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grover posted:I did an experiment yesterday when attempting to cross a crosswalk well-marked with a "STOP FOR PEDESTRIANS" sign (albeit the non-blinking kind) on a busy 2-lane road in an area where people are well accustomed to pedestrians having the right of way and stop at this crosswalk all the time. Makes sense to me. When I'm about to cross, I like to put one foot in the road, so there's no ambiguity. I can't vouch for what those guys were doing at the RRFB, but if he wasn't at least on the curb, then he's dumber than I thought.
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Sep 9, 2012 14:55
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Cichlidae posted:A huge majority of our pedestrian fatalities are either: distracted ped, drunk ped, or ped trying to cross a freeway on foot. The media here isn't really picking up on it, but it's very common for people to get hit because they were obliviously pecking away at their phones, or just listening to music while jogging in the road and couldn't hear the honks. Not that I'm blaming them for being a pedestrian, but their lives could have been saved if they'd been a bit more aware. Yeah, I see that everyday and from cyclists as well. It's been really bad for us this year and the local paper keeps screaming that "PEDESTRIAN FATALITIES ARE UP 40%!" but they're almost all weird things unpreventable from our side like drunk peds scrambling down a 20' retaining wall to cross a freeway 200' from an overpass. Or a driver so hopped up on Xanax he fell asleep seven times on the way into town and manage to run off the road into a crowded recreational trail. It's been a really frustrating year.
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Sep 9, 2012 16:15
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grover posted:I did an experiment yesterday when attempting to cross a crosswalk well-marked with a "STOP FOR PEDESTRIANS" sign (albeit the non-blinking kind) on a busy 2-lane road in an area where people are well accustomed to pedestrians having the right of way and stop at this crosswalk all the time. I think that this is spot on.
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Sep 9, 2012 16:27
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As I understand it, back when the main freeway system was built, the idea was to connect everything with a straight line, point to point. I know that now the idea is to vary things a bit, so that it keeps the drivers on the road actually driving, rather than pointing straight and zoning out. When did this happen? What are the current guidelines and reasons? Two examples of nice, straight, roads known for accidents: http://goo.gl/maps/tEv9g http://goo.gl/maps/1WUWy
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Sep 10, 2012 08:24
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virtual256 posted:As I understand it, back when the main freeway system was built, the idea was to connect everything with a straight line, point to point. I know that now the idea is to vary things a bit, so that it keeps the drivers on the road actually driving, rather than pointing straight and zoning out. Around here, that change happened due to cost reasons, not safety. Building roads in a straight line ends up requiring more earth moving, more bridges, and more property takes. Most of the Route 15 corridor in Connecticut was built this way, which is why I-84 has 3-mile-long straightaways heading up toward Massachusetts. I'll look in the Green Book today to see what it has to say on the subject. I know that, for the past few years, we've been trying to introduce curvature on all kinds of roads, not just freeways. Of course, it's extremely rare to even build a road anymore in this state, so we've had limited chances to apply this philosophy.
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Sep 10, 2012 12:25
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Ciclidae, please introduce these everywhere in the US. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQqAxB5DjgQ
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Sep 10, 2012 14:08
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MrBling posted:Ciclidae, please introduce these everywhere in the US. Some assholes are going to spend all day trigging ped signaling when no one is actually going to cross, and it's going to screw up traffic 
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Sep 10, 2012 14:20
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Volmarias posted:Some assholes are going to spend all day trigging ped signaling when no one is actually going to cross, and it's going to screw up traffic Did you notice how long the green phase is for the cars? Don't worry, that crossing is probably super busy with peds so it's gonna be triggered all day anyway.
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Sep 10, 2012 14:39
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Hippie Hedgehog posted:Did you notice how long the green phase is for the cars? Don't worry, that crossing is probably super busy with peds so it's gonna be triggered all day anyway. I meant for the "introduce this into the US" part. I can totally see some homeless dudes playing pong all day, then making GBS threads directly onto it.
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Sep 10, 2012 15:59
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It's nifty to have the game there and all, but is there really a point to having a high-res color touchscreen for a ped crossing? I'm not seeing what this delivers that the standard button and walk/don't walk sign with countdown display setup doesn't, and those would seem to be a lot more durable.
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Sep 10, 2012 17:58
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It much easier to render a flat touchscreen on a greenscreen.
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Sep 10, 2012 18:14
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Cichlidae posted:My wife grew up in Phoenix, by the way, and when she moved to Rhode Island, she HATED driving. She's since gotten used to it, and, like me, finds driving in Phoenix incredibly boring. Oh I don't blame either of you. I love the fact that our roads are in amazing condition, but they are boring as gently caress until you get out in the boonies. I actually kind of like the days when US60/I10 get clusterfucked on traffic now, because it means that I can take the much twistier / actually somewhat enjoyable Loop 202 instead of a 20-mile ruler-straight line. So, back to discussing clusterfucks - how about this intersection? AZ87, AZ587, and Hunt Highway. The intersection has been evolving over the years and while I think it might be safer, it's also more of a pain in the rear end. Currently it's two lights. Tell me this wouldn't be better as a roundabout. I'm pretty sure the state still owns that big triangular chunk of land, too, since it's signed "STATE PROPERTY - NO TRESPASSING" all over it. That unused looking bit of pavement that follows the line up from the light on the right used to be the path that northbound traffic would follow on 87. I suspect that traffic volumes are highest between the Arizona Avenue section of 87 and 587, since it eventually leads you down to I10, but for the handful of us that actually stay on 87 the whole way, it's now two lights in each direction. 
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Sep 10, 2012 18:43
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I thought of something to ask about! Last week I was driving down Route 99, heading to the DMV in Wethersfield. This intersection tripped me up real bad: https://local.google.com/maps?q=sil...2,9.46,,0,-9.12 See that yellow sign that says "yield to pedestrians?" Well, right below that, it says "Right Turn only," Now, there is a lane use sign, farther back, and the far right line is through/right, not right turn only. However, I couldn't see the lane use sign while I was stopped right at the stop bar, waiting for a green. I had this moment of panic, thinking I was in the right turn only lane, and I was blocking traffic.  I actually ended up turning down that road, into the parking lot on the left, and turning right at the intersection to continue on.So, who can I complain to about that sign? It's drat confusing! 
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Sep 10, 2012 19:23
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What's the rationale for changing from the normal "slower traffic stays in the right lane, you get in the passing lane to pass" rule to putting up signs that say "slow-as-hell trucks and buses drive in the left (passing) lane only" in construction zones? Especially if the construction zone includes a long hill, this always struck me as an awful idea.
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Sep 10, 2012 19:32
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Cichlidae posted:A huge majority of our pedestrian fatalities are either: distracted ped, drunk ped, or ped trying to cross a freeway on foot. t_violet posted:I don't know what the answer is other than education for both the drivers (texting bad) and the pedestrian (texting bad).
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Sep 10, 2012 19:46
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Phanatic posted:What's the rationale for changing from the normal "slower traffic stays in the right lane, you get in the passing lane to pass" rule to putting up signs that say "slow-as-hell trucks and buses drive in the left (passing) lane only" in construction zones? It's keeping big massive vehicles away from the workers and also the right lane in those situations tends to be made a bit narrower during the construction so it's less safe for the large vehicles.
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Sep 10, 2012 21:57
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MrBling posted:Ciclidae, please introduce these everywhere in the US. I'd love to, but they're going to get busted open and sold for scrap within seconds in most cities here. As it is, we need to use these buttons in some neighborhoods, and we also line some of our signal cabinets with Kevlar. In essence, poverty is why we can't have nice things. IOwnCalculus posted:So, back to discussing clusterfucks - how about this intersection? AZ87, AZ587, and Hunt Highway. The intersection has been evolving over the years and while I think it might be safer, it's also more of a pain in the rear end. Currently it's two lights. Tell me this wouldn't be better as a roundabout. If the volumes aren't too high, why the hell not? Arizona's as good a place as any for roundabouts. It wouldn't be too hard to turn this spot into one. Just make sure to introduce some bends in the approaches to bring speeds down. IOwnCalculus posted:I'm pretty sure the state still owns that big triangular chunk of land, too, since it's signed "STATE PROPERTY - NO TRESPASSING" all over it. That unused looking bit of pavement that follows the line up from the light on the right used to be the path that northbound traffic would follow on 87. It is typical for municipalities to hold onto bits of land like this, because opening a parcel like that up to development will really gently caress with your intersection capacity, and it offers you a lot of flexibility in future expansion/construction. Silver Falcon posted:I thought of something to ask about! That sign shouldn't be there at all, because it implies you can ignore all pedestrians that aren't to your right. It's probably a relic from the Old Days, when pedestrians were only allowed to cross at crosswalks. Contact Connecticut DOT, Division of Traffic Engineering, Operations Unit. Phanatic posted:What's the rationale for changing from the normal "slower traffic stays in the right lane, you get in the passing lane to pass" rule to putting up signs that say "slow-as-hell trucks and buses drive in the left (passing) lane only" in construction zones? Well, Install Gentoo posted:It's keeping big massive vehicles away from the workers and also the right lane in those situations tends to be made a bit narrower during the construction so it's less safe for the large vehicles. This, plus overpasses. Many of our bridges have better clearance over the left lane than the right, and bridge reconstruction tends to lower that clearance, providing trucks fewer options.
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Sep 10, 2012 23:25
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GWBBQ posted:Fun fact: drunk pedestrians are 8 times as likely to be injured or killed per mile than drunk drivers. Moral of the story: either way, just take a cab. Las Vegas does a ton of that now up and down Las Vegas Blvd. The traffic is so congested and there's so many pedestrians they don't have a choice but to just stop at grade pedestrian crossings. I'm sure that's expensive as hell though and that's why you don't see it more often. Just about every staircase up has to be accompanied by an elevator. I'd bet Vegas recouped the costs by getting the casino's in on the construction as a lot of the bridges make you actually go into casinos and shopping centers but I doubt most cities would have as many options.
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Sep 11, 2012 01:37
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Opals25 posted:Las Vegas does a ton of that now up and down Las Vegas Blvd. The traffic is so congested and there's so many pedestrians they don't have a choice but to just stop at grade pedestrian crossings. I'm sure that's expensive as hell though and that's why you don't see it more often. Just about every staircase up has to be accompanied by an elevator. I'd bet Vegas recouped the costs by getting the casino's in on the construction as a lot of the bridges make you actually go into casinos and shopping centers but I doubt most cities would have as many options. One of those pedestrian overpasses is much cheaper than a single pedestrian fatality, so cost-effectiveness isn't as big a problem as you might think. Finding right-of-way in established areas, or getting people to actually USE the thing, those are the tricky parts.
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Sep 11, 2012 01:49
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Cichlidae posted:One of those pedestrian overpasses is much cheaper than a single pedestrian fatality, so cost-effectiveness isn't as big a problem as you might think. Finding right-of-way in established areas, or getting people to actually USE the thing, those are the tricky parts. Good point! You can tell in Vegas that they had to go through quite a bit of effort to make crossing the street itself as difficult as possible. Most of the would be crossings are just completely walled off.
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Sep 11, 2012 04:44
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Vegas always tried to keep it quiet how many goddamn people die running across the boulevard. That's why it was worth the trouble, it's cut that down a fair amount. Still, even with all the walkways up and the barriers lining the road (and that extra line in the middle divider) there are ground crossings available and, for some reason, lots of drunk people around there.  If the city gets back on its feet I suspect they'll try to close off every ground crossing there and have it all on elevated or tunnels between the casinos.
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Sep 11, 2012 05:31
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Cichlidae posted:One of those pedestrian overpasses is much cheaper than a single pedestrian fatality, so cost-effectiveness isn't as big a problem as you might think. Finding right-of-way in established areas, or getting people to actually USE the thing, those are the tricky parts. Yeah, most people hate the extra effort of using a pedestrian walkway. They are pricey and you either have an elevator and stairs or a really long series of ramps to keep the required ADA grade. In most places, other than major freeways, it's usually easier to just run across. GWBBQ posted:I think I may have posted it before, but Stamford, CT had a novel solution for the pedestrian/traffic problem during the urban renewal phase of the '60s and '70s: build a network of elevated sidewalks and walkways above all of downtown. This would also allow for ground-level retail and more parking in cramped spaces. The courtyards and walkways around St. John's Towers are the only part that were ever built, and they only connect the buildings to each other. The part between the south and east towers was demolished a few years ago to make way for a parking lot and the north tower is slated for demolition now, so that will be the end of that. So from an urban design stand point, we really don't want to have pedestrians sequestered. We want a vibrant urban environment where peds and cars can co-exist safely and we want pedestrians on the street keeping the block faces activated and safe (an empty block tends to be an attractive block for the criminally minded.) Houston has a series of underground tunnels connecting some of the large buildings downtown so what do you see when you are in downtown Houston at lunchtime on a weekday? A deserted metropolis. You also want easy accessibility for cars which makes it easy for people to drive by and see that this is a cool place to be. Places like malls where the pedestrian is totally separated from the outside world have fallen out of fashion and we now favor mixed use developments that attempt to accommodate all forms of transportation. It does make things more difficult for a traffic engineer; for decades, we've been focused on removing conflict. But conflict in the right context can have some desirable aspects such as lower speeds on urban roadways and a greater driver awareness of his surroundings. (FYI for those interested, Jane Jacobs wrote the seminal book on modern urban planning, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. It's an amazing read and focuses on how urban design should take into consideration how people actually behave, not how they theoretically should behave.) (OK, my favorite example of surroundings influencing driver behavior for those located in Austin. Austin has two large freeways (Mopac & IH 35) bracketing downtown but poor east-west connectivity. Back in the 60's, there was a plan to connect the two with a "crosstown expressway" where Cesar Chavez Blvd is today. a consequence of this plan is that the SB exit from Mopac to EB Cesar Chavez is basically a high speed off ramp. It's almost impossible to slow down to urban speeds after exiting from SB Mopac despite the presence of large signs telling you to do so. The road is built for high speeds and immediately after exiting, you're driving through parkland. However, as soon as drivers start to approach the BR Reynolds intersection with the arch of the Lamar underpass ahead and the presence of trail users on the hike and bike trail, they slow down. The context changes from limited access freeway to urban road and driver behavior changes accordingly.)
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Sep 11, 2012 06:38
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So engineering people, what do you think of things like this http://saveourbridges.com/map.html which seem to mean well but might be generating unnecessary complaints to you guys, rather than to the people with the money?
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Sep 11, 2012 08:32
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I'm partway through a surprise 14-hour shift, so I won't be able to answer any questions today, but I looked through the latest Green Book, and it still says that roads should be straight whenever possible; no mention of adding curves for safety.
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Sep 11, 2012 17:13
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Are you sure you're not an ancient roman traffic engineer?
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Sep 11, 2012 17:18
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Baronjutter posted:Are you sure you're not an ancient roman traffic engineer? Sure seems like it sometimes. If any of you are driving through Southington, Hartford, East Hartford, or Manchester today, and you see a guy with a flashlight and a camera, give me a wave. I'll be out there until 10.
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Sep 11, 2012 17:22
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Cichlidae posted:Sure seems like it sometimes. I waved, but I doubt you're personally working on that bridge on rt10 that I84 runs over, so I probably just confused someone else with a flashlight and camera. 
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Sep 12, 2012 01:28
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I know you're more a roads guy but I'm curious about how placement of subway/elevated rail lines is decided. I'd always thought they were just routed along dense areas that don't have service but I've also heard about placing them in less developed areas to encourage growth. How does it work? I guess this could include bus routes too even though buses are lame. Trains rule buses drool. 
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Sep 12, 2012 01:58
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t_violet posted:Yeah, most people hate the extra effort of using a pedestrian walkway. They are pricey and you either have an elevator and stairs or a really long series of ramps to keep the required ADA grade. In most places, other than major freeways, it's usually easier to just run across. It doesn't have the optics, but it sure is nice. It doesn't keep people from walking around outside when it is nice.
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Sep 12, 2012 03:29
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Bradley International Airport just opened a Cell Phone Lot. That's great, because it means I don't have to keep driving around the terminal in circles waiting for a call. Most cell phone lots have electronic message boards which show flight arrivals and their gates. We don't have the cash for that kind of tech, though, so instead...  (Coworker's lovely phone picture, I didn't have my cam) Great if you have a smart phone, a bit less so if you don't, but it's hard to argue with that cost-effectiveness. t_violet posted:It does make things more difficult for a traffic engineer; for decades, we've been focused on removing conflict. But conflict in the right context can have some desirable aspects such as lower speeds on urban roadways and a greater driver awareness of his surroundings. It's counter-intuitive that you can improve safety by adding conflicts, but then again, so are many aspects of traffic engineering. The problem with Connecticut is that we have a horrible freeway + arterial network; most of our arterials are two-lane urban roads with a driveway every 100 feet, carrying 15,000 cars per day. Anything that cuts capacity ends up giving us mile-long delays on a daily basis, and that just makes everyone miserable. A lot of the volume ends up routing itself through residential neighborhoods as a result. We try to add pedestrian and bicycle accessibility to our arterials while maintaining the current capacity, squeezing every second we can out of signals and closing driveways where we can afford it. We don't have much right-of-way, either. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad posted:So engineering people, what do you think of things like this http://saveourbridges.com/map.html which seem to mean well but might be generating unnecessary complaints to you guys, rather than to the people with the money? I think bridge safety is one of the most important issues right now, if not the most. Any publicity the issue gets, complaints or otherwise, is vitally important to ensuring we get funding to fix them. That website is just very out of date and doesn't include functionally obsolete bridges or bridges that are structurally deficient and not fracture-critical, so people will tend to think that it's less of a problem than it really is. Stargle posted:I waved, but I doubt you're personally working on that bridge on rt10 that I84 runs over, so I probably just confused someone else with a flashlight and camera. Not me, but we never mind a wave, as long as you use more than one finger.
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Sep 13, 2012 01:10
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The first half hour at the BDL parking garage is free. 
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Sep 13, 2012 01:21
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Cichlidae posted:Most cell phone lots have electronic message boards which show flight arrivals and their gates. We don't have the cash for that kind of tech, though, so instead... It is pretty hard to argue with that kind of savings - and even then, more often than not when I've picked someone up at Sky Harbor, they've called me to tell me which door they're coming out of before the tracker board has updated to even say they've landed yet.
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Sep 13, 2012 02:07
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Grand Fromage posted:I know you're more a roads guy but I'm curious about how placement of subway/elevated rail lines is decided. I'd always thought they were just routed along dense areas that don't have service but I've also heard about placing them in less developed areas to encourage growth. How does it work? This gets its own post! Designing subway layouts is a subject near to my heart, and one I've been doing for fun since middle school. Around here, we're constrained by cost, so we can only build where land is the easiest to get. Old rail lines tend to go between downtown areas, so they're a great place to build up - if you can find one that hasn't been turned into a freeway or bike path. But we're more idealistic than that! Let's look at a generalized example city, and how we'd put in subways.  This is Sampleville. It's a city of about 500 thousand people, with another million or so in the suburbs. Sampleville has a simple freeway network (black lines), a central business district, and a busy port area. It also has huge backups twice a day. Tens of billions of dollars have just become available for the construction of a subway network! While that seems like a lot of money, a good network will pay for itself within a couple of decades.  Now, we look at its density. This is vastly simplified; most cities look very fragmented. Using the old SimCity standard, blue, green, and yellow stand for commercial, residential, and industrial, respectively. Deeper colors indicate higher density. Think about where in this city you'd be likely to live, and where you'd work. That central high-density residential area is a cluster of high-rises near the shore, backed by row houses and apartment blocks closer to the freeway. The light green is suburban land. Strips of commercial development lie along the bypass freeway, but the CBD is right downtown. Next to it is a large industrial center with railheads and a very busy port. The airport is located in the other industrial area to the north; we don't want to forget about that.  We have origin-destination pairs, too. A gigantic table of numbers isn't too friendly, and a bunch of arrows isn't great, either, but we'll want to accommodate as many of these movements as we can. Some of them will be impossible; most traffic between commercial and industrial is freight, and that won't be going on the subway. Most traffic from out-of-town is going to commute no matter what, but if we build Park & Rides at outlying stations, we may be able to capture some of that.  The next step is to look at construction costs. There is so much that goes into this, but for now, we're just looking at things in very general terms. Your construction costs will depend on right-of-way, depth, development, groundwater, soil/bedrock, constructability, station size, and a million other little things. Now if you like, you can stop here, because science has advanced to the point where you can develop a genetic algorithm to plot a million different routes and find a nearly optimal solution. Heck, in Japan, they've even used slime molds to lay out theoretical transit networks. This stuff is all very exciting and shiny, but I don't have that kind of software on hand, so let's continue with the example.  Now is the time to lay out some lines. Go crazy, draw dozens, see what works best. Your station position is going to depend on the subway location, but try to put them all throughout high-density locations. Suburban areas don't require frequent station placement, as people are much more likely to take a bus or drive to the station, rather than walking. Also, you'll use up a lot of money that way. Remember the cost diagram. Building heavy rail down the middle of a freeway, or anywhere else above grade, is generally going to be cheaper than burying it or tunneling. Save costs where you can.  Want to take it one step further? Consider even more lines. They don't need to be subways; trams or suburban rail will work fine, and it's easy enough to expand service later. Building new stations, especially in medium-density areas that didn't have good freeway access, will spur transit-oriented development (TOD). It's a lot easier to buy up that low-density land now and leave it empty until you need it than it is to try to buy land later. If anything, it's much better to overbuild than underbuild; most transit systems operate at a loss, but the benefits of getting cars off the roads and encouraging denser development make it worthwhile in the long run. NOTE: It should be obvious that this is all very schematic and theoretical! I've never designed a subway system (and probably will never get to), so I'm not speaking from experience. If any of you has experience with this sort of thing, please share it!
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Sep 13, 2012 02:36
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kefkafloyd posted:The first half hour at the BDL parking garage is free. That's kind of a pain in the rear end, though, and I try to avoid the garage on ethical grounds (its construction and operation are a great example of corruption under Rowland). If I'm going to be there more than half an hour, I usually park at the Friendly's on 75. The cell phone lot is a bit closer and easier to get to/from. FIELD VISIT!  This is a night inspection. The project is joint replacement at a dozen freeway bridges around Hartford. This one is on Route 2, which is a major freeway heading southeast out of the city.  Route 2 was built in the 50s, and it's got a lot of crazy geometry. As you can see in the background, just past the site, it splits into 5 parts. 2 of its 5 lanes go to a freeway that was never built (I-284).  These joints are sealed with an elastic compound, but as you might imagine, that stuff tends to crack / get ripped up / collect dirt and become potting soil.  The expansion joint doesn't stop at the edge of the deck. It goes all the way up the parapet, and even includes the bridge rail at the top. This bridge rail is our current design - the bridge itself isn't that old; it's from 1992.  Night work is tricky. There is less volume than during the day, but visibility is very poor, and a police officer's strobes can almost blind you. It's extremely important to have retroreflective drums and cones.  Drums get run over and crushed pretty often, but as long as you pop them back into shape and hose them down, they're still pretty visible.  Does anyone remember years ago, when I said "moths are a big deal at night"? Well, it's still true.  The first step in replacing the joint is to get rid of the old one. This involves jackhammering away slabs of asphalt or concrete and ripping out the old seals.  These billets of bitumen get melted down in a portable oven into that gooey poo poo that smells awful...  ...which is, in turn, collected in drums and kept liquid by torches.  These backer rods get jammed down into the depths of the crack...  ...followed by this silicone epoxy. Then, it gets paved back over if needed.  Old paved-over joint on the left, new on the right. Now that's it for construction, but let's take a look at the bridge while we're here.  The bottom half of the parapet is made of granite. This is very unusual, as granite is super expensive. The nice part is, plows aren't going to do poo poo to granite. There were just a couple chips at joints from the plow blade.  There is an overhead sign support on the bridge. Even though it's 20 years old and way out of code, this thing is MASSIVE. Just look how thick those steel plates are. So that's it for now.
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Sep 13, 2012 03:10
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You put those Photoshop (subway planning in layers) and photography skills on your resume, right? drat, and I was going to give you a hard time about giving little notice to the Parmer bike route post. I did ride that the other day... it's long, and it's direct, but it could be better. Also the Texas 45 toll road 85 mph speed limit signs are real, and the road's undriven surface cuts through the hilly terrain like a gentle thread of dark maroon high speed design standards. e- What do you know about crowd-sourcing traffic data? Is volume data collected by mobile service providers acquired by design firms during the planning process of a project? grillster fucked around with this message at 03:52 on Sep 13, 2012 |
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Sep 13, 2012 03:49
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I could have sworn that there was discussion earlier in the thread about zipper merging being the most effective at moving traffic, and much wailing and gnashing of teeth about people *not* doing it when lanes drop for construction. Given that, couldn't you basically force people to zipper merge by not having either lane continue (at least initially)? See the attached picture for a crappy mockup of what I'm talking about. Edit: There was even a picture of a road sign that would warn people of two lanes merging into one without priority, but drat if I can find it. Edit 2: First post in a years-old thread, and *I'm* the one who kills it! 
Grundulum fucked around with this message at 22:39 on Sep 13, 2012 |
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Sep 13, 2012 04:36
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grillster posted:You put those Photoshop (subway planning in layers) and photography skills on your resume, right? Sure, but they're not exactly prized in civil engineering. grillster posted:drat, and I was going to give you a hard time about giving little notice to the Parmer bike route post. Like I said, I have very little experience with bike routes, and even less experience with Texan roads. I'm learning about them from AASHTO's new bicycle facility guide, bit by bit, so in a few months' time, I'll be able to give you a better opinion. grillster posted:Also the Texas 45 toll road 85 mph speed limit signs are real, and the road's undriven surface cuts through the hilly terrain like a gentle thread of dark maroon high speed design standards. Do you know how strictly that's enforced? Around here, typical 85th percentile speeds are 15-20mph over the limit, but I don't know how many people would be doing a hundred, even in a rural area. grillster posted:e- I'm not sure what Google specifically does with their data, but I've worked with third-party data sources in the past, and they tend to be much better than our own. For almost every road in the state, we get one day's worth of bidirectional counts every three years. Just counts, no speeds or compositional data. As for turning counts, those are harder to do via crowdsourcing, since you risk missing out on lower-volume movements. You'll also tend to underestimate volumes in poorer neighborhoods. Grundulum posted:I could have sworn that there was discussion earlier in the thread about zipper merging being the most effective at moving traffic, and much wailing and gnashing of teeth about people *not* doing it when lanes drop for construction. Pfft, it takes a lot more than one post to kill a thread this long. Just remember, I work a lot of OT, so I can't be on as often as I used to. Zipper merges are definitely the way to go, since they use both lanes to full capacity right up to the merge point. In your diagram, I think that would work very well with the right signage, especially if the skips were removed for long-term patterns. Just might be tricky getting people on freeways down to a safe speed for it; even if you manage to get people down to 15 mph or so, there is a big potential for fatal rear-ends. It would work a lot better on a low-speed roadway.
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Sep 13, 2012 23:36
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Oh my god, how could I have forgotten the best part? Making the maps! 
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Sep 14, 2012 23:20
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You make fantasy transit systems too 
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Sep 14, 2012 23:25
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Baronjutter posted:You make fantasy transit systems too What else is there do to in school when your teacher is droning on about something you already know? Well, besides drawing airplanes and ships with thousands of AWESOME guns and nuclear engines.
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Sep 14, 2012 23:38
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