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Varance posted:Overkill. Why does the horizontal part need to be so solid? It's not going to get hit by any trucks.
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Apr 4, 2013 22:43
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tilp posted:Why does the horizontal part need to be so solid? It's not going to get hit by any trucks. Wild Assed Guess:  They started replacing pole and wire signals with single-post solid arms in the early '00s in my area. The '05 season accelerated that significantly.
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Apr 4, 2013 22:48
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MrYenko posted:Wild Assed Guess: Varance fucked around with this message at 03:08 on Apr 5, 2013 |
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Apr 5, 2013 03:02
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Varance posted:Overkill. The first time I saw that pipe I thought it was the coolest thing ever and wondered why the rest of the county didn't do it. Now I know! Kakairo posted:It looks like IDOT may finally be doing something about one of the biggest bottlenecks in the county, Chicago's Circle Interchange. I'm not sure it's enough, though. Nothing short of rebuilding the whole thing would seem to be enough ...
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Apr 5, 2013 04:54
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Is there anything like Braess's paradox for added lanes? The Chicago's Circle Interchange work seems like it is just a bandaid that won't do a whole lot in just a couple years time as less congestion is just an invitation for more people to use that highway leading to more congestion.
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Apr 5, 2013 05:00
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In the city I live in they are doing some work on the on/off ramps for the freeway here. I hear they are turning it into a cloverleaf, but I don't know for certain. Could someone explain how this would benefit from a cloverleaf design? (click for googlemaps) 
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Apr 5, 2013 05:16
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Terminal Entropy posted:Is there anything like Braess's paradox for added lanes? The Chicago's Circle Interchange work seems like it is just a bandaid that won't do a whole lot in just a couple years time as less congestion is just an invitation for more people to use that highway leading to more congestion. The only way around that is to limit your demand. Work toward stricter building codes, zero (or negative) population growth, move people onto other modes, that sort of thing. PureRok posted:In the city I live in they are doing some work on the on/off ramps for the freeway here. I hear they are turning it into a cloverleaf, but I don't know for certain. Could someone explain how this would benefit from a cloverleaf design? I really hope they mean partial cloverleaf (parclo), because cloverleaf interchanges are 20+ years out of date and universally considered to be bad designs.
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Apr 5, 2013 12:18
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Someone needs to work on their centering skills.
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Apr 5, 2013 20:03
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smackfu posted:Someone needs to work on their centering skills. Our sign detail drafter is a 6'2 motorcyclist who could crush any of us engineers. You don't tell him how to design signs, he doesn't tell you where you can stick your t-square.
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Apr 5, 2013 22:19
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Cichlidae posted:Our sign detail drafter is a 6'2 motorcyclist who could crush any of us engineers. You don't tell him how to design signs, he doesn't tell you where you can stick your t-square. Man that sounds like a sweet job.
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Apr 5, 2013 23:35
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I just found out they're putting a Diverging Diamond here in the cities. Its even on my route to work. yay?  I have a feeling there's going to be some confused people when this thing opens up. So, how do you prevent people driving on the wrong side of the road and crashing into each other? How would the light rail tracks running in the middle affect the intersection? Nothing can cross over when a train's going through the intersection after all.Intersection now Final Layout
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Apr 6, 2013 03:28
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Silver95280 posted:I just found out they're putting a Diverging Diamond here in the cities. Its even on my route to work. yay? The answer to your first question is good channelization. Square up those curb corners so people realize they're not supposed to turn. Put some big arrows on the pavement and some DO NOT ENTER signs where appropriate. Really, it shouldn't be any more complicated than the intersection of two one-way streets. For the second question, the rail lines cross through areas which are already signalized (and thus can be easily pre-empted), and the off-ramps should have plenty of space to queue while the crossing is occupied. Long-term, the rail line should really be buried, but that's incredibly expensive.
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Apr 6, 2013 03:45
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Silver95280 posted:I just found out they're putting a Diverging Diamond here in the cities. Its even on my route to work. yay? Sweet, super glad we're making this LRT stop even more inhospitable to pedestrians. Really glad we added that one onto the line.
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Apr 6, 2013 05:32
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FISHMANPET posted:Sweet, super glad we're making this LRT stop even more inhospitable to pedestrians. Really glad we added that one onto the line. Wait, there's an LRT stop there? Why the hell would you put one in the median at a diamond interchange?
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Apr 6, 2013 17:19
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Cichlidae posted:Wait, there's an LRT stop there? Why the hell would you put one in the median at a diamond interchange? The stop appears to be immediately to the south, on a surface street and not the freeway.
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Apr 6, 2013 17:59
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Cichlidae posted:Wait, there's an LRT stop there? Why the hell would you put one in the median at a diamond interchange? Bloomington is the suburbs defined. Killing people who can't afford cars is probably considered a benefit.
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Apr 6, 2013 20:07
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Hedera Helix posted:The stop appears to be immediately to the south, on a surface street and not the freeway. Yeah, it's south a bit on American Boulevard. The stop was added after the line was built, and it's in the middle of a 6 lane road. It's pretty inhospitable now, but putting at the end of a DDI (not in the middle, whoops) isn't going to make it any better.
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Apr 6, 2013 20:29
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To briefly detour the thread, it feels like America continues to have a real bias to rail for transporting folk. How would you go about overcoming that and other obstacles to make using it a reality? If you feel up to it, do you think it would be possible to do something similar for trolley systems in certain cities?
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Apr 6, 2013 22:40
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December Octopodes posted:To briefly detour the thread, it feels like America continues to have a real bias to rail for transporting folk. How would you go about overcoming that and other obstacles to make using it a reality? Subsidies. Make high-speed rail the same price as regular rail, same as France did when its first LGV came online. Keep upgrading facilities, make it cheaper than flight, connect it with your existing transit, remove grade crossings. Basically, it takes money, which nobody in the US is willing to spend because they won't look past the initial cost and see the incredible benefits available. As for trolleys, light rail is already feasible, and we'd have a lot more of them around if GM wasn't so evil back in the day.
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Apr 6, 2013 22:48
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I don't think America's bias against rail has anything to do with being willing to invest, so much as rail being wholly ineffective in decentralized and spread-out American cities. To have effective passenger rail, you need high-density places to transport people to and from, and that largely doesn't exist in America outside of a very small handful of metropolitan areas. Our homes are largely in sprawling suburban subdivisions, and jobs are largely in sprawling industrial parks and commercial areas. The handful of communities that have tried to invest in rail after a century of growth based around the car have met with utter dismal failure. The "American Dream" is a nice big house with a well groomed lawn in a quiet neighborhood with the freedom to hop in your car and 5 minutes later be parked 50' from the entrance to a grocery store. The good news (if you can call it that) is that rail is actually not all that energy efficient. Trains and buses are big and heavy and while are very efficient when fully loaded, run virtually empty most of the time but still need to run to service routes during off-peak hours as well as peak. Hybrid-electric and EV cars (with 1.57 pax, which I think is the actual average passenger rate) are actually more efficient than the most efficient rail in the world, and are a wiser place for america to invest. 
grover fucked around with this message at 23:15 on Apr 6, 2013 |
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Apr 6, 2013 23:12
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Rail can be (and already is) competitive with short and medium-haul air travel, especially with the added hassle of security and transport to and from airports. The Northeast Corridor and parts of California are already showing that, and hopefully more and more of the Chicago-centered Amtrak system will get to 110 mph or faster. For cities with less developed transit systems, there's no reason you can't have rental car facilities at train stations just like you do at airports. I wouldn't call the light rail lines in Minneapolis, Charlotte, Denver, or Phoenix (to name a few) "dismal failures" either.
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Apr 7, 2013 00:32
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A midwest HSR network centered on Chicago basically has the same spread of population centers as the TGV centered in Paris. For a lot of city pairs in the midwest, even mid speed rail can be faster from city center to city center than flying. And BTU per passenger mile is a pretty stupid way to compare transportation modes. It assumes that going farther is better. If you really want to talk about energy efficiency, you'll care about how many BTU each trip costs. Basically, this Randal O'toole poo poo needs to  .
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Apr 7, 2013 01:31
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 The reality is that the kind of trips that could be served by high speed rail are a very small proportion of the trips made each day in this country Regular speed rail is way more important to build out.
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Apr 7, 2013 01:36
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Yeah, HSR can be pretty expensive, the midwest would do pretty well with 110 MPH service.
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Apr 7, 2013 01:40
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All this talk about high speed rail, but guess how bad the New Haven line is:Wikipedia posted:A number of projects are either planned or underway that will upgrade the catenary system, replace outdated bridges, and straighten certain sections of the New Haven Line to accommodate the Acela's 240 km/h (150 mph) maximum operating speeds. Much of the catenary system has not been upgraded since the New Haven Railroad installed the catenary wires in 1907. The signal system is nonexistent on the Danbury branch. At South Norwalk a GCT bound train can be forced to wait up to 20 minutes for other trains using the main line. Due to the fact that only one active line exists from Wilton to Danbury, most off-peak Danbury bound trains have to wait at Wilton station for the opposing train to pass by. Don't forget to marvel at the cars in service - 40 years and going strong! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arMcRUkeJTM
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Apr 7, 2013 01:46
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I've been watching some BBC shows about the British rail system. They've got a really robust service, and between a lot of smaller cities they run Diesel Multiple Units with only one or two units. Vehicles like that make smaller trains more energy efficient and also require less capital for frequent service (but if you run frequent service that still requires more labor which costs more money). But vehicles like that are illegal in the US because of silly FRA reasons.
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Apr 7, 2013 02:04
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FISHMANPET posted:A midwest HSR network centered on Chicago basically has the same spread of population centers as the TGV centered in Paris. For a lot of city pairs in the midwest, even mid speed rail can be faster from city center to city center than flying. Would be very nice if we had a cheap rail alternative to air, especially to major cities where travelers could transition directly to subways and wouldn't really need a car at the far end. Would be REALLY nice.
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Apr 7, 2013 02:05
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grover posted:Actually, that's a very good point- BTUs per passenger mile don't represent that the bus drives 12 miles in a roundabout route that a car could have taken a more direct route and only traveled 6 or 8. Or that people have to drive a car to a park 'n ride to catch a train, and then catch a cab on the far side. The vast majority of passenger trips on local service transit are shorter than an "average" car trip, because in the areas served by that transit, things are closer together.
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Apr 7, 2013 02:17
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FISHMANPET posted:I've been watching some BBC shows about the British rail system. They've got a really robust service, and between a lot of smaller cities they run Diesel Multiple Units with only one or two units. Vehicles like that make smaller trains more energy efficient and also require less capital for frequent service (but if you run frequent service that still requires more labor which costs more money). But vehicles like that are illegal in the US because of silly FRA reasons. The British rail system also has absolutely no high speed rail service except on the line that was built to link the Chunnel to London. Diesel and gasoline multiple unit cars used to be very common on American rails. But they mostly died off around the time when Amtrak had to be created to manage passenger rail service, as they had been used pretty much exclusively on low traffic branch lines. The lines considered worth saving were often instead converted to regular push pull service if demand was high enough. 
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Apr 7, 2013 02:22
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HiHo ChiRho posted:Don't forget to marvel at the cars in service - 40 years and going strong! Hey we're upgrading the M8, traveling in style now. I've yet to get on a metro-north train with the M8 cars yet though  When it comes to any aspect of non automobile transit in the US though, trolleys, bicycles, cars, commuter rail, long distance high speed rail, ect, the importance of car culture can never be underestimated. Unless it's a plane where you have to travel a long distance in a very short time frame, many Americans can't fathom why you wouldn't drive your car. We I think in large part personify are cars, since we have to spend so much time in them, they become part of our personality, which means when people don't want to be in cars, some people begin to be threatened by the entire concept of that. The end result of this though is transit requires subsidies, much like the infrastructure to drive cars does, but, many people don't see their cars as being subsidized, and loathe the idea of subsidizing non auto traffic. And for commuter and mass transit traffic, there's always the "Ugh, I'm sick of subsidizing buses and poo poo for those drat poors and minorities"
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Apr 7, 2013 02:43
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That's captured in this highly accurate Onion report: Report: 98 Percent Of U.S. Commuters Favor Public Transportation For Others FISHMANPET posted:The vast majority of passenger trips on local service transit are shorter than an "average" car trip, because in the areas served by that transit, things are closer together. Lack of parking and insane road congestion drive people to walk and/or rail in city travel; none of which apply when talking about trying to apply rail service to the rest of the US where distances between point A and point B are much longer and there is ample parking for all. Mass transit ridership density will drop dramatically with population density, while overhead operational and infrastructure costs remain the same or larger. grover fucked around with this message at 02:57 on Apr 7, 2013 |
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Apr 7, 2013 02:47
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I am curious as to where this infographic was taken from, what methodology was used, and why they chose the (now-defunct) Galveston trolley, of all systems, as an example of light rail. You can't seriously expect a heritage trolley for a city with a declining population, which had apparently run its equipment into the ground over the course of thirty years before having to shut down after Hurricane Ike, to be representative of anything, can you? Really now. It's an outlier.
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Apr 7, 2013 04:02
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December Octopodes posted:To briefly detour the thread, it feels like America continues to have a real bias to rail for transporting folk. How would you go about overcoming that and other obstacles to make using it a reality? Do you mean a bias towards rail or a bias against rail? While several posters have covered the latter, I honestly think the former is dangerous too--a model BRT system could serve more passengers more flexibly than LRT at a lower capital cost. Of course, not only is there no model system in the US, there's a huge mistrust of buses. To overcome the bias towards rail (and against buses), heavy investment in buses is needed. http://www.theatlanticcities.com/commute/2012/07/why-we-should-stop-talking-about-bus-stigma/2601/
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Apr 7, 2013 04:14
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The source of the graph seems to be some random blog (http://www.templetons.com/brad/transit-myth.html), but I think the data is taken for a former edition of the Department of Energy Transportation Data Book. I say former because reading the current version (http://cta.ornl.gov/data/tedb31/Edition31_Chapter02.pdf), it does talk about BTU per passenger mile for various modes of transport, and it does give information for various light rail, heavy rail, and commuter rail systems, it doesn't break down specific vehicles, nor include the average load that this graphic includes. The website says former versions of the report are not available, so basically the data is unverifiable.
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Apr 7, 2013 04:16
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FISHMANPET posted:The source of the graph seems to be some random blog (http://www.templetons.com/brad/transit-myth.html), but I think the data is taken for a former edition of the Department of Energy Transportation Data Book. I say former because reading the current version (http://cta.ornl.gov/data/tedb31/Edition31_Chapter02.pdf), it does talk about BTU per passenger mile for various modes of transport, and it does give information for various light rail, heavy rail, and commuter rail systems, it doesn't break down specific vehicles, nor include the average load that this graphic includes. What it also ignores is that 1000 BTUs produced by a gasoline engine in a personal vehicle and 1000 BTUs produced in a power plan will have vastly different efficiencies in fuel usage; as well as much different pollution profiles (even if the power plant is a filthy coal plant, it's still going to be a lot less pollution).
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Apr 7, 2013 04:45
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December Octopodes posted:To briefly detour the thread, it feels like America continues to have a real bias to rail for transporting folk. How would you go about overcoming that and other obstacles to make using it a reality?
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Apr 7, 2013 06:48
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FISHMANPET posted:The source of the graph seems to be some random blog (http://www.templetons.com/brad/transit-myth.html), but I think the data is taken for a former edition of the Department of Energy Transportation Data Book. I say former because reading the current version (http://cta.ornl.gov/data/tedb31/Edition31_Chapter02.pdf), it does talk about BTU per passenger mile for various modes of transport, and it does give information for various light rail, heavy rail, and commuter rail systems, it doesn't break down specific vehicles, nor include the average load that this graphic includes. IMHO, EV cars + nuclear power is the sweet spot for peak energy efficiency of low-density suburban sprawl cities. Those costs are largely insulated from the rising cost of oil and gas and will likely remain the sweet spot for the design length of public roads and infrastructure being built now and in the near future.
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Apr 7, 2013 11:18
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grover posted:IMHO, EV cars + nuclear power is the sweet spot for peak energy efficiency of low-density suburban sprawl cities. Those costs are largely insulated from the rising cost of oil and gas and will likely remain the sweet spot for the design length of public roads and infrastructure being built now and in the near future. Completely agreed. Possibly not with traditional pressurized water reactors, but fission power is definitely the key to sustainable first-world growth. It's really too bad that the knee jerk reaction to more nuclear power is:  BUT ATOMS ARE BAD
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Apr 7, 2013 15:48
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MrYenko posted:Completely agreed. Possibly not with traditional pressurized water reactors, but fission power is definitely the key to sustainable first-world growth. It's really too bad that the knee jerk reaction to more nuclear power is: There is no such thing as sustainable growth! 
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Apr 8, 2013 00:12
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Cichlidae posted:There is no such thing as sustainable growth! But "somewhat less-unsustainable growth" doesn't have the same feel-good connotations, and it's kind of awkward to use as a phrase.
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Apr 8, 2013 00:29
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