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Socket Ryanist posted:California solved the "many parallel toll booths merging into few lanes" problem I fell victim to the opposite problem in France last Saturday. Turns out that toll gates on highways really mess with the road capacity, and there was a 5km line of cars waiting to pay €5,40 each. A few hours later a traffic report on the radio said that the line had grown into a 15km traffic jam  Switzerland's vignet system really seems like a much better solution.
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Aug 13, 2013 00:07
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How are roads in mountainous and very hilly area designed? Is there a certain performance envelope that cars must meet? How is the maximum appropriate slope determined?
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Aug 13, 2013 01:21
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AmbassadorTaxicab posted:How are roads in mountainous and very hilly area designed? Like this:
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Aug 13, 2013 02:21
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AmbassadorTaxicab posted:How are roads in mountainous and very hilly area designed? Is there a certain performance envelope that cars must meet?
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Aug 13, 2013 04:28
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Chemmy posted:Like this:
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Aug 13, 2013 15:39
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Just do what we do in Kentucky and blast straight through the mountain: http://goo.gl/maps/XxOTc
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Aug 13, 2013 20:26
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Did someone say mountain highway with low speed limits?? I present to the thread: The Malahat!  http://goo.gl/maps/WyGVr What may look to be a fairly straight only slightly hilly highway is in fact apparently a massive death trap. There's often weekly accidents along here that result in the entire highway being shut down. It's mostly 3-lanes in most places (2 going uphill, 1 going down). The speed limit ranges from 60 to 80k and more and more dividers and safety equipment are added all the time. For some reason though it has a reputation of being extremely dangerous. I've driven it many times and it just seems like a pleasant nice route. But every week someone crashes their big-rig truck spilling oil into a salmon habitat, or jumps the divider and kills a bunch of people, or just does something incredibly stupid and shuts the whole loving highway down. To make matters worse, it's pretty much the only north-south road between population centers of around 400k and 300k. I guess what makes it dangerous is that the volumes can get VERY high and despite not being long until you're back to 90kph 4+ lane highways people will do extremely stupid poo poo like over-taking trucks or doing 120k through the 60k sections.  New dividers to stop idiots from committing murder-suicide and/or environmental terrorism along this 60kph gentle curve.  Oh yeah this happens a lot too. So they covered the cliffs in this sort of chain-link netting now.
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Aug 13, 2013 20:34
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Baronjutter posted:I guess what makes it dangerous is that the volumes can get VERY high and despite not being long until you're back to 90kph 4+ lane highways people will do extremely stupid poo poo like over-taking trucks or doing 120k through the 60k sections. Also the entrance/exit to Goldstream. I saw an accident there last time I went up that road (someone had made an unsafe left turn out of Goldstream, I think) though it didn't look like anyone was seriously injured. Still shut down a lane. I know traffic lights on highways are Bad but maybe putting one in there wouldn't be the worst thing in the world? Wouldn't be the only traffic light on a highway around Victoria as the road out to the ferry is full of them.
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Aug 13, 2013 20:37
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There's already tons of lights. There's a light just before the hat to turn left to that huge cisco foods warehouse, and one just after in mill bay.
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Aug 13, 2013 20:39
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Oof, sorry, didn't see the new page!AmbassadorTaxicab posted:How are roads in mountainous and very hilly area designed? Is there a certain performance envelope that cars must meet? How is the maximum appropriate slope determined? You take into account the class of road and who's going to be using it in order to get the maximum slope. If you have to exceed that slope, there are some ways around it. You could build a switchback, a tunnel/bridge, or bypass. You could put in climbing lanes and runaway truck ramps to improve safety. You could close it down in bad weather, put in stops where trucks need to chain their tires, set variable speed limits, and... In the end, if you're still stuck with a substandard road, just get a design variance. Sure, you might have to sacrifice some of your funding, but it'll still be cheaper than blasting apart a million tons of rock. ----- Remember the roundabout in Salem? The landscaping is in, and the project is essentially complete.  I think the signs and pavement markings are excessive, but then again, this is the first turbo roundabout in the state, and we want to make sure it sticks.  If you remember the roundabout in Killingworth, our concrete curbs got beat up after one winter, and the embedded fiberglass rods were snapped off right away. We learned from those lessons - sloped granite curbs and sleeves for the rods.  The landscaping looks pretty good, except for those 'street trees.' In a few years, they'll be fixed objects, and the first person to ramp up the curb could end up dying. Trees are not breakaway.  Comically oversized sign. It's fifteen feet wide.  If you ever wondered how the legend is held onto the sign, now you know: it's riveted.  And how are our signs connected to the ground? Shoved in an empty PVC pipe and sloppily coated in asphalt. Now to go build some more freeways in Dwarf Fortress...
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Aug 13, 2013 22:15
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This is neat: http://streetmix.net/ It lets you play around with visualizing road cross-sections in whatever right of way width you choose, with auto lanes, bike lanes, bus and transit lanes, medians, sidewalks, and so on.
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Aug 13, 2013 23:06
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Cichlidae posted:The landscaping looks pretty good, except for those 'street trees.' In a few years, they'll be fixed objects, and the first person to ramp up the curb could end up dying. Trees are not breakaway. Won't those trees also serve to psychologically narrow the road, thus slowing traffic and improving safety?
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Aug 14, 2013 00:46
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Dominus Vobiscum posted:This is neat: Look what you've started.  My ideal redesign for Chicago's major avenues, like Ashland. Actually not too far off from the real Ashland plan, except for the protected bike lanes.
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Aug 14, 2013 01:38
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Kaal posted:Won't those trees also serve to psychologically narrow the road, thus slowing traffic and improving safety? Yes, but they're callery pears, which can easily get over a foot in caliber. Anything wider than 4" needs to be protected by guiderail. It's the same as having a big fuckoff rock a foot from the road - it'll slow people down, but once someone hits it, they're hosed.
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Aug 14, 2013 01:38
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Kakairo posted:Look what you've started. Something like this:  Varance fucked around with this message at 02:51 on Aug 14, 2013 |
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Aug 14, 2013 01:46
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We've got an LRT that runs next to the road here, and we're building our second line in center ROW. Granted the line next to a road is next to a pseudo highway rather than a standard city street, but it's been my understanding that the awful signalling on the road is a result of the way the side running LRT interacts with the traffic, whereas center running can fit in better with existing signal timings. Though maybe we just suck at implementing side running LRT, or running it in the street is a lot more different than running it next to a highway.
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Aug 14, 2013 03:10
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FISHMANPET posted:We've got an LRT that runs next to the road here, and we're building our second line in center ROW. One of the common reasons to favor Center vs Side is when you have a lot of minor cross-streets. You can just cut those off and give the LRT absolute priority down the road (forcing U-turns to cross the tracks at major intersections), instead of opening yourself to accidents. From a safety standpoint, you need some kind of signal to alert drivers to the presence of an oncoming rail vehicle whenever you have an signalized opening, which drives up cost.  You can also convert the near-side streets on a side configuration into emergency-passable pedestrian mall dead-ends, but that brings a different set of headaches (mainly, capacity problems at the streets that do cross) --------------- We've having NIMBY issues with our BRT system post-implementation because local residents complained about how the system makes side street red lights too long. Now the TSP system, which costs millions of dollars to implement, only operates when buses are more than 3 mins behind schedule. And the schedule is setup in such a way that the drat thing is never seen as running behind, so it's basically disabled. And now TSP is likely going to be an afterthought for future projects, hurting system performance in mixed traffic areas. Varance fucked around with this message at 03:43 on Aug 14, 2013 |
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Aug 14, 2013 03:16
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Minneapolis. We've actually gone through a number of revisions of our signal timings, but a few people I trust in the local community on rail issues say that center running is better than side running for the transit, not just for the cars. And I'm all for making driving suck when we need to, but if there are two choices for transit and the only difference between the two is how bad it is for cars, I don't think any jurisdiction is going to actually choose the one that's worse for cars. Hell, I don't think many places would choose the choice that's worse for cars even if it makes transit better, for that matter.
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Aug 14, 2013 03:38
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FISHMANPET posted:Minneapolis. Edit: Yeah, 50k AADT close to I-94 and 20k toward the end of the alignment? And some of those areas are only 4 lanes across? Yeah, LRT's not your problem there, it's lack of capacity on the road. Our 35k+ 4 lane roads here are a loving nightmare during rush hour, and we have no LRT to speak of. BTW, Minneapolis's traffic data is on the net. Zoom in to see AADT on most major Minneapolis roads. http://minneapolis.ms2soft.com/tcds/tsearch.asp?loc=Minneapolis&mod= Edit 2: Looking at it some more, it looks like the engineers also failed to compensate for increased traffic loads at the major cross streets, due to disconnecting a ton of roads from Hiawatha. When you do that, you need to expand the cross-street intersections... even if it's just a short set of double left turns or a second through lane that merges back down on the other side of the intersection, you want to give Hiawatha as much green time as possible by keeping the side street phases as short as possible (especially when you've got LRT messing with timings). Here's an example from my neck of the woods:  That particular intersection still has traffic problems, as AADT has grown over time. The smaller street is N Kingsway Ave/S Bryan Rd, with 12k/11k AADT (LOS C) in 2011. The arterial, SR60/Brandon Blvd, has an AADT over 69000 (LOS F). Tampa LOS reports are depressing to look at. Everything not in an industrial section of town is an E or an F, mainly due to a lack of any kind of transit grid. Buses at 30/60 minute headways do not cut it in a major city. 
Varance fucked around with this message at 05:11 on Aug 14, 2013 |
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Aug 14, 2013 03:45
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Dominus Vobiscum posted:This is neat: I made the best street, what do I win  The transit shelter is supposed to be a subway station entrance. 
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Aug 14, 2013 06:22
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Hedera Helix posted:I made the best street, what do I win Where do you ride the bikes?
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Aug 14, 2013 14:11
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FISHMANPET posted:Where do you ride the bikes? on the sidewalk 
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Aug 14, 2013 17:39
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Qwijib0 posted:on the sidewalk From rooftop to rooftop 
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Aug 14, 2013 18:27
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On a scale of 1 to 10, how terrified would you be to drive here?   It's probably a bad sign that the first thing I did with this was go "how could I make the worst street possible?"
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Aug 14, 2013 19:21
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Haifisch posted:On a scale of 1 to 10, how terrified would you be to drive here? Add some high-speed trains and we can push it to 11!
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Aug 14, 2013 19:30
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Haifisch posted:On a scale of 1 to 10, how terrified would you be to drive here? You left out adjacent traffic going in opposite directions, as well as two bikes lanes surrounding and surrounded by traffic, ditto with the pedestrian lanes:  All flanked by water with no guardrails
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Aug 14, 2013 22:32
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I found a link for this: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/08/hyperreal-cartography-city-maps/ Holy crap that would make things look weird and different.
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Aug 14, 2013 23:35
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will_colorado posted:I found a link for this: Jeez, that plan for Berlin... assuming the model on the right is to scale, the Volkshalle would be about twice as tall as the Eiffel Tower. That's hard to even imagine!
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Aug 15, 2013 00:13
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Terminal Entropy posted:You left out adjacent traffic going in opposite directions, as well as two bikes lanes surrounding and surrounded by traffic, ditto with the pedestrian lanes: Needs a Hyperloop.
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Aug 15, 2013 02:45
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Terminal Entropy posted:You left out adjacent traffic going in opposite directions, as well as two bikes lanes surrounding and surrounded by traffic, ditto with the pedestrian lanes: Even this is too optimistic. We all know that the streetcar and light rail would be removed to make for more car lanes. will_colorado posted:I found a link for this: ..."Central Parking District"? Surely that has to be a joke. The maps of unbuilt rapid transit in Boston and Los Angeles are pretty depressing. 
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Aug 15, 2013 03:35
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Terminal Entropy posted:You left out adjacent traffic going in opposite directions, as well as two bikes lanes surrounding and surrounded by traffic, ditto with the pedestrian lanes: So thats Downtown Norfolk, not that scary (The Tide is insane) Haifisch posted:On a scale of 1 to 10, how terrified would you be to drive here? Virginia is nightmare mode, it feels like they just slamed transit options to the walls and made them stick.
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Aug 15, 2013 04:03
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Cichlidae posted:Jeez, that plan for Berlin... assuming the model on the right is to scale, the Volkshalle would be about twice as tall as the Eiffel Tower. That's hard to even imagine! Hitler had a giant boner for pointlessly large buildings and streets to show off just how special Germany and its True Aryan Germans were. I swear one of the later plans for Berlin after the war (which of course the Nazis would win) was to have a 500 meter wide street going from Central Berlin out towards the west, with a giant palace at the end in Berlin.
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Aug 15, 2013 06:08
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Install Windows posted:Hitler had a giant boner for pointlessly large buildings and streets to show off just how special Germany and its True Aryan Germans were. To be fair, the planning department there was kind of a special case, since Hitler loved the grandiose designs and the designers loved not getting drafted to fight in the war, so a lot of stuff came out that was totally unrealistic but looked really neat since "looking great for Hitler" was the largest level of utility expected for most of the designs and was directly correlated to not getting shipped off to fight the Russians. No one expected any of it to be built.
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Aug 15, 2013 12:48
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I'm a fan of EUR, as far as fascist architecture and urban planning can be appreciated anyway  Of course there's bombastic over the top stuff everywhere, and lots of blocks have become gated compounds, but the rationality of its setup feels pretty good, coming from the chaos of the inner city.
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Aug 15, 2013 14:05
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I had a webinar about Kansas City today, specifically their smart workzones. One thing that was mentioned, and which we'd considered for our next SWZ, was Bluetooth tracking: you set up a few Bluetooth readers along your work zone, and they contact every Bluetooth-enabled phone that passes by. You can track them origin-destination, get travel times, speeds, all that fun stuff. Doesn't that seem like it would violate privacy, though? It's technically anonymous, and it's something you could do yourself if you had a hundred people sitting around and tracking every license plate that goes by... By the way, precast concrete pavement slabs were also mentioned as an innovation used by 12 states, which had gotten a bunch of funding from the FHWA's research division.
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Aug 15, 2013 22:39
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Volmarias posted:To be fair, the planning department there was kind of a special case, since Hitler loved the grandiose designs and the designers loved not getting drafted to fight in the war, so a lot of stuff came out that was totally unrealistic but looked really neat since "looking great for Hitler" was the largest level of utility expected for most of the designs and was directly correlated to not getting shipped off to fight the Russians. Hitler expected it to be built.
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Aug 15, 2013 22:42
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Cichlidae posted:I had a webinar about Kansas City today, specifically their smart workzones. One thing that was mentioned, and which we'd considered for our next SWZ, was Bluetooth tracking: you set up a few Bluetooth readers along your work zone, and they contact every Bluetooth-enabled phone that passes by. You can track them origin-destination, get travel times, speeds, all that fun stuff. Doesn't that seem like it would violate privacy, though? It's technically anonymous, and it's something you could do yourself if you had a hundred people sitting around and tracking every license plate that goes by... As long as you don't retain any form of unique identifier from the phone, it should be OK, I think.
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Aug 15, 2013 22:56
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kefkafloyd posted:As long as you don't retain any form of unique identifier from the phone, it should be OK, I think. My concern isn't so much that you could track someone, it's more that the vast majority of people would have no idea that it's happening, and no way to opt out.
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Aug 15, 2013 23:17
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Cichlidae posted:My concern isn't so much that you could track someone, it's more that the vast majority of people would have no idea that it's happening, and no way to opt out. You can't opt out of a lot of anonymous traffic tracking features. As long as it's properly anonymized (e.g. there is no way to ever link you to it), and the information is deleted after a period of time, it would probably pass muster.
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Aug 15, 2013 23:38
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As a counterpoint, you may want to rethink that.
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