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People have no idea how invisible they are on roads at night, even well lit roads. Unless you're wearing reflective safety poo poo, you are invisible. The worst is when someone wearing black, at night, illegally crossing the street at a blind corner or something sees you coming, then just goes back to slowly crossing. loving SCOOT, move!
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Jan 30, 2012 20:59
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 12:42 |
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How the gently caress does that happen...
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Jan 31, 2012 05:37
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But does it eventually pay for its self via reduced upkeep?
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Mar 16, 2012 16:44
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Cichlidae, I'm working on a fun project to design a sort of "model town" on a plot of farmland next to the highway as a general exercise in urbanism. Currently along the edge of the plot there is a slightly winding but mostly straight highway with a traffic light and a small 4-way intersection with right turn lanes. The highway is a fairly standard 80kmph 2 lane (about 32m wide) each way at-grade highway while the road crossing it is a 11m wide 2 lane country road. The highway runs north/south and the road runs east/west. Farms and rural homes lay to the west, and the fantasy town will be east so that will be where the majority of traffic comes from. Traffic should be coming and going fairly evenly both north and south. What would be the best way to handle this? It's all fields around the intersection so space isn't really a big issue. Obviously we'd like to eliminate the light on the highway but it's totally fine to have a light on the access road. Personally I was thinking of having a simple overpass with 4 ramps running parallel to the highway leading to 2 signaled intersections above. but maybe some sort of crazy round-about might work too? PS Sometimes big logging trucks use this intersection, which may be a problem for round-abouts, or at least would require a larger radius circle? Baronjutter fucked around with this message at 17:57 on Mar 22, 2012 |
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Mar 22, 2012 17:47
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After some additional study, and finding a very similar interchange situation along a similar highway nearby I decided to try 2 round-abouts. So 4 ramps leading to 2 circles with an overpass between them. Sound good?
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Mar 22, 2012 18:49
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TELL ME ABOUT: Round about design. How large should they be? How many roads can connect to them? Most seem to be simple 4-way intersections, but what about having 6 roads or 8 roads coming into a traffic circle. Do more roads just add to the diameter? What other factors must be taken into account?
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Mar 23, 2012 18:18
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When I was in europe I noticed many of the level crossings there had these little ~1m metal ramp things in front of the railways. When the crossing guards go down, these plates raise up so that a car trying to enter the track would hit it, but a car already on the track could drive over it, pushing it back down and letting them escape. Seemed like a pretty good idea, what with the amount of idiots trying to play chicken with trains.
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Mar 26, 2012 23:48
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How does poo poo like that happen? A captain should know the height of his drat boat, and the height of the bridge. I understand semi-drivers hopped up on drugs hitting over-passes and poo poo, but how does a bloody ship captain gently caress up so badly?
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Mar 29, 2012 17:50
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Sometimes infrastructure can just be so embarrassing!
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Mar 29, 2012 21:49
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I thought I'd share a bridge building story from my home town! There's a great old bridge in our harbour, a real historical gem actually. Designed by the same guy that did the golden gate. Anyways, through years of almost sabotage-like lack of upkeep the bridge needed a lot of work. Most people assumed it would just be fixed up, but a newly arrived mayor suddenly announced they were going to tear it down and build a brand new bridge. To wow people he showed a cool modern draw-bridge with a light-rail component, bike lanes, and a cool pedestrian section that actually went through the lifting mechanism. Everyone was a bit shocked that he just decided this with no public consultation. This is in a city with a very very powerful historical-protection lobby where any developer trying to tear down a 30 year old shed would have to get through a gauntlet of public meetings and consultations and studies. To make matters worse, it seemed like the option of fixing the old bridge wasn't even looked at. An engineering firm that wanted to build the new bridge was also hired to see if fixing the old bridge would be worth it. Oddly enough they said no! What was quickly figured out is that the repair option was compared against impossible standards. An insane earthquake rating no other bridge would be held to, and the construction of a new bike-lane expansion (when an abandoned railway section existed right there). A citizens group was formed due to the very suspect engineering report and costs quoted. That was another thing, with the extremely limited amount of engineering done for the new-bridge option experts said there was no way any price would be accurate. So, the community group raised enough awareness and raise a big enough stink to force a city referendum. The mayor and council were outraged and said it would only make the project more expensive due to delays. One councilor even called it anti-democratic. The city hired 3 full time PR experts with 100+ grand salaries to "educate" the city why the new bridge was the only way to go and refurbishment was not an option. meanwhile the "no" side managed to get some historical bridge refurbishment experts to come here for free to volunteer their time to look at the refurbishment option, they all agreed that the city had cooked the numbers and that repairing the bridge would be far far cheaper. They were of course ignored. The city had tons of renders and fliers and commercials for the YES side. All the pictures showed a huge wide bike path, bragged about the earth-quake rating, and compared the impossibly low price of a new bridge with the insanely exaggerated cost of refurbishment. most importantly they showed a railway portion with modern LRT trains crossing it. The yes side just barely won due to the massive misinformation campaign. It's a year later and so far: The entire rail portion of the bridge has been axed. City claimed the renders were not meant to be taken literally. The bike lane has been reduced. The earthquake rating has been dropped. The costs are already many millions over budget and they aren't even done demolishing the old bridge. So, lovely story. My question is, would you have ANY idea why the mayor and council would ignore actual engineers, the public, all financial sense, and resort to expensive propaganda and misinformation to sell an unneeded and extremely expesive bridge? None of them have any obvious conflicts of interests or benefits from this. No one can figure it out. Also one of my favourite parts is that one of the leading pro-bridge councilors is incharge of the historical protection group that raises hell any time someone even wants to paint an old fence the wrong colour, that group refused to do an assessment or even get involved in the bridge issue. They claimed that infrastructure can't be historical, only buildings can. Baronjutter fucked around with this message at 00:21 on Mar 30, 2012 |
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Mar 30, 2012 00:19
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The mayor has higher political aspirations, and the head of the historical society that refused to even consider a huge nearly century old unique bridge could be historical is also a very vocal pro-bridge member. The prevailing theory is that he thinks a high-profile project like this will elevate his profile. The moment he started this whole thing, the larger political party he belongs to sent a handler that is now rarely seen without him at any political event. He's not very bright either. I think he got sold on the shiny new bridge by some scuzzy engineers, got his ego deeply involved, and got his allied same-party councillors to hitch to his wagon. Thought he could just strong-arm it through and once it came to a referendum ego and his career got in the way. being remembered for a failed expensive project rejected by a referendum would damage his higher political aspirations. These are all members of the milquetoast "socialist" party. Very anti-business, anti-change, anti-development. None of them have any business connections or even understanding of the business world (or that money is a finite resource). In short I think they're too stupid and unconnected to have any financial kick-backs coming their way. The one person on council with any actual related education and business-world connections (harvard economics) was the only councillor against the project and demanding proper procedures and controls.
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Mar 30, 2012 07:09
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http://focusonline.ca/?q=node/357 This one. Turning into the biggest most expensive loving "told you so". The whole thing has basically been "here is a super cool bridges loaded with features that a re-furbished bridge could never have. We 100% need these cool features so we can't even look at the repair option. Also it will some how be cheaper. Voters, we NEED these features, absolutely, they are vital!" then "Oops all those features we said we 100% needed? Yeah we're cutting them all. Also we're now way way way more expensive!" Baronjutter fucked around with this message at 22:22 on Mar 30, 2012 |
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Mar 30, 2012 22:10
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My city has such hosed bus stop placement. There will be a stretch of road maybe 4 blocks long, in those 4 blocks there will be 5 stops. What important high-traffic area are they serving? Some houses on one side and a huge cemetery on the other. People almost never get on at these stops, but everyone coming home on the bus will of course get off at the stop meters closer than the other to their house. When each stop it used to ends up faster to walk due to the bus having to pull back into traffic, missing lights and such. Then later on you'll have situations where there's a major transport draw like a school, have no bus stop directly in front of it but instead a stop a block away in each direction. Sometimes they're 100m apart, sometimes 500m, no reasons.
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Apr 2, 2012 21:08
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It was only after talking to americans did I figure out that a really long loving light every km or so is NOT the norm on a highway... Proper interchanges are so expensive though....
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Apr 2, 2012 21:25
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Huge parts of north america are just unfixable. They were designed to be unadaptable, unservable by transit. Cities need to stop expanding outward entirely, and contract their footprints. Some suburbs can be helped, but it's expensive and the infrastructure upgrades will require a much bigger tax base to both build and support, which means more density. Many people want magical solutions that let them live in a house with a big yard on their suburban street yet some how have access to transit and not be as car dependent, but they of course refuse the density increases that will have to support that change. It's much like how in my city people in the burbs demand an LRT because it will provide 'green' transport (for other people, they just want the highway cleared up for them selves) but are absolutely against the idea of any increased density along the LRT corridor. Nope.
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Apr 3, 2012 19:34
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grover posted:It's true! Report: 98 Percent Of U.S. Commuters Favor Public Transportation For Others They need to build an underpass or overpass or something, for the boats.
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Apr 3, 2012 23:31
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Apparently that line is fairly popular for model railroaders to try to re-create or be inspired by due to it's uniqueness. It's always cited as an excuse why freight trains can run down the middle of a residential street. There's a few other places like that where it isn't even in the median, it looks just like tram track and them bam, huge heavy freight train just driving down some small residential street.
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Apr 4, 2012 17:50
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http://www.h1451310.stratoserver.net/movsimwebpage/app.shtml Cute web based traffic sims
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Apr 4, 2012 18:11
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drat why do all american rail vehicles always look so boxy and heavy like an 80's volvo? Do they all have to be up-armoured to withstand constantly being smashed into by idiots in trucks/suv's turning left into them?
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Apr 4, 2012 19:38
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I'm going to have nightmares of that train, holy poo poo it's scary looking.
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Apr 4, 2012 20:37
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I keep telling everyone, there's something about trains and autism spectrum. Before there was anime or eve online, autistics flocked to train spotting and model railroading. Go to a model train convention/show and talk to some of the people with booths...
Baronjutter fucked around with this message at 17:52 on Apr 5, 2012 |
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Apr 5, 2012 17:49
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Civilized and educated nations build their bike paths as part of the sidewalk system, not road system.
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May 7, 2012 15:27
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   In Berlin they're mostly integrated into the sidewalks or between parked cars and the sidewalk and physically separated enough to be out of the door zone. I like the idea of widening sidewalks for bike lanes, rather than widening or just re-painting streets. Baronjutter fucked around with this message at 17:40 on May 7, 2012 |
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May 7, 2012 17:37
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I think it has very important safety/physiological aspects. When bike lanes are just a line of paint on the road, many drives still see it as THEIR space, their domain. Sidewalks on the other hand are clearly not a place for cars to drive, so putting bike lanes behind a curb of some sort keeps them safe and separated. Also nice wide sidewalks where the edges have a special colour/paving look way nicer than a big fat road with a lane painted on it.
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May 7, 2012 18:28
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Yeah I was that pedestrian a lot in Berlin... sometimes the bike paving is too subtle and I'd wander into it, specially on really busy streets. Usually people just ring their bell or politely warn you they're coming up behind you.
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May 7, 2012 19:17
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What it all comes down to of course is cost. A curb alone is so much more expensive than just painting a line.
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May 7, 2012 20:14
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That's loving ridiculous. It's safer than a house hold panel but you have to wear a god damned space suit? Who comes up with this...
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May 15, 2012 23:52
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oooo I like. If they did it on both sides like theatre aisle ligting that would be rad. 99% of my driving is in the city, during the day. Driving on highways at nights scares me. It's DARK, there could be monsters...
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May 22, 2012 21:26
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Look yellow and orange to me, but it's not like traffic signs ever take into account the most common type of colour-blindness that effects like 10% of men.
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May 30, 2012 23:35
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What's wrong with grating?
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Jun 18, 2012 18:54
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Jun 18, 2012 22:24
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 This actually looks pretty cool!
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Jun 19, 2012 20:16
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Great comments "This is as usual all a hoax.. There is no Road Buildings that benefit the People. You will notice this by Chinese now rebuilding Bridges in the USA. Why? Because as Martial Law sets in, These TANKS being deployed will have to cross these bridges. Highways are unimportant. We as a fact are being lied to by the media about what our alleged Great Government is doing. You might notice that Google, Bing and other Engines now block hyperlinks in your searches. I am going to do a video to Prove this." Traffic engineers, confirm/deny that highways are only for chinese tanks now?
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Jul 4, 2012 20:52
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Drives can be loving stupid and just get into a trance like zombie state. The other day I was crossing the street at a huge long avenue with like 4 block visibility and almost highway-like lack of access/distractions. I didn't step out because I noticed she was going really fast, while the old lady on the other side did go. The lady had to jam on her brakes and almost slid through the crosswalk. People just zone the gently caress out, specially on straight fast sections of road.
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Jul 4, 2012 21:36
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Ok, Canadian road questions. I can't figure out when to use single or double yellow lines. I just google street view'd my town and it seems utterly random. Usually 4 lane roads have a double yellow and 2 lane roads have a single yellow. But I've found 2 lane roads in nearly identical situations with double and single yellows, and even found a bunch of 4 lane roads with single yellow. Does anyone have any canadian insights??
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Jul 10, 2012 23:49
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Ok imagine you have a road. Can you do it? Probably. Ok good! Now this is a 2 lane road with bike lanes on either side. One side of the road has a sidewalk, the other side of the road has no sidewalk, but instead a dedicated tram right-of-way. I'm imagining some sort of curb would be needed between the bike lane/road and the tram tracks. My question is: should this curb be painted yellow or is just a concrete divider ok?
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Jul 13, 2012 00:02
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Can you tell me all the horrible things I did wrong with this tram stop and road/bike lanes?  I'll be adding stop-bars to the intersection don't worry, I got that one. And it's hard to see but there ARE wheel-chair ramps at the curbs.
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Jul 16, 2012 23:35
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It's my N scale layout of course. I can't build traffic infrastructure in real life but I can try to model it! Also OP is of course gone on vacation so I'll never get an answer on this ooops
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Jul 17, 2012 01:47
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Most all my tram experience comes from europe where they really don't seem fussed dropping people off on centre platforms in the middle of a road without even crosswalks. The tram sounds its bell and you get the gently caress out of the way. Late for the tram? Cross right in front of it and tap the window and hope the driver not only doesn't run you over by stops for you. Tracks can't move or at least it's not in the budget, and in hindsight I don't know why I did a centre platform like that when I should have done the tracks through the middle 
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Jul 17, 2012 04:24
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 12:42 |
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Yeah even where I was all the newer tram stops were MUCH safer and more developed, more like tiny train stations than bus stops. Some of the worst I saw just dumped you in the traffic lane. That's right, the tram would stop and the lane would have some white hatching on it and cars are just supposed to stop when you get out.
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Jul 17, 2012 06:01
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