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People can and do build private roads all the time but they don't generally go anywhere much. The bylaws you'd fall afoul of would be as diverse as the local bodies of the world, who knows what any one locality focuses on? In my region, probably aren't allowed to move the amount of earth required for a road without a permit, and clash with rules about the amount of impermeable surface that to can create because it causes drainage problems, among many, many other things. If you're trying to do it entirely independent of the local body, you also run into problems because you need to create intersections with the existing roads on public land that you don't have any rights to. So you'd be stuck abusing an existing driveway crossing to get onto your road. And even then the local body might have rules that disallow it or retroactively implement a new bylaw. You'd be stuck with the costs of maintaining the roads, and even if you build it to the council standards, if you tried to vest it in the council later on you might find that the standards have changed in the meantime and you need to rebuild it to a higher standard (happened to a customer of my work a while back) If you have any new houses going onto your road, then that also means its a subdivision that generates traffic and virtually every local body in the developed world will have rules about that.
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Jul 16, 2019 03:01
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Tiny Tubesteak Tom posted:Here's a real dumb question I thought about today. Say I own a lot of land that may or may not abut two or more separate streets. Can you just start building roads? Can you connect them to other roads and allow thru traffic? I was sitting in delirious amounts of traffic today and for some reason I thought it'd be loving hilarious if someone just built a big-rear end road in the middle of some neighborhood or something. I imagine the town/city would have something to say, but what? The Kelston Toll Road is amazing example of this The Kelston toll road was a 1,198-foot-long (365 m) private, temporary toll road, built by a private entrepreneur without planning permission between Bath and Kelston, 9.5 miles (15.3 km) southeast of Bristol in Bath and North East Somerset, England. It opened on 1 August and closed on 17 November 2014, when the A431 road reopened. 
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Jul 16, 2019 04:18
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If you're buying or have bought properties that can join two roads, you do already have the ability to build driveways on those lots, and you can connect them freely. It's hardly uncommon out in farm country, or in certain suburban neighborhoods, and businesses in urban areas often end up creating roads like that just from their parking lots. Convincing people they are allowed to turn into your driveways to get to the other road is more likely to be where you start getting into conflict with the local authorities and drivers too, and depending on the sort of location you're in the allowable width of the driveway entrance may only be suitable for a single lane.
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Jul 16, 2019 04:35
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Qwijib0 posted:The Kelston Toll Road is amazing example of this Yeah, this is fantastic because the closest other route was a quite long detour and instead of the authorities building a temporary detour, this guy just did it and got the costs back by asking for a toll.
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Jul 16, 2019 06:47
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According to the article he ultimately lost money on the venture, which is probably why we don't see more of that
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Jul 16, 2019 09:02
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Roads are expensive. Who knew?
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Jul 16, 2019 14:43
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dublish posted:Roads are expensive. Who knew? And that’s a fly by night operation with no additional cost to acquire right of way. For the government to build that bypass it would probably cost a whole lot more.
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Jul 16, 2019 14:49
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Tiny Tubesteak Tom posted:Here's a real dumb question I thought about today. Say I own a lot of land that may or may not abut two or more separate streets. Can you just start building roads? Can you connect them to other roads and allow thru traffic? I was sitting in delirious amounts of traffic today and for some reason I thought it'd be loving hilarious if someone just built a big-rear end road in the middle of some neighborhood or something. I imagine the town/city would have something to say, but what? generally speaking, you'd be opening yourself up to an unprecedented and horrifying new world of legal liability if you did so people build private roads all the time. this is no big deal. but these roads rarely go anywhere aside from providing access from a private residence or two and connecting them to the road network. driveways are technically private roads. since nobody uses them for through traffic, they're lightly regulated. there may be local regulations around permeability/drainage and whatnot but most laws which are applicable to roads are waived for private roads/driveways since no government wants the headache of taking everyone's driveway, whether it's 100ft or 1mi long, onto their administrative load the most immediate thing you'd have to deal with is getting permits for curb cuts. the government would want to know why you are connecting a road to a government-owned road, and busting up government concrete on the government right of way. they'd want to do some kind of impact analysis on how much traffic this private road is expected to see. if it's a driveway, you get a "fine whatever" response and your permit stamped because nobody's moving a large amount of traffic on their private residential driveway. if you are opening a business or something and trying to build a parking lot, the government will start to care about things like draining stormwater ("how big of a parking lot are we talking about here?") and pedestrian-vehicle interactions. you may have to kick some money towards adding a crosswalk across your driveway entrance for pedestrians. if a developer is building a subdivision full of houses, all the roads in that subdivision are typically built at private expense to the local code standard. this includes sidewalks, storm drains, utilities access, etc. - and then once the project is complete, the roads are typically given over to the local government for long term maintenance. this is because it's easier to take care of legal questions of access if the land the road is on is in government hands, and also because roads are expensive and lmao the HOA shitfit that would happen if a sinkhole opened up and every owner in the neighborhood had to pony up a multi-thousand dollar assessment to fix it. way better to deal with this through taxes so anyway, you've got some land and you decided to build a public access through road. you go get your curb cut permits and start construction. eventually someone at the county notices you're making your own wildcat addition to the road network and they come around to politely ask you what the gently caress you think you're doing. there's a lot of poo poo that could happen here, from someone noticing that some of your construction is not up to code (unless you have hundreds of thousands of dollars sitting around to hire a professional road-building contractor and not just Joe's Asphalt and Used Tire), or your behavior kicks off some kind of traffic impact review and your neighbors get involved not wanting to see 2-3x extra traffic rolling by their homes, really a lot of things can happen now that you're in big boy permit land, and eventually probably the government eminent domains your road away from you because why does a private citizen need a toll road in the first place? and if you're lucky you will break even here
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Jul 16, 2019 18:45
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Dude, that's an insightful post and I thank you for it, but now my eyes hurt. Please use your shift key next time. (I know you have one, I saw a couple capitals in there.) Edit: vvvv What, are you in the field, digging for it? Or looking through city archives for a schematic or something? Hippie Hedgehog fucked around with this message at 19:37 on Jul 16, 2019 |
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Jul 16, 2019 19:09
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Have been trying to find a waterline all day at the intersection our roundabout’s going in and god drat I hate underground utilities.
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Jul 16, 2019 19:12
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Happy Noodle Boy posted:Have been trying to find a waterline all day at the intersection our roundabout’s going in and god drat I hate underground utilities. I'm now picturing a world with above ground water lines in the vicinity of a roundabout being used by Ohio drivers. My mental image roughly resembles the kids section of a waterpark with open pipes just spraying everywhere. wolrah fucked around with this message at 21:24 on Jul 16, 2019 |
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Jul 16, 2019 21:22
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Let me introduce you to the clusterfuck that is the double railroad crossing in Oxford, OH. It also happens to be the intersections of some of the busier roads in the city, particularly traffic coming off 27. Stop lights in red, railroad track in yellow, queuing area in purple.  There is a short bit of queuing area just after the tracks, before you get to the main intersection. The problem is both railroad crossings are graded quite a bit higher than the road, so it is nearly impossible to see if you will fit into the queuing area until you are already up on the tracks. And the tracks are quite active, a couple trains a day sometimes. Also the timing of the lights is terrible... the green section seems to always be red, when the other lights are green and vice versa.. And given that it only holds a small amount of cars, if it gets remotely busy, all the other intersections back up. And if there is a train, the entire thing, and all the surrounding streets just grid lock.  In the street view picture it doesn't look nearly as high, but in a car closer to the ground, you have to just about drive onto the track to see anything.
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Jul 17, 2019 02:25
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obviously the solution is to eliminate the railroad. to continue the ohio chat, the third state roundabout conference is this september in Neward, OH. home of roundabout block
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Jul 17, 2019 03:09
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stevewm posted:Let me introduce you to the clusterfuck that is the double railroad crossing in Oxford, OH. If you can't fix the grade, a common solution would be (at least in the Netherlands) to connect that line of traffic lights and also connect them to a couple extra ones right before the railroad crossing, so they sync their signals. For bonus points, have them turn red/green ony by one just a couple seconds apart (the amount of seconds it takes to drive from one traffic light to the next). Although that just solves the straight-ahead problem. That purple situation is tricky. It probably requires changing the phase of the lights if a train approaches such that all cars *before* the intersections that are going in the direction of one of the crossings get red for a while. Carbon dioxide fucked around with this message at 06:45 on Jul 17, 2019 |
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Jul 17, 2019 06:43
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stevewm posted:Let me introduce you to the clusterfuck that is the double railroad crossing in Oxford, OH. looking on google street view why the hell isn't there an underpass? obviously a modern one wouldn't be tall enough for semis but I'm surprised there's not one from the 1920s or whatever
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Jul 17, 2019 19:49
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stevewm posted:Let me introduce you to the clusterfuck that is the double railroad crossing in Oxford, OH. Perhaps the road traffic safety could be improved by making changing the intersections to roundabouts (for continuous flow) and adding partial light signal control of entry to the roundabouts, to prevent sending more cars into the green and purple roads when a train is approaching. But I think the best approach would also involve safety systems on the railroad. Trains approaching the crossings would need to slow down to 25 mph well in advance, preferably enforced by an ATC system. Install a system on the crossings to detect blockage after the barriers have closed. If either of the crossings are blocked, the train would receive a stop signal before the crossings, hence the need for an enforced low speed limit over them.
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Jul 17, 2019 21:30
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What really sucks is when a train comes through it basically bisects a large, busy, chunk of the city. All the crossings are at-grade. No underpasses/overpasses anywhere. And the trains creep through at like 15mph. More than once I've seen someone get stuck on the tracks when a train started approaching. Because the intersections ahead where grid locked and the person couldn't see that until they drove up onto the tracks.
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Jul 18, 2019 03:27
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stevewm posted:And the trains creep through at like 15mph. Well, see the post above yours to find out why that is.
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Jul 18, 2019 20:09
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Hippie Hedgehog posted:Well, see the post above yours to find out why that is. Yeah, I understand they are going to creep through slowly given all the crossings, its a given. Just sucks that all the crossings are at-grade and no way around it.
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Jul 18, 2019 20:28
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I mean one thing here is just to extend the warning period so that every lane has enough time to clear. When trains come through my hometown, the gates start closing several minutes before the trains pass by. That way every light will have cycled and there's no reason for a car to be on the tracks. But really the solution is to limit the number of crossings in the first place. Direct traffic into a handful of well-designed crossings, rather than all over the place. I mean there's seven different road crossings in just over half a mile of track - there's got to be a better approach. Kaal fucked around with this message at 21:21 on Jul 18, 2019 |
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Jul 18, 2019 20:42
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stevewm posted:What really sucks is when a train comes through it basically bisects a large, busy, chunk of the city. All the crossings are at-grade. No underpasses/overpasses anywhere. And the trains creep through at like 15mph. If anything happens to the train, your city is just hosed. We had someone drive on the tracks a while ago (did not get hit) and it was just a complete clusterfuck.
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Jul 18, 2019 20:51
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Carbon dioxide posted:
Why not have the road raise up in elevation earlier so there's room to stop when people see the queue is full on the purple side?
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Jul 19, 2019 04:48
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mamosodiumku posted:Why not have the road raise up in elevation earlier so there's room to stop when people see the queue is full on the purple side? That's probably not possible because the airspace 15 ft above the street is owned by a private low-flying planes company or something.
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Jul 19, 2019 06:50
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  The story is that the new guy on the paint truck pushed the wrong button and nobody noticed. How huge a deal is that to fix?
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Aug 3, 2019 10:20
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Javid posted:
That sucks, hopefully they didn't go too far. Fixing it is a pain but it's a common issue. People used to use vertical disc grinders in a process known as scarifying, but have begun switching to high pressure water trucks because they cause less damage to the road surface. Here's an article talking about different methods of doing it. It's geared towards commercial folks removing striping from parking lots and warehouses, but there's information on roadways as well: https://1800stencil.com/how-to-remove-parking-lot-lines/
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Aug 3, 2019 12:07
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Kaal posted:That sucks, hopefully they didn't go too far. Fixing it is a pain but it's a common issue. People used to use vertical disc grinders in a process known as scarifying, but have begun switching to high pressure water trucks because they cause less damage to the road surface. It looks like paint and not thermoplastic, so yeah water blasting would probably get it off pretty easily
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Aug 3, 2019 18:08
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Aug 4, 2019 13:27
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i like mid-century chart design, it's kind of soothing:  probably from the 1979 california water atlas, and where are those resource maps from? i love their style. the url says 1978 i assume it's that sweet spot when you still needed graphic design professionals but they had powerful computing tools at their disposal. so a little later than the example you're presenting, that's probably the end of physical graphic design? i dunno the history of this poo poo but it's interesting to me, i feel like in a previous age (and given the necessary privileges) i'd have been a cartographer another cool modality we don't have any more is the plastic overlays they used to use instead of clicking the checkbox next to layers in ArcGIS edit: a traffic-related example that comes to mind is the digitization of america's road maps - that's a seminal event, the manual generation handing off to the GIS generation. Here's a census article patting themselves on the back for doing it and explaining the details edit2: i might as well link the royksopp geico commercial song video that is mostly composed of cool infographics. there's some about transportation! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VF8LMQQ0rEw oystertoadfish fucked around with this message at 14:35 on Aug 4, 2019 |
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Aug 4, 2019 14:24
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oystertoadfish posted:another cool modality we don't have any more is the plastic overlays they used to use instead of clicking the checkbox next to layers in ArcGIS Back in the day you would put hand-draw all the base-mapping for a roadway project (topographic survey, contours, property lines, etc.) onto a translucent plastic sheet of mylar - and then make copies of that onto the reverse side of more mylar sheets, then show all your roadway/structure/drainage design on the fronts. If you made a mistake drawing the proposed work, you had to use a dremel-like tool to grind off the layer of plastic with the ink on it. And since the existing information was on the back, you wouldn't obliterate it while erasing the error on the front.
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Aug 4, 2019 15:21
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Kaal posted:Fixing it is a pain but it's a common issue. People used to use vertical disc grinders in a process known as scarifying, Devor posted:If you made a mistake drawing the proposed work, you had to use a dremel-like tool to grind off the layer of plastic with the ink on it.
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Aug 4, 2019 18:47
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We used to correct spelling mistakes on signed plans by using a razor blade to scrape the ink off the vellum ( I have no idea what modern vellum is, but we were required to print the final plans on it). Then you'd key it with one of those pen erasers before inking it in. By the time I started all the ink pens and so on were terrible because they'd only get used like once a year. Sucked a lot, you didn't want to make a mistake.
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Aug 4, 2019 21:44
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Jaguars! posted:We used to correct spelling mistakes on signed plans by using a razor blade to scrape the ink off the vellum ( I have no idea what modern vellum is, but we were required to print the final plans on it). Then you'd key it with one of those pen erasers before inking it in. By the time I started all the ink pens and so on were terrible because they'd only get used like once a year. Sucked a lot, you didn't want to make a mistake. What other weird old stuff have people seen around the office? We had an old guy who we had to take away his Planimeter because he wouldn't stop using it to measure areas on paper prints even when we had CADD files. It has a ton of inherent uncertainty/inaccuracy - you could never get the same area twice, so you used it 2-3 times and averaged the results together. The tool is a pretty cool idea - it lets you measure the area of an arbitrary shape. If the arm is out further as you swing it around, the area increments faster. Kind of like a variable-radius compass that measures as you go.
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Aug 5, 2019 00:48
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lol now I'm considering pulling the fire alarm and sending everyone into the rain so I can search the office for our one. Glancing around, I can see: French Curves Functioning light table Abney Level What I think are a couple of clip on EDMs (Electromagnetic distance measurers) Cadastral wall map dating from 1980. We threw out our last drawing board about two years ago. At the same time we found a pre-war draughting standards book for Malaya, left over from the long dead founder of the company. We used to have a really nice Wild T1A theodolite in the garage but it seems to have disappeared. I brought it in to survey around a course for my surveying 101 paper and got a perfect angular close. Unfortunately one of the requirements of the paper was to adjust out an error so we had to forge a new field notes with a suitable error to complete the assignment.
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Aug 5, 2019 02:25
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Planimeter A. Ott Kempten Abney level:  This is for measuring angles on a vertical plane. Looking in through the pinhole, half your view is your target and half is the spirit level at the top (it's obscured here). you move the little handle along the scale and the level tilts until the bubble is in the middle of your view and then you read the scale on the side. Beautifully simple little tool. Looks like the sighting apparatus from a plane table?  A bunch of drawing sets hanging around, some in very good nick. Also an adorable perambulator thing that I've never seen before, presumably used for scaling distances off of plans.  1982, 2nd Edition(!) 
Jaguars! fucked around with this message at 07:34 on Aug 5, 2019 |
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Aug 5, 2019 07:27
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I don’t think we have any old equipment around, but I do love taking a look at old plans when I’m verifying existing right of way for a project. The most eye opening one was from the 1920’s in rural South Carolina. They had labeled all the buildings with owner names, except for one building: the Negro School. I believe there was a Negro Church on there as well.
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Aug 5, 2019 21:05
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I seem to remember the OP talking about how it was pretty much impossible to get utility poles moved. Utility Pole Mistakenly Left In Middle Of Somerville Bike Lane quote:BOSTON (CBS) – Bicyclists in Somerville are dealing with a dangerous obstacle – a utility pole right in the middle of a new bike lane on Beacon Street.
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Aug 7, 2019 17:44
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Anybody know what the deal is with all these stanchions built into interstate overpasses that remain completely empty? I-93 north of Boston has a ton of overpasses where it seems like there either were signs mounted previously, or where signs should be mounted now. What was the point of building the shape of the sign into the masonry of the overpass if they're just gonna be giant blank walls? Part of some project to make the "distance to exit" more accurate?
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Aug 28, 2019 18:12
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Tiny Tubesteak Tom posted:Anybody know what the deal is with all these stanchions built into interstate overpasses that remain completely empty? I-93 north of Boston has a ton of overpasses where it seems like there either were signs mounted previously, or where signs should be mounted now. What was the point of building the shape of the sign into the masonry of the overpass if they're just gonna be giant blank walls? Part of some project to make the "distance to exit" more accurate? There used to be a sign there, and when teh road was re-signed six years ago they didn't put a replacement on the overpass. Massachusetts used to mount BGSes on overpasses, but the practice has gone away. Some were mounted via metal struts, others used concrete backings like that one and were attached directly. When that overpass is rebuilt, it'll be rebuilt without the sign mount.
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Aug 28, 2019 18:38
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kefkafloyd posted:Massachusetts used to mount BGSes on overpasses, but the practice has gone away. Why?
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Aug 28, 2019 18:56
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Maintenance It’s always maintenance. Sign mounted to bridge is one more place for water to hide and make the bridge fall down earlier Sign obscures parts of the bridge and makes inspections more difficult When bridge is being worked on the sign might be obscured, so now you’re building a standalone sign support anyway You have to run electric conduit along the bridge, again making inspections and repairs annoying The detailing required (see that giant flat slab of concrete) makes it more difficult to change the size of shape of the sign Connection details to mount the sign to concrete are more annoying than connecting to a steel truss When signs are mounted to an overhead truss, you can do 99% of the construction off the side of the road behind barrier, and then move the whole thing in at once to minimize traffic disruption
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Aug 28, 2019 19:08
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