutally a pair of signs) I remember seeing in the Milwaukee area. The top-most sign on the pole said ‘STOP’ the one beneath that said ‘TRAFFIC KEEP MOVING’. Eh?
(The intersection had two lanes… turns out the ‘keep moving’ sign was supposed to go for the right-most lane, which was a turn-only and had its own lane so stopping wasn’t neccessary. Later on, I noticed they had corrected it to ‘RIGHT LANE TRAFFIC KEEP MOVING’. Too bad I don’t have a pic.)
<< History may not repeat itself, but it does rhyme a lot. — Mark Twain >>
I have a singular and demented love for the NYS Thruway’s upstate east/west leg; at one point, I could recite to you every exit and what towns were on the sign (I did a lot of drivin’ between albany-home and rochester-college). I even had a NYS Thruway map up on the wall of my room, right next to my bed (which always puzzled my then girlfriend). Now that I’m in Jersey, the roads are poorly designed and the signage is the worst I’ve ever encountered. I weep whenever I take long drives here.
As far as the best sign ever, it’s obviously the one that you see warning motorists of a Speed Bump - the sign’s erroneous language (Speed Hump) is the source of the humor. I think the expected steal rate of these signs is about 20 times higher than any other sign (my buddy has one hanging on the ceiling above his bed).
Maybe a good psychiatrist can pinpoint the reason why, but ever since I was around four, I’ve been intensely fascinated by road maps. When other kids were reading comic books, playing sports, and doing other normal youth activities, I used to draw maps of imaginary cities and states copying the format used on H.M. Gousha’s highway maps (I liked their format better than Rand-McNally’s). I used to visualize the places I created and–like in Sim City–plot out the communities. Then puberty hit, I discovered girls, and I stopped drawing maps. (Although, I still find a road atlas to be engrossing reading.
There’s a man in my house who has a mapmaker program on the laptop, a travel atlas that fits in the saddlebags, 4 weather links on the browser, plus a link to topography for any given area…:rolleyes:
I just sit on the back, read the signs, wave alot, and keep an eye out for great little roadside cafes.
Ever read misc.transport.road? Yup, there’s a whole newsgroup for roadgeeks. I lurked there for a while…interesting reading.
It appeals to the history buff in me. I love finding old road signs, or ones that aren’t quite “right” (different font than usual, for instance.) I mouned the loss of the old button-copy signs on westbound U.S. 12 between I-494 and Long Lake, MN…(One of those signs even had the old “THRU TRAFFIC” instead of the big downward arrow used today.) Of course, if I say that to most people, they don’t even know what I’m talking about. The new signs have a nice rainbow sheen to them if the sun hits them just right, though. Oh, well, there’s still plenty of button-copy in Wisconsin, but it’s disappearing there, too.
I used to watch I-90 from my back yard as a kid. I was fascinated by the fact that my little home town was connected to so many places by this road–Seattle, Chicago, Boston. Just hop in your car and drive.
I like funny signs, too. There was one near the park at the ond of the street where my parents live: “Dead End” and, underneath on the same pole, “Slow Children”. I took a picture of that sign for a high school photography class. They later removed the “Slow Children” sign and replaced it with a sign that said “Watch for Children” on a separate pole. Oh well.
My daughter likes maps, too, but she doesn’t seem to be as much in love with the actual roads. I think the city does that to you–roads are more of a nuisance than an opportunity of adventure.
I’m a streetnamegeek. I am weirdly fascinated by streetnames. I like the ones that are named after presidents (downtown Memphis has Madison, Monroe, Jefferson, Adams, Washington, Jackson) and states (Lawrence, KS has streets named after all 50 states, I believe). I like the fact that nearly every city seems to have an MLK Jr. Boulevard. I also like the street names that sound “normal” even though you can’t quite define what makes street names canonical. (I don’t think I’m describing this well.) Streets like Elzey and Evelyn, Lincoln Way and Lexington, Seagraves and Shirl.
I’m also a big fan of county names, for some reason. I love hearing the names of counties where my out-of-town friends live or have lived. (Memphis is in Shelby County.)
Eh?