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So I'm wondering what your thoughts would be on cleaning up this catastrophe of an intersection. As a consequence of the river, and abysmal urban planning, the southbound section of the road backs up, every day without fail, between the hours of 3:30 and 6:00. Northbound is also kind of a mess, but for partially different reasons, but I only really care about southbound traffic, because I'm a selfish jerk. Intersection looks as follows:  Google Maps Link An explanation on the area:
Now, to the relatively uneducated, it seems that most of the interchanges between Deerfoot/Anderson/Bow Bottom work pretty well. The issue seems to be the terrible weaving problem: many (most?) of the people coming from Blackfoot onto Deerfoot want to stay on Deerfoot and cross the river. That means they have to merge left across 2-3 lanes of traffic, theoretically moving at 100kph, in about 600m. Add in everyone currently on Deerfoot who needs to cross that traffic to get to Anderson/Bow Bottom, and you've got a complete mess. I'm not sure how you'd fix it without either closing the ramp from Southland to Deerfoot altogether, or adding some sort of flyover to take the Barlow-to-Deerfoot traffic over the majority of the intersection but I don't know where you'd put such a thing.
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Jan 25, 2013 22:51
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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I've never really understood how people get hit by trains in the first place. They're huge, they make a ton of noise as they come towards you (even the rails), and they can only come from so many directions.
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Jan 26, 2013 20:29
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Cichlidae posted:Man, that is a serious mess. That whole area is so built up, I don't think it'd even be possible to build things up to any reasonable standard without removing half of the exits. There's not much right-of-way available, which is too bad, because putting in a C/D roadway would take care of some of the weaving problems. The ramps themselves aren't too bad, but everything is so dense, there's no way you're going to avoid weaving. Yeah, that's basically what I figured. Would it be any different with that gravel plant closed? I have zero idea what their plans are, but the quarry that was serving it is now transiting over to commercial/residential development, so the City might be able to cut some deal with them in the future. Koesj posted:Since it's already the Oil State up North why not use some of that money to go maximum Texas/Middle East and just add lanes lanes lanes and connections? You've already got the trappings of a grid-like network there, just expand it into oblivion and accept the fact that car culture has destroyed any hope of reclaiming the city to a more personable level. Well, the first reason would be that we actually don't have any money. Alberta has done an absolutely miserable job of running it. Royalty rates are next to zero, and what revenue they do get is used to keep personal and corporate taxes at a flat 10%. Budgets routinely implode since you can't predict the value the oil will sell at, which has us constantly eating into our Heritage Fund (think Norway's Sovereign Oil fund). Thanks to that, the fund currently sits around an abysmal $16B. Alternatively, the city could theoretically do work on it; while it's a provincial highway, I think the city and province share jurisdiction for the part where it runs though the city. But the city has no way to raise funds other than service fees and property taxes. It's been a campaign issue for the last few years to have the provincial authority allow the City to raise a 1% sales tax, or cut them in on a part of the income tax, or basically anything approaching steady funding. As for the grid, our arterial roads tend to work alright except in a handful of places. Most of the bottlenecks involve getting over the rivers. Incidentally, there's a sour gas processing plant some 20km SE of the city, and in case of a catastrophic failure, the evacuation zone covers a big chunk of SE residential land, hemmed in by the river and rail lines. As a lark, I once did a project for a university class on how you'd try and evacuate it. The gist of the it was that if anything happened during a time when people were all home from work, there would be a lot of dead people around. PittTheElder fucked around with this message at 18:00 on Jan 28, 2013 |
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Jan 28, 2013 17:57
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Wolfy posted:I'm going to go out on a limb here and say explosion. I was going to say, making the assumption that I did, that the truck was carrying fuel oil of some sort, there's no way it should have cratered like that, especially to the point of damaging the rail lines. But the articles linked above say the truck was carrying explosives, so I suppose that crater makes sense. Also, holy poo poo.
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Jan 28, 2013 18:42
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Cichlidae posted:With the quarry closed, you've got some room to breathe. Now you can plop a 2-lane collector/distributor beside the through lanes, extending it as far as you can afford in both directions. Up to Route 8 in the north if you can afford it, but it looks like you'd have to buy out a few car dealerships there, and those don't come cheap. You've already got a partial c/d southbound between 245-246, and you might be able to sandwich a few more lanes between the housing developments to the east. Well, it does back up each and every day, often taking 10-20 minutes to work from Highway 8 up there down to where the highway splits in two at Anderson. I guess we're hoping that the ring road that should finish this year will take some of the traffic off of Deerfoot, but I doubt it. I suspect if traffic gets any better, more people will just abandon the terrible transit in the area and drive instead.
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Jan 29, 2013 20:46
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Koesj posted:I really don't know how the modal shift (IE change proportion of users of cars/PT/other) works in North America but here in Holland there are comparatively very little people who have the opportunity to do a one to one substitution from one form of transport to the other. Drivers, passangers, cyclists or pedestrians are mostly segregated and self-selecting groups here, they have 'bought into' a mode of transport because of various economic, social and geographical reasons. Adding capacity, even in the form of new connections, for the largest part intensifies usage by leading to more or longer trips, but not new users. In the real big cities, I'd expect that to hold, but I suspect North American suburban cities really are pretty different. Here in Calgary, a lot of people use transit only to go to downtown and come home, in the morning and afternoon rush. Probably a large majority of transit traffic. Meanwhile, these same folks all own cars as well, since living in the suburbs means you need one to get around; trying to take transit somewhere other than to downtown takes you an hour or more, one way. For reference, for me to get to work (admittedly, 33km away by road) in the morning would take an hour and 45 minutes (that's one way). Driving takes about 20-30 minutes each way, under regular traffic conditions.
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Jan 30, 2013 01:31
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Yeah, Option B definitely looks like the correct one.
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Mar 13, 2013 00:34
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Chemmy posted:But option B carries the risk of plowing into someone and having to argue your case with a cop. Well that depends what lane you start in. If you're in the right hand lane to start, then option A presents the identical problem. From a logical standpoint, it seems really unlikely that people would want to turn into the must-turn-left lane on the road they just turned on to. Assuming there's no signage on the road they're leaving saying like "be in the left lane to immediately turn left again!" I think you have to assume they will want to continue straight. DaveSauce posted:Is there a legal justification? I mean, I agree completely, but I just don't trust other drivers. Safe move is obviously to take the outside B route at all times and adjust later, but sometimes I forget that people do stupid things. I'm wondering if I would be covered should I take the inside lane on the B route and someone else takes the outside lane on the A route and collisions happen. Well, I'm both Canadian and just a regular driver, so take my words with a hefty grain of salt, but I seem to remember from my driver education that you are always restricted on which lane you turn into. For instance, if you're on a one lane road, and you turn right on to a two lane road, you must complete your turn in the right-most lane that does not contain parked vehicles. Same applies for left turns then I'd think. Doing anything else would constitute changing lanes in an intersection which is already illegal I'm pretty sure. That said, and assuming that is in fact how it works, people ignore that poo poo constantly. Take for instance, a road on the way out of my community:  I'll be headed south on Prestwick Circle, they'll be headed north on Prestwick Circle. It's a two way road, one lane each way (plus parking on side). We're both signalling that we want to turn onto eastbound Prestwick Gate, which has a median and has two lanes each way, and you're not allowed to park on it. Now, I'd assume that we could both just harmoniously turn without my needing to yield; I'll turn left into the left lane of Prestwick Gate, they'll turn right into the right lane of Prestwick Gate, everybody goes home happy. This is the situation I've drawn. Of course, what actually happens is that they usually want to go North on 52nd Street, and so they try and turn right into the left lane, rather than making a separate turn and lane change. It's infuriating, and a great example of why even when there are (I think) rules to dictate proper behavior, that's no substitute for actually paying attention to what other drivers are doing. PittTheElder fucked around with this message at 18:18 on Mar 13, 2013 |
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Mar 13, 2013 18:15
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NightGyr posted:So, this happened. Even if he made the progress go faster, there's no guarantee the widening will actually reduce traffic. If it starts moving faster, more people will choose to drive on it until it reaches equilibrium with the other roads again.
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Apr 26, 2013 18:38
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Gat posted:You can always have a mini-roundabout! (a uniquely british concept I think...) I think I saw one in Switzerland, and they've started putting in one lane roundabouts in the more upscale neighbourhoods here in Calgary.
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May 2, 2013 19:18
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Amused to Death posted:I that map is misleading. Density isn't the only thing you need for public transport, you also need walkable places. This is an important point. It's also pretty easy to encourage walking; just putting a grass strip with some small trees between the sidewalk and the road makes a tremendous difference.
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May 7, 2013 21:18
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I think an important factor of self driving cars is that they can theoretically - and it'll be a complete bitch to implement probably - is that they can communicate with each other. So if a car ahead of yours slows for some reason, it can notify cars behind it all at once (rather than a brake light cascade), which I think helps prevent the braking shockwaves that actually cause most traffic jams. I am not optimistic about that happening any time soon, though there are academics and engineers out there trying to figure out how a system like that would work. Of course, self driving cars will probably also create a massive induced demand (which is not the correct term because it's actually cutting costs, not increasing supply, but I'm using it anyway). If you don't have to be paying attention while driving, that would take most of the hassle out of commuting, and tons more people would be willing to sit in traffic if they got to read a book, or mess around on their phone, fool around with their SOs, or just nod off. Which I'm sure is something self-driving-car builders would insist you not do just in case something failed, but I am 110% sure it will happen.
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May 27, 2013 06:49
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NightGyr posted:More than once, I have been driving on the highway and looked over to see the driver next to me holding a book with both hands against the steering wheel. Sweet almighty Atheismo, that is absolutely hosed up, and something I'm kind of glad I've never seen first hand (which doesn't mean anything I know). I thought the only people stupid to pull that poo poo were mayors of Toronto who were entitled to a chauffeur but declined to use one.
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May 27, 2013 17:47
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Baronjutter posted:That seems like such an insane idea, I can't believe they actually built it. While we're on the topic of funny stuff with gyros, let nobody forget the Gyro Monorail. Which is probably quite a bit less stupid than the gyro bus.
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May 30, 2013 22:40
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Indeed, flywheels are great, especially if you don't need to make any quick turns (trains), or can be used in a non accelerating vehicle. But they do resist being rotated externally, so they're pretty bad if you need to turn quickly. Fun fact: a bunch (4?) large flywheels are used to maintain and manipulate the orientation of the ISS!
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May 31, 2013 00:54
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quote:Anyway, in unrelated (but indubitably good) news, I'm now officially a PE. I was in the midst of a pretty nasty fever today at work, so I almost didn't believe it at first, but it's starting to sink in now. Congrats sir. I really need to get around to applying for mine; the Canadian equivalent anyway.
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May 31, 2013 01:51
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Cichlidae posted:Nuclear Engineering's the hardest: 45% pass rate, and 0% repeat pass rate. So you get a specialized degree, work in the field for five years, then you've got less than a coin flip's chance of passing. If you fail, see ya! Better go back to school! Wait, what? How is there a 0% repeat pass rate? Are they somehow only allowing people to write it once?
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May 31, 2013 23:55
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Cichlidae posted:I'd say they don't want people who've failed the exam running nuclear power plants, but then again, they let 'em design buildings, electrical systems, machines, etc. So there is just a blanket rule on that one that you only get one shot at it? That seems nuts to me.
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Jun 1, 2013 06:23
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MrYenko posted:I think it's a locality thing. The majority of locals in South Florida think roundabouts entrances and exits are stop signs. Two plus lane roundabouts are mostly for trading paint and raising my blood pressure. People don't understand that if you don't get over RIGHT loving NOW, you can just, you know, go around for another try in ten or fifteen seconds. Yeah, we have a two-laner in our neighbourhood, and whenever pedestrians cross at the entrances, everybody inside stops and waits for them. A couple weeks ago I had that epiphany: why wouldn't I just keep going around the circle? Of course, now even if I do it, nobody else will, and nothing improves.
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Jun 6, 2013 00:37
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Would you people who have more than one traffic circle in your city find a traffic circle with 5 inlet/outlets unusual? This is the one we have in our neighbourhood, and everybody gets along just fine for the most part. The drivers handbook is pretty clear about how to do it; those outside the traffic circle yield to those inside it, and the outer lane yields to the inner lane. Though that latter bit seems to contradict what I gather most other circles work like. A picture of said circle:  But I guess somebody must have complained, because a few months ago they painted a bunch of stuff in it that ran contrary to that (that has since been scraped off by the snowplows), and put up signs like this:  The problem with those being that they seem to imply it's a 4 road traffic circle, rather than 5. Since all the paint got scraped off the road, and the signs seem ambiguous/agree with what the driver's handbook said, we're all back to doing it that way it seems. Still, it's the only two-lane traffic circle in the city, and while it's great, and I wish there were more of them, I also know this one scares the hell out of people. I know people who actively avoid it, and the local registries don't seem to test your ability to drive in it. Edit: also, I am terrified of having to do it on my bicycle, and have no faith in other drivers to not kill me. The few times I've been through it I'll just walk it like a pedestrian. PittTheElder fucked around with this message at 05:28 on Jun 7, 2013 |
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Jun 7, 2013 05:21
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Cichlidae posted:And before you guys ask, yes, you can search by age. I think there were about 180 crashes where someone 5 and under was driving.  Come again? How are these children even getting the cars to move? God damnit it world.
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Jun 19, 2013 21:42
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Install Gentoo posted:Canada has a habit of signs that work like that You really have to watch this right up to the end; the sign actually falls off in the last two seconds of the video. Which is exactly why they're putting up those heavier supports these days.
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Jun 22, 2013 07:18
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Was he filming that on a handheld camera/cell phone, while driving, during a mini-tornado? Good god some people make just the worst decisions.
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Jul 3, 2013 00:00
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Speaking of Arizona, does the record heat that's hitting the southwest right now make roads wear out faster? I would think the heat must increase the malleability of the surface, which probably shouldn't be good for it.
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Jul 3, 2013 06:34
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Cichlidae posted:They do that in the snow, too. Nothing like a truck passing you at 50 mph and spraying 18 wheels worth of slush onto your windshield! Pfft, silly Americans, that's why you just go faster than all the trucks. Problem solv  Eh, nevermind. quote:It's been a while since my asphalt class, but from what I remember, asphalt's viscosity is halved for every ten degrees celcius. Your job mix formula should be designed to maintain adequate viscosity at the maximum expected pavement temperature, but still be able to flow from an asphalt truck, which isn't very easy when your pavement can fry an egg. Unless the engineers planned for that heat, the asphalt will take a huuuuuge beating, especially in the form of rutting. Yeah, rutting is about what I'd expect. Is rutting usually just expected wear-and-tear on roads with large volumes of truck traffic? The roads in my local industrial park are super messed up rut-wise, and I assume that's why.
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Jul 3, 2013 16:38
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Cichlidae posted:If the mix design is done properly, you won't get rutting. It's a problem with the asphalt binder in high temperatures, or the aggregate not being angular enough. Well, that's certainly depressing to learn.
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Jul 4, 2013 05:57
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Is that really easier than just making a big old ferry line?
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Jul 14, 2013 08:11
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Cichlidae posted:I don't understand why you'd need on-street parking in a residential neighborhood, anyway. Because tons of people don't have driveways and/or garages of any sort, and those that do might have more cars than spots in the garage to store them? And that's for house-type buildings. Up here there is apparently (based purely on anecdotal observation) zero regulation requiring apartment and condo type buildings to provide any sort of guaranteed parking. So tons of people need street parking for that too. Really this is such an obvious answer I feel like I must be misreading the context. My place is in a very suburban residential area, but it's new, so only about 40% of the houses have garages behind them. And we're three guys living in that house, so we have more cars than we could fit behind the house anyway. And there's an apartment complex at the end of the street, and those folks are always parking on the street. The available area is full of cars during non-work hours. PittTheElder fucked around with this message at 23:29 on Jul 15, 2013 |
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Jul 15, 2013 23:25
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grover posted:Why in the world would turning an arterial into a cul-de-sac be a good idea? Or only allowing traffic in one direction? All it's going to do is force congestion onto other arterials and the nearby secondaries and make the problems even worse. Probably because it was never intended to be an arterial in the first place? I'm not familiar with the road, so I don't know, but if it wasn't intended to be an arterial, the engineers that designed it would have made design decisions that make it unsafe for people to treat it like one. There's also the possibilities that residents are super sick of the traffic (but it doesn't sounds like that's the case), or that the people just 'downstream' of the proposed cul-de-sac are really pushing for it because it would reduce the flow on the road and make their commute easier (but that's also unlikely, because I doubt they would have thought that far ahead).
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Jul 16, 2013 19:24
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Hedera Helix posted:Then again, isn't having on-street parking for a major thoroughfare dangerous in and of itself? Really, replacing that with bike lanes would be doing everybody a favor. Yeah, if it's functioning as an arterial, there really shouldn't be parking on it.
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Jul 17, 2013 06:03
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Gods, how the hell can people hate traffic circles? You do a hell of a lot less stopping than you do for traffic lights.
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Aug 2, 2013 05:52
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Carbon dioxide posted:Some weird photo artefact in the sky there. French UFO. Whatever. Yeah, that's Google's automated photogrammetric processing right there. It tends to generate weird stuff like this all the time really.
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Aug 3, 2013 20:14
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will_colorado posted:The Brandenburg Gate is UNDERNEATH THE GIANT ARCH STRUCTURE in the middle Oh sweet lord I totally missed that.
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Aug 16, 2013 06:39
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grover posted:EU is trying to implement speed limiters to electronically prevent drivers from speeding. Is this idea bad, awful, or terrible? Aside from an argument about "MAH FREEDOM!  " I don't know why we should automatically assume it's a bad idea. I don't know that it's a good idea either, but it seems like if it's cool that we have limits, it should also be cool to judicially enforce them.
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Sep 3, 2013 04:18
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Carbon dioxide posted:It depends. If the limit is a hard enforce, what if you need to speed up for a short amount of time to overtake a truck, or even to prevent an accident? It would be horrible if the pedal just isn't responsive because you're driving at the limit. Yeah, you wouldn't want to make it a hard limit for these exact reasons. Though most of this could be accounted for in a soft limit that you were allowed to exceed, but perhaps only by a limited amount (10-15 kph) and only for a limited time (1-2 mins). wolrah posted:Of course accuracy of speed information could be an issue no matter what the tolerance. If its based on GPS or similar, what happens when there's a highway built over (or under as the case may be in certain metro areas) an alley? Forget even the signal issue, how do you prevent vehicles on the highway legally traveling 65 MPH from deciding that they're actually in an alley with a 20 MPH limit, making the tolerance cutoff speed 40 and triggering the hard cut. If its based on road tags, they have to be so widely distributed and the encoding information so widely known that the Internet would eventually figure out how to make their own and all hell would break loose. There's a lot of technical reasons why this isn't a great idea. Stuff like this being at the top of the list. GPS is a wonderful thing, but it has tons of caveats that make it less than reliable in an urban environment. Though this could be the sort of thing that was only enforced on major highways, most of which would be easy enough to pick out. Personally I much prefer the system that I think I read about existing in the Netherlands somewhere, where cameras on the highway road signage register license plates as people pass, and if you exceed the average speed limit between any two cameras they mail you a ticket.
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Sep 3, 2013 07:30
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An alternative would be use cameras in the vehicles themselves that could just read the actual speed limit signs, but that then gives you the same problem where you need to upgrade most of the vehicle fleet to have any effect, and that takes like 20 years.
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Sep 4, 2013 20:55
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Neither of them is particularly effective though, especially in urban areas. You have similar multipathing issues with cell reception as you do with GPS. It also depends quite a bit on exactly which cell communication technology you're using (CDMA vs. TDMA). The key with cell phone navigation is that knowing which cell tower you're closest too, and roughly how far away you are, is already enough to have an easier go of using a better location method (namely, GPS). Road side navigation also tends to take shortcuts and hold your position to a road it thinks you're on. If it's initial fix was wrong, or the map data is out of date, you're in trouble.
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Sep 5, 2013 19:03
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Cichlidae has already been over the fact that speed limits aren't arbitrary, and have to be set considering the needs of vehicles and drivers other than a young guy in a fast car. Which is not to say that all speed limits are correct, I believe he specifically pointed out that many residential speed limits get lowered simply because people complained hard enough. But I'd wager that most speed limits are set to what the highway was designed for. Even with the argument that the top speed for American highways is mandated to some number to save fuel, I imagine most highways designed after that point have been designed with that speed limit as an upper bound, so upping it now would make no sense.
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Sep 6, 2013 00:24
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Yeah, I was just in Seattle for work, and it was great. Getting from the actual waterfront back up to like 4th Ave turned out to be surprisingly challenging for an out of towner, simply because holy poo poo that hill is huge an I'm not surprised only a few of the cross street run up it. Downtown was a blast to walk in though. Also, looking at it on Google maps, I gather the road Baconjutter is complaining about is the Alaskan Way Viaduct? I didn't even notice it was there.  grover posted:There's speeding, and then there's speeding. I've oft heard said that speed limits are intentionally set about 10mph slower than the intended speed because it's cheaper to enforce that way. The drawback is that now, in most states, when one car is going 71 in a 55, he's given a ticket for 16mph over, even when all the traffic around him is doing 70. The way our justice system works, it just seems patently unfair. And it also creates a large speed disparity. Set the speed limits properly (including reasonably minimum speed limits. Why is 41mph legal on a highway?) and only nail those who are actually driving an unsafe speed. And then ticket them appropriately. That's exactly why putting speed governors or cameras everywhere is great though; it changes things from being completely arbitrary to uniformly enforced. It'll go a long way to reduce the speed differentials too, by lopping off the top half of the curve, although there's always some idiot doing 15 under for some reason.
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Sep 7, 2013 00:53
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Fog lights maybe? My car has them, but I live in a place where fog never happens, so I have no idea what they're really for or how well they work. Really that sounds like a collective case of driver error. They were out driving their visibility, and then couldn't stop in time. Classic night time driving mistake.
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Sep 7, 2013 07:07
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