Half a croissant, on a plate, with a sign in front of it saying '50c'
h a l f b a k e r y
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Coloured Roads

Paint roads to match road map colours
  (+7, -1)
(+7, -1)
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A simple aid to avoid getting lost while driving around. Paint the roads to match the colours on maps. If you get lost, just look down and you'll have a bit of a clue as to where you are.

Could even lead to people giving better directions: "follow the blue road to the end, turn left onto the yellow road, and about three miles along you need to take the green road on the right..."

gardnose, May 11 2001

(?) Pictures of the roads to the hillbilly's house :-) http://www.kellyele...ads/WV%20Roads.html
USA roads...gotta love them [Susen, May 11 2001, last modified Oct 21 2004]

rainbow cars http://www.halfbake...idea/rainbow_20cars
If we have colored roads, we need this too.... [egnor, May 11 2001, last modified Oct 17 2004]

(?) Hard Problems http://swww.ee.uwa....lsd210/ds/hard.html
Scroll down to "Map Colouring" - probably applicable to road colouring [hippo, May 11 2001, last modified Oct 21 2004]

[link]






       This would work better if the colors on maps where arbitrary. As is, they indicate which type of street you're on, and you can usually already tell that - "turn onto the little side street" already carries all the information "turn onto the grey street" would have in your example.
jutta, May 11 2001
  

       People well versed in topology could probably recommend the optimal number of colours for roads to used for differing kinds of road networks.   

       Yellow roads would lead to wizards, of course.
Aristotle, May 11 2001
  

       Straight ahead
Follow the trees
Till there's a south
Take it two miles
That's as far as I see
From my house
  

       Should be required signage down the way from a hillbilly's house
reensure, May 11 2001
  

       Of course this would also lead to legislation (at least in the US) that fit the guideline for American's with Disabilitys Act to make sure that the colorblind are also represented.   

       While we're at it, how about making it mandatory to also include road signs in braille?
RobGraham, May 11 2001
  

       Susan: I'm familiar with SR60, site of many of the photos at your link. We assumed that surveys were done by two fellows with radios. You know, "Little more to the right." "No, that's my right". It's a traditional method of roadbuilding that's been all but lost and forgotten beneath periodic reenforcing and repaving. Where else is a "pretty good pile" considered a prepared surface?
reensure, May 11 2001
  

       reensure: I lived in West Virginia for three years....lord but I don't miss driving those roads in winter....I slid off the road once and went down over a 60 foot embankment onto another road and just kept driving..... I love my pickup.
Susen, May 11 2001
  

       Susen, off topic: A little take on Appalachian hunger. Having once ventured up a 'hollow' road off SR2, the kind that just begins in someone's driveway and proceeds off their property and up the hillside, I drove about two miles upward on a road with absolutely no room for passing a car on the way down. At the top of the grade was a small community of about 10 houses and two Meals on Wheels trucks. Kind of makes you feel small.
reensure, May 11 2001
  

       Back when local quarries were used for crushed rock in roadbuilding many of southwestern Oregon's paved roads had a decidedly greenish cast (greenschist?) and some in the central part of the state were reddish because red basaltic cinder was used. Modern surfacing techniques seem to have turned everything grey-black but some of the older secondary roads are still colored.
Dog Ed, May 11 2001
  

       Hey Susen, Thanks for the plug...   

       How'd you come by my page, anyway? Just curious.   

       -Virgil   

       We're not hillbillies... we're mountaineers. Hillbillies live in Tennessee... ;-)
sparky66wv, May 12 2001
  

       Hi sparky (Virgil), I found it one day when I had too much free time on my hands----I have no idea how I ended up on your page...but the pictures were great and I bookmarked it for future reference. I do miss WV...I went to college there and spent a lot of time at Mountaineer Park. Your pictures are great! (how did you find out that I linked to it from here?)
Susen, May 12 2001
  

       My web space provider also has tools to do research on my site statistics. Helps to know who to give credit for my page views! Thanks again...   

       -Virgil
sparky66wv, May 12 2001
  

       How 'bout them ears, sparky? BTW, in tennessee you find hicks, not hbillys. Hbillys are in Arkansas, yes? A hick is, of course, Halfways to Indiana, Carolinas, &Kentucky. Probably dates from prior to the early 1800 reapportionment that created Kentucky and left many roads red--as the redmen went.   

       I liked your site as well, sent a link to a musician buddy in Kansas City. Love your area, having spent a few binge moment out at Blue Hole near the old scout camp. Luck to you.
reensure, May 12 2001
  

       As one versed in Cartography, I know there is a limit to the amout of colours that you can use on one map sheet before it gets cluttered and confusing but the thing that worries me is where will the gigantic legend box go and how will you view it. For example, If we're to paint all of London's roads, will we stick the the legend in Kent, (no offence), and view it via satellite. Also, do we we paint the road names along the road as on street plans. There could be a problem with a) paying attention to the road while trying to drive, (e.g. O...X...F...O...R...D.....S...T...R...CRASH!), and b) Assuming you don't shunt somebody you could drive past your turning before figuring out where the hell you are.
Ivy, May 14 2001, last modified May 15 2001
  

       RE: Roads to hillbilly's house. (Susen)   

       We have loads of single track roads in the UK. If you go anywhere in the south west or in scotland or the yorkshire/derbyshire dales you'll see loads of them.   

       Many of them have hedges both sides right up to the edge of the road, so if you meet someone coming the other way, one of you has to back up to a passing point. (They are around every 50 metres.)   

       These roads tend to be very twisty and a made up of blind corners. They are caused by the road following the shape of the fields, which always had wiggly boundaries due to how they were plowed in the Olde days.   

       It just means you have to actually LOOK WHERE YOU ARE GOING and drive sensibly. I don't understand what your problem is.
CasaLoco, May 14 2001
  

       CasaLoco: I didn't mean to imply I had a problem with these roads.... Having grown up in the Appalachian region of the US and having spent a good portion of my adult life there....I am a master at taking blind curves at 55 mph. I also have one car that has had 4 new front ends due to encounters with deer (speed beef). Fortunately, the deer I've hit with the truck did minimal damage to the truck...I took out a lovely 8 point buck on the first day of buck season once with my truck...took that sucker home, butchered it, and fed it to the dogs. My link and comments about West Virgina were due to my many fond memories of the state and the roads that they have there. We just don't have roads like that in Indiana.
Susen, May 14 2001
  

       Don't call them "colored", just call them "black".
Duffi, May 14 2001
  

       CasaLoco and Susen These roads you speak of are better than any fairground ride. Fear, you don't know what fear is until you've been round a blind bend a bit too quick, found your way blocked by an industrial strength tractor being driven at 40 mph by some headcase out of his brains on scrumpy and then in your fright realising that you can no longer identify the brake pedal with ease. Even better at night. CasaL, some of these roads were also dug out by the rutting caused by carts over hundreds of years. When they finally invented tarmac, they simply put a hard surface along the bottom of the huge rut. Great stuff the bakery. Eductational while being fun to play with.
Ivy, May 15 2001
  

       [Ivy]: You don't need a legend. The point is not that every road is given a unique color, but that colors can be compared against map colors to give you some notion of where you might be and where you can't possibly be. (I'm in this area, at the intersection of a small blue street with a large red street. I *thought* I was following this road, but that can't be right, eh?)
egnor, May 15 2001
  

       While we are at it, lets get the guy that does the white lines on the road to draw white lines on all the hills showing 10m intervals. We could call them contour lines...???...
DRudge, Dec 05 2002
  

       This could be done with GPS and a color HUD. Just follow the Yellow Brick Road to your destination.
FloridaManatee, Mar 06 2003
  
      
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