Transportation Mis/Information
I mentioned here last Wednesday the CHEN College Town shuttle, and saw this map of the three routes at one of its bus stops, when I walked down Warren Street to the College of Architecture and Design gallery of NJIT this Monday for the closing reception of the 2+2 exhibition. The dark spots top and bottom middle are bolts to the supporting post, joined by a faint line of corroded metal.

Nearby was an electronic sign with info about the next bus. I tried to get the "crawl" along the bottom, but missed all except the tail end.

Notice anything wrong? "Kearny" is misspelled on this electronic sign, tho it is spelled right on the map shown above.
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I tried to get a sharper picture than the ambient-lite shot above, but when I snapped a flash foto, the letters and numbers turned out to be unreadable, perhaps caut in some mid-phase stage that was illegible. I took a second flash foto, to no better effect. Why?

When I returned to my car (the shuttles don't go near my house, and I'm not a student, tho I might like to take some computer and digital-fotografy courses from some college, perhaps ECC, which is free for old folks), I was about to open my driver's-side door when a metallic-silver Town Car (or similar) limo pulled up and the driver hailed me. Now, that's a change. He asked how to get to Florham Park. I was a little surprised, tho not at being asked for directions. I've been asked for directions a lot, including, among other places, Seneca Falls, NY, which I had never been to before (my father and I were visiting a town the family had lived in before my birth, in The Olden Days), and had arrived only about 20 minutes earlier; Ottawa, Ontario; and, I think, in then-Leningrad (present St. Petersburg) — in Russian! No, what I was startled at is that a limo driver with passenger would have no GPS and would be so lost as to be at Lock and Warren Streets in Downtown Newark when he was supposed to be driving to Florham Park.
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I had to think. I told him that he was in the wrong county (Essex, when he should have been in Morris), not just city, and that the only way I know to get to Florham Park is via South Orange Avenue. But how to get to SOA from Lock and Warren? There was a curving road feeding into Lock, which screwed up my perceptions, since the rectangular grid had been skewed by that curve. I thought a bit, then realized I had a

Only after he had driven off did I realize that MLK does not quite intersect SOA, but actually hits Springfield Avenue one block east of the start of SOA. I had, I think, told him there was a big courthouse at the right road. Afterward, I hoped he either realized that the back of the Old Essex County Courthouse was a courthouse, or that he would mistake the Hall of Records a block above as the courthouse I meant, so made the right turn at Springfield, whereupon he would see the 510 sign for SOA at most 200 feet off to the right. But at least he would know to ask the next person he asked, where South Orange Avenue is, if he drove beyond it.
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After that limo driver pulled away, I pulled out of my parking place straight ahead, ran into Central Avenue, made the left, then left again on First Street to go to the Bergen Street Pathmark — and realized that I could have told the driver to go that way, because just after the B St Pmk parking lot was SOA! But you might often drive places readily without realizing how to tell other people to follow the same route, and the driver didn't write anything down, so might not have remembered. Ah, well. I tried.
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When I got home and checked the .PDF Downtown Business District map that I have stored on my computer Desktop, as to what I had told the limo driver, I confirmed my error, but found another, this one in the internally illuminated map of the NJIT campus that appears in this next foto and which I compared to my .PDF map.
As you can see from this closer view zoomed in on via my graffics program, that map shows "Academy Street" for what is, according to my Business District map, Raymond Boulevard. I know that if you drive up Raymond Boulevard, you merge into Lock Street.

Here's that area as shown on the Business District map. Who's right, the makers of that map or the makers of the NJIT campus map?

I checked my other .PDF map, the Official City Map, to be sure that my understanding was based on the official street names.

So it would seem that somebody at NJIT goofed. As to whether the CHEN "Next Bus" electronic sign's mistake ("Kearney") is NJIT's, CHEN's, or someone else's, I do not know. But society has got to be more careful, and proofreading must be appreciated for the valuable skill it is. Proofreaders are not dispensable. Organizations and businesses should at least run things past a few different sets of eyes before committing texts to maps and signs. It's embarrassing when a university, or group of universities, makes conspicuous mistakes.
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(My two .PDF maps used to be available for download from GoNewark.com, but seem no longer to be offered there. Why the heck not? Shouldn't the "new" version of anything also be "improved"?)


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