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noblergt posted:The solution in Europe is usually a combination of signs and arrows painted on the road, and usually the dividing line is either unbroken or significantly less broken, e.g http://g.co/maps/6k9c5 In the UK we use yellow for parking restrictions, as seen there. There is no plan at all to introduce yellow lines or any other colour to separate direction of travel. quote:However I do agree that Priority to the Right is loving retarded and I glad we don't use it in the UK (well, it would be to the left here!). If it says "Give Way" you give way, that's it. Priority to the right is actually brilliant, it establishes a ground rule that is obeyed unless other markings are present. You can't mark up every single intersection everywhere with shark's teeth or priority signs, especially out in the countryside or in tight residential parts of cities. Priority to the right works perfectly well, the only problem I've ever encountered is that bicyclists falsely think it doesn't apply to them and yield to traffic from the left. But they're excused since there's no formal bicyclist's training. Priority to the right works, it establishes a solid ground rule in the absence of other signage 
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Sep 18, 2011 09:09
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KozmoNaut posted:Priority to the right works perfectly well, the only problem I've ever encountered is that bicyclists falsely think it doesn't apply to them and yield to traffic from the left. But they're excused since there's no formal bicyclist's training. Bicyclist think no traffic rule applies to them. It is really hard to be held liable for a accident as a bicyclist. Even while pulling a illegal manouveur if a car hits them it is fairly likely the car driver will be held liable. He should have expected the cyclist was insane and going to pull some suicide move and adjusted his speed to that. I'm not bullshitting, if you can read Dutch here is a example of a case where a bicyclist made a illegal dick move and the tram driver that hit him was still held liable. The idea is that the guy piloting 1+ ton of steel has a heavier responsibility to other road users.
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Sep 18, 2011 13:36
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NihilismNow posted:Bicyclist think no traffic rule applies to them. KozmoNaut posted:Priority to the right works perfectly well, the only problem I've ever encountered is that bicyclists falsely think it doesn't apply to them and yield to traffic from the left. But they're excused since there's no formal bicyclist's training. But I'm glad you got that piece of bicycle rage off your chest.
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Sep 18, 2011 17:50
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Jasper Tin Neck posted:That's right, the problem in his neck of the woods is that bicyclists are too timid. I don't thing that counts as crazy illegal dick moves yet. They're only too timid at intersections with priority to the right, everywhere else they jump the red lights, weave across city streets without looking, harass people on the sidewalks and have a severe entitlement complex. So he's partially right and I've never heard of a bicyclist being held liable for an accident involving a car, even if they caused it.
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Sep 18, 2011 18:21
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Bicyclists around here will blow through an intersection without even looking, and give you dirty looks if you honk at them for almost getting run over. loving morons - and they wonder why everyone hates them. You do not own the road, nobody does, and nobody cares for your safety but YOU!!!! Idiots.
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Sep 18, 2011 19:44
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The Idaho stop (for bikes stop signs are yield signs and stop lights are stop signs) should go national and then be enforced.
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Sep 18, 2011 20:48
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Jasper Tin Neck posted:But I'm glad you got that piece of bicycle rage off your chest. I don't get where you get rage from. I'm a bicyclist myself. Most bicyclist don't give a gently caress about traffic laws and will do illegal things all the time (so do pedestrians). It's good to train drivers to expect this. edit: I explained why above, the car driver has more responsibility because he is more capable of doing damage and a colission is less likely to damage him.
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Sep 18, 2011 22:17
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NihilismNow posted:I don't get where you get rage from. I'm a bicyclist myself. Most bicyclist don't give a gently caress about traffic laws and will do illegal things all the time (so do pedestrians). It's good to train drivers to expect this. I'd be fine with this if bikers weren't also self righteous assholes about their rights on the road. I'm also a biker, and I get pretty pissed when people blow by me while I'm sitting at a stop sign. Though I'm also a huge proponent of the Idaho stop.
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Sep 18, 2011 22:32
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Choadmaster posted:I'm confused, because in your link all I see are four lanes separated by identical dashed white lines, three of which are traveling one direction and one of which is traveling the other... no medians anywhere. Sorry, I wasn't going on about these situations specifically but more on conditions in general. The Hereweg is still single laned because the outer lane is an exclusive buslane and it's pretty well signposted so that's another unique thing going on right there. The road ahead in my first streetview example is one-way so there's no conflict going on there for example. The lane-splitting before that particular intersection is a bit lovely though I'll admit but it's only a small distance anyway The trianglethingy is a busstation.
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Sep 18, 2011 23:48
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Cichlidae posted:It's a major connection. There aren't many bridges over the river, so if there is an evacuation, you don't want it to be a chokepoint. Route 8 is on one end, and that definitely merits four lanes. Sticking the extra lanes underneath a diamond interchange gives much more storage, and it's good form to continue that extra width just in case it needs more widening in the future. Moreover, there is room for four lanes downtown on the West end of the bridge, so it's conceivable that it might be widened at some point in the future. You don't ever want bridges to be a bottleneck, since they're the most expensive thing to widen/replace. Thanks, that makes a lot of sense. The new bridge is beautiful too, although it is now one of those bridges that doesn't even feel like a bridge, just a fancy section of road that happens to be 50 feet off the ground.
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Sep 19, 2011 15:29
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There's an alternate route I commute on that's typically less traffic but takes longer than the freeways. It's mostly single lane 50mph country highways. One section slows to 35 through a commercial district and freeway interchange with a second lane opened up. After that the 2nd lane ends and there's another stretch of single lane 50 mph that slows terribly due to congestion. Five miles later or so it opens back to 2 lanes and the congested traffic become quite spread out. Do traffic averages show that if it was 2 lanes the entire time that congestion would be lessened, or would it increase due perhaps to more people using it? I imagine planning uses the average traffic, right (as described in the OP), and not for max capacity/peak traffic. It seems pretty overwhelming to figure out the best case scenario so I'm glad you guys know how to make it work.
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Sep 19, 2011 15:59
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ack! posted:There's an alternate route I commute on that's typically less traffic but takes longer than the freeways. It's mostly single lane 50mph country highways. One section slows to 35 through a commercial district and freeway interchange with a second lane opened up. After that the 2nd lane ends and there's another stretch of single lane 50 mph that slows terribly due to congestion. Traffic's gotta go somewhere, right? Taking out bottlenecks is a relatively low-impact way of improving capacity, and maintaining a constant cross-section simplifies maintenance as well. 5 miles is a bit long, though; widening that much roadway gets pretty expensive. The benefit may not be worth it. And, as you mentioned, it would increase demand. I'm sure those in charge would do an extensive cost-benefit analysis before building up. Just remember that congestion doesn't help anyone (perhaps excepting oil companies.) If you're removing an existing jam, even if it means more use in the future, you've helped out growth in the area as well as reducing pollution and lost time.
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Sep 19, 2011 20:01
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Summer's almost over, so here's a virtual vacation to Middletown, CT courtesy of Cichlidae. This is my biggest current project, the reconstruction of Bridge No. 00524, the Arrigoni Bridge, built starting in 1936. Someone in a helicopter took them, not me. I'm not that tall. 4MP versions available upon request!     Looks like these were taken before the hurricane (as the water's relatively clear). You can see the work crews removing deck panels in preparation for their replacement.
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Sep 19, 2011 20:19
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Nice pics! On that subject, why is the merge on the Middletown to Portland side on the actual bridge? Wouldn't it have made more sense to just close that lane all the way back to the traffic light? Or would it not have mattered and the traffic would have been terrible no matter what? (We were stuck in that for around 20 minutes on Friday night.) Also, do you guys have better images from the cameras that aren't on the web? The web views are so tiny (like 300x200) and it is almost impossible to see whether there is actual traffic, which kind of defeats the point of the snazzy website. smackfu fucked around with this message at 22:47 on Sep 19, 2011 |
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Sep 19, 2011 22:42
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smackfu posted:Nice pics! We need two lanes through the signal to provide enough capacity to serve the 1 lane across the bridge, otherwise the signal would be a bottleneck. We also need 12 x G feet of two-lane section after the signal, where G is the green time allotted to the major double movement, to allow people to accelerate through the signal and merge. We also don't put merges on a curve, or within 200 feet of them. smackfu posted:Also, do you guys have better images from the cameras that aren't on the web? The web views are so tiny (like 300x200) and it is almost impossible to see whether there is actual traffic, which kind of defeats the point of the snazzy website. Nope! That's what's in the spec, so that's what the subcontractor delivered. I can view them in 640X480 on the control website (requires login) but it's just horribly compressed upsampled 320X240.  Edit: At least you can zoom in far enough to count the individual cobbles in the asphalt. Cichlidae fucked around with this message at 23:20 on Sep 19, 2011 |
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Sep 19, 2011 23:16
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Can anyone tell me why the New Jersey Turnpike and I-295 seem to parallel for several miles? Help me out here, I don't deal with many toll roads. It just seems highly counter-intuitive to run two freeways right next to each other.
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Sep 20, 2011 06:04
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I've just read an article that states cops in the second-largest city in Denmark have begun ticketing people for running the yellow lights when they could have stopped. The enforcement is based on actual police officers instead of cameras and will probably be based on whether drivers manage to clear intersections before the red light, as is intended. I applaud this move, every single day I see people speed up to catch the yellow when they have more than enough time and distance to brake safely, most of the time they don't even make it all the way across before the light turns red. Unfortunately, I'm sure this is just a temporary measure 
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Sep 20, 2011 12:57
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Millstone posted:Can anyone tell me why the New Jersey Turnpike and I-295 seem to parallel for several miles? Help me out here, I don't deal with many toll roads. It just seems highly counter-intuitive to run two freeways right next to each other. The New Jersey Turnpike is intended to be part of a non-stop high-speed freeway from Washington DC to New York City, and as such has limited local access. I-295 has more local exits. As for why the roads are built next to each other rather than being concurrent, I suspect that the "non-stop high-speed freeway" bit plays a part in that; adding local exits to the turnpike would have reduced traffic flow during construction and would have added congestion after the exits were constructed.
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Sep 20, 2011 13:46
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I'm slowly catching up with this very interesting thread (I'm on page 25 now yay!). So far I've seen this subject (automated tolling) pop-up several times in the thread (as in the case of the London congestion charges), but Singapore seems to have a great system that works really well. Apparantly they were the first city in the world to implement congestion charges as well, and according to wikipedia, in 1998 the current system was implimented. Basically every car has to have a unit installed that takes a smart card that you pre-load with money. Throughout certain parts of the city there are overhead congestion signs that charge a certain amount when you drive under them depending on the time of day. In rush hour, a certain road might cost you a dollar if you want to drive on it, and 50 cents just after rush hour and then be free again later. Trucks, buses and taxis pay their own rate. Motorcycles might only pay 25 cents during the busiest hour and have the rest of the day free and so on. Here's one on google streetview. You can't see it on streetview, but the electronic sign indicates how much you will be charged according to your class of vehicle. This same system also works in just about every parking garage/lot in the city as well. So no parking tickets and pay stations, you just drive in and out and the appropriate amount is deducted from your card. Very convenient. Drive through any of these without money on your card? First time you get warned, the second time fined. They also seem to have some kind of system where you have to pay a surcharge to buy a car, which they adjust to control the number of cars allowed on their roads to begin with, though I don't know any of the details. As far as I can tell its one of the most expensive places in the world to drive a car. I think working as a traffic engineer in Singapore must be great, they seem to be constantly improving everything and to be very well funded, but have a lot of interesting problems to solve due to how little space they have to work in. At least from my perspective it looks like it would be a traffic engineering paradise.  Just outside my hotel on my last visit, they were making upgrades to the road to prepare for any future expansion of the pedestrian underpasses and subway. Every time I've been there, there'd been construction crews loving with pieces of road all over the city drat near 24 hours a day. Batcat! Batcat! fucked around with this message at 14:39 on Sep 20, 2011 |
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Sep 20, 2011 14:35
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Phenomneek posted:Singapore We were 20th, behind Namibia. A bit embarrassing if you ask me.
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Sep 20, 2011 19:24
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Wolfy posted:When the ASCE did their study about America's crumbling infrastructure, they ranked Singapore #1 in quality of surface roads. Namibia apparently has the best gravel/dirt roads in the world. The government contracted out maintenance of the roads to locals, usually farmers, that basically pay a guy to drive a bulldozer 5 days a week scraping their section of road. I worked in Swakopmund (large, for Namibia, German town) in Namibia for three months, and they still use salt roads except for the freeway and a few bits in the town center. Once a year when it rains those roads basically turn into a slippery ball of snot. And yeah I saw roads getting resurfaced in Singapore that looked new by our (South African) standards.
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Sep 20, 2011 20:21
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Phenomneek posted:I'm slowly catching up with this very interesting thread (I'm on page 25 now yay!). That is amazing, just about as hands-free as you can get a system working. In a place like Singapore, driving a car really should be a luxury.
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Sep 20, 2011 21:55
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Singapore is so small it seems silly to include it in country lists. It's like including DC in state rankings.
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Sep 21, 2011 18:18
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smackfu posted:Singapore is so small it seems silly to include it in country lists. It's like including DC in state rankings. If we leave out the outliers, then we won't have fun data "trends" to explain! Like trying to tell my coworkers that Singapore's relatively low crime rates aren't necessarily a result of their strict corporeal punishments.
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Sep 21, 2011 22:39
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Cichlidae posted:Singapore's relatively low crime rates aren't necessarily a result of their strict corporeal punishments. It's their strict spiritual punishments that really do it.
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Sep 22, 2011 21:12
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Phanatic posted:It's their strict spiritual punishments that really do it. Corporal, then  Alright, today's a Mini Field Visit! I spent the whole day out in the field, but I didn't have my camera, so you're left with cell phone pictures. I went to the new Route 72 in Bristol, which has been mentioned several times here recently. Bristol is Connecticut's largest city without freeway access. That's not for lack of trying, though; routes 72, 10, and 6 were all supposed to have freeway routes through Bristol. Unfortunately, each one was, in turn, canceled, leaving Bristol rather isolated. The Route 72 relocation is a small step to mitigate this problem: extending the Route 72 freeway, which ends just before the Bristol city line, a mile or so into the city as a 2X2-lane avenue. Most of it is currently open, though parts are not. This is the unopened portion.  Signs here are already installed, which is a bit ironic considering we're still waiting on ~200 signs for the already-opened portion. You'll see as many empty sign posts as used ones. This picture shows a new bridge that is ready to open up, once the utility companies finish their work.  Even on roads nobody uses (or perhaps because nobody uses them), you need to watch your step. Used syringes are a cosmopolitan threat. We wear steel-toed boots for a reason!  Someone mentioned storm damage! This is the Pequabuck river, which runs through downtown Bristol. You can see debris caught in the fence, which was left after the river receded. It's probably hay from the silt fencing used to prevent erosion. The river rose at least 8 feet, jumping over the nearby (in-use) Route 229, gouging out a bridge joint, wrecking a few feet of asphalt, and completely destroying a brand new sidewalk. The structure itself, thankfully, seems unharmed.  All around the job, there are washed-out embankments and sinkholes. They're very easy to fix, thankfully, but we are forecast to get 2" of rain tomorrow. Pics hosted on imgur since tinypic is acting funny. Please let me know if they run out of bandwidth!
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Sep 22, 2011 22:05
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Imgur was made to host for Reddit, who gets 2.5b pageviews a day. Imgur will definitely out-host tinypic!
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Sep 22, 2011 22:30
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So are you still employed?
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Sep 22, 2011 22:57
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Chaos Motor posted:Imgur was made to host for Reddit, who gets 2.5b pageviews a day. Imgur will definitely out-host tinypic! Alright, I've just seen a lot of imgur "image not found" in other threads. I guess they're getting actively deleted instead of out-bandwidthing. IOwnCalculus posted:So are you still employed? Yes, but with a big cut in pay and benefits! I've vowed to stick around a year and grab my general Civil Engineering PE (more for personal satisfaction than anything else), then grab a job overseas. Everyone's leaving the DOT... it's just not even close to parity with the private sector.
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Sep 23, 2011 00:11
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What is going on over on I 84 in the South Windsor/Manchester/Vernon area? It looks like a lot of concrete work with a plethora of random patches all over the place. Will this stretch eventually get repaved?
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Sep 29, 2011 16:17
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Lobstaman posted:What is going on over on I 84 in the South Windsor/Manchester/Vernon area? I was asking around about this myself, because they're definitely disrupting traffic. They had westbound traffic down to one lane at 7:00 pm, which is absolutely not allowed. Looks like it's a maintenance project, and those guys usually don't pay attention to restrictions. Full-depth resurfacing I-84 through East Hartford and Manchester (from Route 2 to Buckland Street, I think) is in design right now, which means it should begin next year. The project engineer is Eugene Saykin, and I can give you his contact information if you'd like some details.
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Sep 29, 2011 21:52
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Cichlidae, I know you get a lot of "why is traffic so bad in my town?"; but way back in the earliest pages of this thread it seemed that you had some knowledge to speak about the general history and more recent events that led up to Boston's current traffic situation and the Big Dig. I have read most of the thread up to here but haven't seen anything other than a map that showed how there were a lot of cancelled highways. Did you have any other insight into why Boston has so many traffic problems?
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Sep 30, 2011 17:24
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PoopinClumpin posted:Cichlidae, I know you get a lot of "why is traffic so bad in my town?"; but way back in the earliest pages of this thread it seemed that you had some knowledge to speak about the general history and more recent events that led up to Boston's current traffic situation and the Big Dig. I have read most of the thread up to here but haven't seen anything other than a map that showed how there were a lot of cancelled highways. Did you have any other insight into why Boston has so many traffic problems? Sure. Here's an old-school lesson, stuff I learned from the book Good City Form by Kevin Lynch (an MIT professor). Two hundred years ago, Boston was a city of the same stature as New York. It had a booming port, a strong commercial downtown area, and was steadily growing in population. Like NYC, Boston was built on a river estuary atop a bunch of mud (a few hundred feet of Boston Blue Clay, to be precise). This meant that dredging and leveling nearby hills to provide landfill material, pushing the City out into the Harbor and narrowing the Charles River. Now here is where Boston and New York diverge: NYC had excellent city planning. Dividing the City into blocks and establishing regular avenues provided a framework for future growth and kept the port areas connected to the rest of the city. Boston, by comparison, extended out like a tentacle into the Harbor. That type of growth led to a bottleneck between the port and the commercial district. More importantly, once rail came into being, railheads couldn't be established near the Harbor thanks to the dense growth in the area. In the late 1800s, suburban growth began to multiply around the cities. This was facilitated in a large part by trains, trolleys, and horse-drawn buses. While NYC developed a central rail station and a dense network of streetcars (and later subways), Boston found its suburban areas increasingly isolated by poor planning. Eventually, the areawise growth of the city itself stopped as the surrounding neighborhoods refused to be annexed. While Boston did develop a subway system, mismanagement hasn't helped it much. The end result was that Boston's economy was strangled by its own growth. Instead of a central business district, downtown Boston spiraled into poverty. That trend has been somewhat reversed in the last few decades, though nothing will undo the damage done by a century of poor (or nonexistent) urban planning.
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Sep 30, 2011 21:53
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Cichlidae posted:Sure. Here's an old-school lesson, stuff I learned from the book Good City Form by Kevin Lynch (an MIT professor). Yo, recommend me a city planning book!
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Sep 30, 2011 23:29
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Mandalay posted:Yo, recommend me a city planning book! Pretty much anything by Kevin Lynch could serve as a textbook. Most of the other ones we read were in French. Go see what your library has available. Edit: There have been a lot of other great suggestions in the thread as well. Cichlidae fucked around with this message at 03:36 on Oct 5, 2011 |
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Sep 30, 2011 23:58
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Well, this is pretty cool! I got an award for the ITS implementation on the Arrigoni project.  Every once in a while, this job can be rewarding. It's a rare occurrence, but a plaque on your wall looks pretty good. Cichlidae fucked around with this message at 21:59 on Oct 5, 2011 |
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Oct 5, 2011 21:53
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Good job dude!
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Oct 6, 2011 03:30
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Chiclidae, remember this intersection from a year ago? Turns out, after 40 or 50 years of complaining drivers, the powers that be decided to finally do something and revise the intersection to this:  Looks like a large improvement to me And congratulations on the award!
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Oct 11, 2011 09:34
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Dutch Engineer posted:
Definitely an improvement! How do you get to the buildings on the southeast corner? Is there some driveway that's not shown there, or will it be pedestrian/bike-only?
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Oct 11, 2011 12:26
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Cichlidae posted:Definitely an improvement! How do you get to the buildings on the southeast corner? Is there some driveway that's not shown there, or will it be pedestrian/bike-only? I think they'll leave the road surrounding the buildings intact, but it's not shown on any of the drawings, so I'm not 100% sure. I also just heard that the engineers forgot to include the bike paths in the new design. Brilliant. In semi-related news, the man who designed the intersection, the 87 year old professor-engineer Heetman, is furious that it's being changed and keeps defending his design, saying people are stupid and should just pay more attention to the road. True as that might be, he won't have any say in the matter, as he's currently in jail.
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Oct 12, 2011 08:41
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