Potential Associate Member

After some emails back and forth between myself and Alex Nitzman of aaroads.com, it appears that I might become an associate member of that site! That would entail me helping out with updates on photos and captions of photos they have in their backlog as well as adding photos of my own. My specialty areas would be Connecticut and Oregon since that's where I have the most pictures and knowledge of. What this means for my site is that I probably won't be adding much if anything else to it since I would like future additions to go to the aaroads family of web sites. My site did serve a purpose; my guide to US 97/Bend Parkway showed that I know how to take decent pictures as well as write captions.

Posted US 6/Windham Expressway Page

Today I finally got to taking the pictures I took of the US 6 expressway in eastern Connecticut and putting them on my site. I only have the westbound guide to it done, but the eastbound guide as well as miscellaneous associated photos won't take too long to post. I have taken some photos of I-384 and have considered contributing them to interstate-guide.com so that those guys can incorporate them into their site. My pictures are decent but they will be helped out by the new 8 MP digital camera that I am getting soon.

Here's the page for the US 6 Expressway.

US/state shield mix-ups

For those of you in the United States, you may or may not have noticed that road numbers have different backgrounds on their signs depending on the type and location of the road. Interstates are in the blue and red shields, state routes shield or border depends on the state with most being a simple shield or like most New England states just a square, and finally the U.S. routes that have their number in a white shield that is a bit fancier than a state one.




There is no Oregon state route 20, however there is a U.S. Route 20 that runs from Newport, OR to Boston, MA. This picture was taken July 2006. The picture on the right is the updated sign at the same location. The upper portion of the sign and the route number shield have been omitted. About a few hundred feet after the interchange there is a sign with that information for distances to Millican and Burns as well as the correct U.S. 20 sign.

This picture is incorrect because route 19 is an Oregon state route, not a U.S. route. US 19 exists from Erie, PA to Memphis, FL. It doesn't even come close to being in Oregon. State Route 19 runs mostly north-south from a southern terminus at US 26 in Picture Gorge to a northern terminus of Arlington, OR at I-84.

Oregon's successor to the gas tax

Oregon has brought up a good idea for the eventual phasing out of the gas tax and phasing in a road user fee based upon the amount of miles. A transponder in your car would keep track of how many miles you drove on Oregon's roads and would transmit that data at the gas pump so you would pay the fee there rather than paying a gas tax. As a revenue source, the gas tax has failed to keep up with inflation as well as the increased fuel economy in vehicles lessens how much fuel people purchase. I think for this to take off, it would need to be implemented in at least a block of states to begin with or even nationally. Also, it sounds like their plan would be to include the transponder only in new vehicles and existing vehicles would just pay the gas tax. This way neither the DOT nor the consumer would have to pay to retrofit older autos. Anyway, more can be read about it here.