Road Scholars Driven to Go the Extra Mile

Some people in California--perhaps the majority of them--see highways as a necessary nuisance, something to complain about on the way to and from work, maybe, but certainly not worth contemplating during their free time.

Then there are people like Mike Ballard.

He once spent three vacation days voluntarily organizing old records at Caltrans’ Sacramento headquarters, where the librarian knows him by name. He owns 40 years’ worth of Chevron gas station maps, and a set of concrete road markers adorns his front yard. He has adopted a two-mile stretch of Interstate 5 in Kern County so he’ll have an excuse for legally parking on the freeway, getting out of his car and poking around.

In other words, roads are Ballard’s hobby, one he devotes himself to with the same enthusiasm others reserve for bird-watching or collecting vintage glassware. A sometime college student and Santa Clarita native, he may be the only person ever to set a goal of driving the entire California highway system--all 16,622.16 miles of it. It only seems fair to ask: Why?

“I ask myself that often, and I’m not totally sure,” laughs Ballard, 23. “I chalk it up to my curiosity. I’m just always wondering what places once looked like.”

Although Ballard’s obsession might seem a little offbeat, he is not the only native son with a serious road trip. He is part of a small but dedicated group of highway enthusiasts who spend their leisure hours thinking about, studying and, yes, driving the state’s roads, making a serious pastime of something most folks take for granted.

Where the average motorist observes only a uniform blur of green and white whizzing past the windshield, for example, Joel Windmiller of Sacramento finds human foible in freeway signs and scours every one for misspellings and other bureaucratic bloopers. And while other drivers probably give little thought to the nonsequential numbers identifying state highways, Daniel Faigin, an aerospace engineer from North Hills, sees them as pieces of an intriguing puzzle.

After researching the history behind every highway naming and numbering, Faigin, 42, published his route-by-route findings on a Web site, www.cahighways.org. The project led to other interests, and his site now includes pages on proposed transportation legislation, updates on actions of the California Transportation Commission, and the latest Caltrans news.

“When you start looking at the history of highways, it takes you into a lot of areas, like railroads, architecture and politics,” said Faigin, who attributes his own status as a self-described “road geek” to his “very geographic mind.”

Like Faigin and Ballard, Andy Field, 29, of San Diego has been fascinated with highways for as long as he can remember. During car rides with his family as a child, he would pore over maps and imagine what towns he’d never visit looked like.

“Getting a road atlas was like a major gift for me,” Field said. “I would write in them where I thought roads should be.”

He abandoned the pastime when he was in high school--”It wasn’t in vogue. No one wanted to go out and look at road signs with me”--only to rediscover it during college in Wyoming. “I went back to my atlas and plotted how I would renumber all the interstate and U.S. routes in the country,” he said. But it wasn’t until he returned to California and discovered a road-related Internet newsgroup that he felt comfortable identifying himself as a highway groupie.

According to Field, “disbelief and relief” were his reaction upon realizing, “Oh, my God! There are other people out there like me. Finally, I have someone I can talk to about this stuff.”

After meeting online, he and several other California-based highway buffs have become friends who accompany each other on field trips. Last spring, a group of seven people that included Field, Faigin and Casey Cooper, 28, a road enthusiast from Orange County, spent a day exploring bridges, new freeway construction and signage in Riverside and San Bernardino counties. (An account of their outing, complete with pictures, is available on Field’s Web site, www.aaroads.com.)

When they are not on the road, they indulge their hobby by reading. Windmiller, the Sacramento-based highway junkie, regularly visits Caltrans headquarters to scout out the latest reports for his friends. Cooper is the envy of his traveling companions because he owns a lot of back issues of “California Highways and Public Works,” a magazine published by Caltrans’ predecessor from 1911 until 1967.

“I read them all the time,” he said. “It’s fascinating to me because these are historical documents and they offer a lot of insight of how people thought back then. Whether they are talking about highway projects in terms of jobs during the Depression or building freeways to service the suburbs during the 1950s, ultimately, roads are a metaphor.”

Although their areas of interest overlap, each has a slightly different take on roads. Ballard and Cooper, for instance, are chiefly attracted to historic roads. Faigin is into the numbers. Field is a generalist who takes equal delight in studying interchange design, considering ways to improve the state’s signage standards, and taking the time to stop and smell the asphalt.

Of them all, though, none is so committed a highwayman as Mike Ballard. How committed is he? Suffice to say that he grows wistful while discussing the history of the Santa Clarita segment of Sierra Highway, which once served as part of the main highway linking Los Angeles to Lancaster.

The road, which was first posted as State Route 7, then U.S. Route 6 and finally State Route 14, lost its highway designation altogether after construction of the Antelope Valley Freeway in 1963. Ballard paid the company that makes Caltrans’ road markers $35 to make him a custom “U.S. 6” shield. He took it out there one afternoon so he could experience what the route looked like in its heyday.

“Once you go along the old roads, you start seeing old gas stations and old restaurants that don’t get much business anymore,” he said. “They were once part of the main road and now they’ve been delegated to some side road, and that’s if you’re lucky.”

Two-and-a-half years ago, Ballard fulfilled his ambition of traveling every highway mile in California. He made most of the journey in his 1965 Ford Ranchero. The leg that took the longest to complete, Route 271 south of Eureka, is also one of his favorites. “I ended up walking part of it where it was closed because of a landslide,” he said.

Although he spread his journey over a couple of years, he estimates it took him about three months of actual driving time. It would have taken longer if he hadn’t given himself credit for routes he’d already traveled.

You’d think he would be sick of pounding the pavement after so many miles, but if anything, his appreciation has deepened. He is writing a book about U.S. 99, the former Los Angeles-to-Bakersfield route that, to Ballard’s thinking, is just as significant as its more famous cousin, Route 66. And he still enjoys hitting the highway. He has been revisiting the roads he particularly liked on his travels, this time on a bicycle.

“With an old road, there are only two ways it’s best done: in a Model T, which I’ve yet to experience, or on a bike, so you are going slow enough to see everything and enjoy it more,” he said.