Roads and the Internet

Roads and the Internet

The study of roads is different than it was eighteen years ago. During these years, so-called “roadfans” were isolated and found no others to share their hobby with. Eighteen years later, with the proliferation of the internet, this is no longer a problem. There are many avenues that a roadfan can pursue in their line of interest.

Online Direction Sites

There are a few main sites online that give directions (although there are plenty of others). The main ones to know about are Mapquest, Google Maps, Yahoo Maps, and Bing.

Mapquest (www.mapquest.com) has become the more traditional brand name used in this context; Mapquest has even published traditional paper road atlases. However, Mapquest tends to have a Western bias, with detailed maps and directions only being available in the United States, Canada, and Western Europe. During the last few years, Mapquest has fallen out of popularity due to the proliferation of the other websites listed here.

Google Maps (http://maps.google.com) has come through the continual expansion of Google into different fields. Even though they are newer than Mapquest, they have drawn a lot of attention, likely due to the Google brand name. Internationally, Google Maps are not as effective, though with their program in the late 2000’s to involve other users in developing coverage for third-world countries, the maps are somewhat more reliable internationally. However, they do hold some advantages due to integration with other Google services.

Yahoo Maps (http://maps.yahoo.com) are lesser-known and lesser-used than the other sites listed here, but due to some inaccuracies in Google Maps, some people have begun to use them again.

The newest site is Bing Maps (www.bing.com/maps), sponsored by Microsoft. Bing is Microsoft’s new search engine and the default on the Internet Explorer platform. It remains to be seen how reliable and useful these maps are to the general public and to the roadfan, due to the site being so new.

Mapping and Modeling

This is a relatively new field, with the primary advancements in this technology being made in the last five years.

Satellite imaging became common in the mid 2000’s with advances like Microsoft-funded Terraserver. This was a repository of black-and-white satellite images that were stitched together. One could look up a location on the Internet and see the corresponding satellite images. Today, most online mapping sites have a satellite view where one can see the satellite images as an overlay to the online map that he or she is viewing.

However, the advent of Google Earth transformed this field. Google Earth displays the Earth in 3-D, with 3-D models of major cities whenever possible. Topography is also displayed in 3-D. One can enter in a location around the world and see satellite imagery as well as overlays relating to roads, political boundaries, and internet connections to Panoramio (an image hosting site), National Geographic, and Wikipedia. Google Earth has become a staple of today’s office world, with many maps that do not follow the roadmap norm being printed off there.

Google StreetView, an extension of Google Maps and Google Earth, is another important service today. This allows one to view the 3-D models of a location in a city from the perspective of ground level (unlike the normal Google Earth view, where the perspective is from outer space). Specially equipped vans from Google drive on the street and take pictures of the street that are then stitched together and uploaded to the Google Maps site. Advanced technology blurs anything that should not be uploaded to the Internet, such as license plates and people’s faces; however, this technology is not flawless. Many foreign governments as well as the U.S. military have complained about such photography; however, despite this, more and more areas at home and abroad are continually being photographed and covered in Google StreetView in this manner.

Geographic information services (GIS) has also become a tool in the corporate world. Governmental agencies use this information to provide statistics like the status of natural resources or the current maintenance of state highways. The business world uses GIS to track information that is location-dependent; one example is the real-estate market.

Finally, the most recent development in this field is the advent of geotagging and location services. This involves the use of either a GPS receiver or triangulation from cellular towers to provide the user’s location to the user’s phone, camera, or iPod. From there, photos can be tagged with the location they were taken at (as in geotagging), points of interest nearby the user can be located easily, and the user’s location can be shared on social media such as Facebook or Twitter. While there is an obvious privacy concern with this recent development, there are clear benefits from this technological capability that are still being realized.

State Departments of Transportation

Every state and Puerto Rico has websites for their departments of transportation (although Puerto Rico’s is in Spanish!). The main advantage of these sites is that they frequently have freely-available information that cannot easily be found elsewhere. For example, there may be mileage logs, bridge logs, road construction information, legislative info, photo and video logs, exit lists, exit numbering guides, state MUTCD’s, and so much more. Sometimes, from the state DOT or the state tourism board website, there are highway maps that are free of charge – they even mail them to you.

Roadfan Websites

Many roadfans have created websites relating to roads. Perhaps the most famous one is AARoads (www.aaroads.com), which covers about 80% of the states. However, there are areas that it does not cover effectively; for example, California is about 90% covered, but there is very little coverage of North Dakota and South Dakota. Other sites deal with specific states only. Even [rschen7754] has his own website (www.rschen7754.com) that will soon cover much of California, Oregon, and Washington in terms of exit lists, plus provide road photos from the above plus other United States locations and Europe.

Another category of roadfan websites is the clinched counter website. There are two main websites: Mob-rule (www.mob-rule.com/counties) counts the number of counties that you have been in, and Cmap (http://cmap.m-plex.com) counts the percentage and mileage of your travels on the Interstate Highway System. The latter site was recently expanded to provide coverage of the U.S. Route system, in addition to several state highway systems and European, Canadian, and Mexican road systems. Both of these scoring systems promote competition among roadfans.

Wikipedia

During the mid-2000’s, road editors began to create and edit articles about roads on Wikipedia, the collaborative online encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org). Since then, the number and quality of the articles have increased to over 16,000, and there are over a hundred road editors and several divisions relating to roads.

The roads projects have been the scene of many recent successes; there are over thirty articles that are designated as “featured”, with over ten being displayed on the main page. Over 450 road articles have been designated as “good” articles as well. The U.S. Roads WikiProject (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:USRD) is well known for its work ethic and has been featured in the Wikipedia internal newsletter.

Controversy has not been a stranger to the roads department, however. Two arbitration cases faced the project in 2006 and 2008. However, since then, a strong project structure has been implemented for the U.S. Roads department, and the project is poised for great success in the months and years to come. Many ideas that have worked well in the U.S. project are currently being set up for the worldwide Highways project to help them get started as well.