Sorry, I'm really opinionated and maybe others don't agree but I find the transportation subforums really confusing. It's like its overly bureacratic but without a few clearly defined departments.

 

Take for instance the 3-C Corridor thread. It seems like it could easily go in Railways/Waterways or Mass Transit. But how do I know for sure where to find it or where to post a similar topic? How exactly are these subforums defined?

 

It seems like Railways & Waterways is for articles that talk about the broader political context while the Mass Transit board is used for specific initiatives in Ohio but they both seem very interwoven.

 

You guys don't think it would make more sense to combine railways from "Railways and Waterways" with "Mass transit"  :wtf:

 

If not, how exactly are the two subforums categorized? What exactly do you put in each one?

 

 

Well, mass transit would simply be any form of public transportation such as LRT, the Rapid, or buses.  The 3C should be in Railway since it's more of a state thing than a local mass transit thing.

The UO moderators don't classify topics as much as they manage emerging conversations. For example, the 3C Corridor and the Columbus Streetcar might both use rail, but the media coverage, laws and real-life groups behind each movement are very different, and so are the groups of people within our forum who participate in each conversation.

Civvik and ColDayMan pretty much nailed it; and while we try to keep everything organized, there are always going to be some grey areas. If a thread develops to the point that it might be better placed in another section, we'll move it.

I think this is more of a limitation of classification. Without moving to a forum that uses taggings instead of directories to store posts in (I don't think there is a package out there that does taggings), then these gray areas exist.

 

What I'd like to see is a forum package that you can attach tags to a particular post to for browsing. So a Cincinnati Streetcar thread could be tagged with predetermined tags, such as "rail" and "mass transit," and it can be viewed from the main page in such a manner. That could be a good project for me in 2010 :)

The UO moderators don't classify topics as much as they manage emerging conversations. For example, the 3C Corridor and the Columbus Streetcar might both use rail, but the media coverage, laws and real-life groups behind each movement are very different, and so are the groups of people within our forum who participate in each conversation.

 

Ok, so basically there is nothing really distinguishable between the two categories other than railways being more limiting to rail or current rail infrastructure.

 

I know everyone has bigger fish to fry, I just thought I'd bring it up because it sometimes takes forever to find the right child board with the thread I'm looking for, to add news. The other guys who post news in Transportation are virtuosos in that subforum and probably know more easily where threads are located.