Open During Construction: Oregon Roads & Highways Homepage, Interstate 7 Proposal
While this site uses information from many sources, including the Oregon Department of Transportation, ORoads is in no way affiliated with, associated with, or sponsored by ODOT in any way, shape, or form. This site was created after a school project concerning topographic maps and unsafe road alignments along Oregon highways, but has since become a way to show my interest in the Oregon highway/route system.
...But the ORoads bugs are starting to bite (they often bite far apart from each other). But I couldn't resist after spying this document on the Oregon DOT website: The History of State Highways in Oregon.
About 4 or 5 years ago, I obtained a document from an employee at ODOT that was essentially a very rough draft of this document. It provided a lot of insight into the history of Oregon state highways, but reading through the technical jargon proved a little difficult, especially trying to make sense of the jurisdictional transfer agreements that weren't listed in great detail. But this is much more polished, with maps (when available) and plain English descriptions with many references and exact dates, something that someone like me would salivate over.
I will incorporate information from this document into my pages that have a lot of speculation and date guesstimation. The primary focus of this site is on the state route, not the state highway, and I don't think this document explains every single realignment a route may go through. But it's an immense treasure, and I look forward to extracting its gems and displaying them here.
With all this talk about conserving energy, what with high gas prices and the threat of global climate shift and the whatever, I have decided that it is time to start conserving disk space. The first thing that I did in this area was to remove some old photos and maps from the site and scuttle them off to my ImageShack account. However, I am writing now to share an innovation that I am working on for the site: Dynamic Route Logs, or Route Logs that are generated based on a variable in the URL, not by creating separate pages.
The reason for this is two-fold. One is the 20MB bandwidth restriction imposed by Angelfire (I'm not rich enough to own my own server, and I don't have time to shop for other free services). The other is because I hate making the route logs in the format they're in now. With my liberal use of graphics (which do not render properly in Firefox) and nested tables, some of the route logs can get quite bloated and confusing to read from a coding standpoint. Then, if ODOT decides to change a routing, I have to change every single milepost all the way down the line. This is the main reason why I've been putting off updating my US-26 page.
However, these problems will be greatly reduced by my Dynamic Route Log system. How it works is this: Each route log will now consist of three files: A route-specific JavaScript file, an output JavaScript file, and a shell HTML page. The route-specific JavaScript file will contain all the information needed to be prepared by the output JavaScript file and displayed by the shell HTML file, stored in arrays to aid with recursion. Total mileposts are stored as the distance between mileposts, so that when I need to add another few entries I only have to change a couple of total milepost values; the changes will trickle down. The best part is that since the output JavaScript file and the shell HTML are used by every script file, it saves a bunch of space.
Here's an example:
Under the Dynamic Route Log system, I saved over 19.5 KB of space on my site with OR-6's route log along. While it may seem small in comparison to the many gigabytes on my computer, but if I applied it to just 25 pages, I would save 487.5 KB on my site, enough to add another 30 or so web pages of average size. And since the last two pages are only on the server once, I actually end up saving a lot more space than that.
Look for this system to be implemented over the next couple days.
In other news, my pages for OR-46, OR-70, OR-201, and OR-202 are up, albeit not 100% complete. If there were only a system to create my maps in the Rediscovering sections automatically...
As you may be aware, I tend not to update this part of the site very frequently. But as part of some site maintenance, I decided to overhaul the main page's look and give some insight onto choice Oregon Routes, some of which you won't see anywhere else.
These routes, and more, can be found in the Roads & Highways Homepage. More shorter routes, such as OR-46, OR-62, and OR-70, will be coming soon.
The Oregon Department of Transportation has a plethra of state highways under its jurisdiction, referencing it by its number and name (examples: Pacific Highway #1, Olds Ferry-Ontario Highway #455). This system has been in place in Oregon since 1917. Beginning in 1926, Oregon co-signed its highway numbers with route numbers of US Routes (example: US-30 was signed along the Columbia River Highway #2 and the Old Oregon Trail #6) and then Oregon's own primary state routes (one- or two-digit route numbers) in 1932 and secondary state routes (2xx route numbers) in 1935 (examples: OR-8 was signed over a portion of the Tualatin Valley Highway #29, OR-214 was signed over the Silver Creek Falls Highway #163).
This system, though novel for ODOT's record-keeping purposes, can prove to be a nightmare for travellers. Someone travelling on US-20 from Newport to the Idaho Border will experience five different "MILE 1" markers alone due to mileposts following highway mileage instead of route mileage. Fortunately, as of 2002, ODOT is attempting to solve the problem. You see, state routes most often have (or have had) state highway names/numbers, but a lot of state highways have no state route attached to them. Some are so small that they are barely noticed or serve no function (the Swift Highway #120 in North Portland comes to mind); still others are freeways encircling cities (Belt Line #69 in Eugene).
So ODOT has tried to alleviate some of the strain (or possibly add to the confusion) by designating these so-called "hidden" state highways with state route numbers corresponding most of the time with their highway number (the aforemetioned Swift Highway was designated OR-120 in July 2002). If for some reason the state highway number corresponds to a route number already in use, then it is assigned a 500-series number ending with the last two digits of its highway number (Wilsonville-Hubbard Highway #51 = OR-551). The implementation process still remains to be seen (the last route approved was OR-141 along the Beaverton-Tualatin Highway #141, which is also old OR-217), but I will list all of the proposed/accepted highway numbers in a new page soon.
Also, more than 10 new pages have been created, and I've uploaded an index to the Roads folder so you can navigate through all the pages I've created.
I am working at a fevered pace to put this site up, but so far, I really only have a few pages up: My Interstate 205 page, my Interstate 405 page, and my just-added Interstate 105, Interstate 82, and Interstate 7 page. But never fear! All the pages I'm planning will be up soon. I am also working to obtain information pertaining to these roads, such as traffic cameras and the like. So far, enjoy the site.
