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grnberet2b posted:I'm kind of curious if requesting a traffic survey would be proper in this scenario. The speed limit should be the 85th percentile speed. If most people are going 40, then 45 is a reasonable limit. You will have trouble petitioning to have it change, but if you contact the county engineer and ask for a speed survey, there's a chance you could make a difference. From the air, I'd say 45 is a fair speed. Of course, only the designer and traffic engineer there would know what exactly it's designed for, but there's really no harm to driving faster there. Edit: I've been stuck reviewing Busway stuff all day and it's total BS. Politicians have been telling the Governor it's "99% complete" so he'll keep the funding flowing, but it's really more like 60%. We're still in preliminary design on major parts of it, arguing basic geometrics, and parts of the darn thing we have no idea how it's going to work. At this point, we'll be sacrificing capacity and LOS on nearby arterials, forcing more people onto I-84 and completely negating any positive impact the Busway would have had. The worst part is I can't speak out against it publicly, or I can kiss any chance of a promotion goodbye. Cichlidae fucked around with this message at 02:33 on Mar 24, 2011 |
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Mar 24, 2011 02:30
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Awesome thread! I live in Switzerland where everything takes at least 10 years to build. Even lovely stuff like a new exit or something. Could you explain this to me? http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=46.515893,6.502694&spn=0.003765,0.008991&z=17 There is this city called Morges. It's pretty awful because the highway goes right through, but that's a whole other story. Basically there are 2 exits/entrances to this city: east and west. The west has entrances and exits for all direction, all good. However, the east only has an entrance for going eastbound and an exit when going westbound. This makes it so you can't go through the city using only the highway. Do you think this was intentional? There's always a lot of traffic jams in the city and it would make sense to allow people to take the highway when all they want to do is cross the city. Thanks!
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Mar 24, 2011 10:06
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Sir Davey posted:Awesome thread! Does Switzerland use French or German pavement marking and signing standards, or do they have their own? quote:Could you explain this to me? Given that the two exits are sufficiently far apart, and there don't appear to be tolls to worry about, it's unlikely they would've designed the freeway with the express (hah) intent of preventing its use as a bypass. The route seems quite sparse on exits, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, so they could've easily just used a single exit if they were worried about a lot of traffic doing that. My theory is that the eastern exit is incomplete because of a lack of space. The entire freeway is just shoehorned in there right next to the railroad. Building another pair of ramps would require taking quite a few properties and possibly encroaching onto the railroad.
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Mar 24, 2011 12:38
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grnberet2b posted:I'm kind of curious if requesting a traffic survey would be proper in this scenario. With the looks of the number of openings and driveways on the new stretch 30mph would probably be about right. Also considering that the stretch of road is pretty short it isn't like going faster is going to save you more than 5 seconds from one end to the other.
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Mar 24, 2011 14:32
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What can you tell me about the different types of actual paving different regions use? When is concrete used, when is blacktop used? I notice when I go down to the states all the roads seem harder and bumpier and grayer than where I live, where they're generally much darker and smoother and don't have expansion joints like a sidewalk.
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Mar 24, 2011 15:32
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Baronjutter posted:What can you tell me about the different types of actual paving different regions use? When is concrete used, when is blacktop used? I notice when I go down to the states all the roads seem harder and bumpier and grayer than where I live, where they're generally much darker and smoother and don't have expansion joints like a sidewalk. For the most part it is an economic decision. On most larger projects we do a life cycle cost analysis to compare both pavements. The cheaper type gets chosen. Some regions may have cheaper asphalt costs versus concrete so asphalt will be used. Either can be used to build a road with the same loading capabilities.
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Mar 24, 2011 16:45
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Baronjutter posted:What can you tell me about the different types of actual paving different regions use? When is concrete used, when is blacktop used? I notice when I go down to the states all the roads seem harder and bumpier and grayer than where I live, where they're generally much darker and smoother and don't have expansion joints like a sidewalk. The pavement quality is more of an indication of how much money the local government puts into paving and resurfacing than the materials they use. Typically, places with higher tax rates will have better roads. Weather is also a factor, and an east-west band of the continent with frequent freeze/thaw cycles will have worse pavement than somewhere where it's consistently cold or warm. Neutrino posted:For the most part it is an economic decision. On most larger projects we do a life cycle cost analysis to compare both pavements. The cheaper type gets chosen. Some regions may have cheaper asphalt costs versus concrete so asphalt will be used. Either can be used to build a road with the same loading capabilities. Another factor, unfortunately, is the power of the concrete lobby vs. the oil lobby in the state.
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Mar 24, 2011 17:16
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Over here the biggest factor is noise. Pretty much all new roads are paved with ZOAB (Very open asphalt concrete). It is much more expensive than concrete or even regular asphalt and only lasts 7 years but it has quite a a extreme reduction on the ammount of noise. Last week i drove on a concrete road and i can't imagine driving on those everyday, even for just a few kilometers the noise was maddening.
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Mar 24, 2011 18:56
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NihilismNow posted:Over here the biggest factor is noise.
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Mar 24, 2011 19:31
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Captain Corny posted:You forgot to mention that it almost completely absorbs rain, which is a definite plus in our rainy country. Driving on ZOAB in the rain is like driving on a dry road, especially because cars in front of you don't produce spray. I love ZOAB, great invention. We have had a moratorium on porous pavement courses here in Louisiana since the late 70s or so for a couple of reasons. When they tried it out, they skimped on the asphaltic binder (energy crisis had oil costs go up) to the point that it was below design standards, hence it failed even earlier than a standard asphalt course. Properly designed, it should last closer to 10 years, which is what our DOTD designs asphalt pavement for anyway (in practice, they'll let roads go for around 20 though). The second reason is that when it fails, it fails catastrophically; meaning that once it starts to go, it's completely gone in a couple of weeks or so. Our DOTD reasoned at the time that they didn't have the resources to respond that quickly; this is most definitely still true, which you can immediately see if you've ever driven on a state or locally maintained roadway here. Yeah, I wrote a huge paper on porous pavement for a senior design course. That moratorium kills me because it's absolutely perfect for use here. We get a shitload of rain yearly, with extremely high rainfall intensities to boot; so much so that our drainage and treatment solutions are pretty different from most of the rest of the country. But occasionally people use it here in parking lots and such, because you save space (and cost) on drainage structures. Additionally, I think Brad & Angelina may have popularized it's use in New Orleans by having it in their driveway. H.P. Hovercraft fucked around with this message at 19:56 on Mar 24, 2011 |
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Mar 24, 2011 19:49
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Cichlidae posted:Does Switzerland use French or German pavement marking and signing standards, or do they have their own? We have roughly the same marking and signing standards, with different fonts and our freeway signs are green and roads are blue, opposite to France which has blue signs for freeways and green for roads. Thanks for the answer. They did something really weird on this highway: for some reason instead of adding a third lane they widened the emergency lane and put digital signs everywhere and you can drive on the emergency lane during peak hours. Pretty weird.
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Mar 24, 2011 20:45
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Sir Davey posted:Thanks for the answer. They did something really weird on this highway: for some reason instead of adding a third lane they widened the emergency lane and put digital signs everywhere and you can drive on the emergency lane during peak hours. Pretty weird. They've done this in Denmark as well on a couple of heavily used motorway stretches. You're allowed to use the emergency lane during rush hour.
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Mar 24, 2011 20:56
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Cichlidae posted:The pavement quality is more of an indication of how much money the local government puts into paving and resurfacing than the materials they use. Typically, places with higher tax rates will have better roads. Weather is also a factor, and an east-west band of the continent with frequent freeze/thaw cycles will have worse pavement than somewhere where it's consistently cold or warm. Interesting! I'm not sure if I've ever driven on a concrete road other than when I was in the US. Here I guess it's all 'oil lobby' stuff? Thats asphalt right? Stinky black sandy crap. It's fairly smooth and quiet, but for me that's the baseline. When I drove on a concrete road in LA it was so noisy and you felt every drat bump and it was not pleasant. DO they just not use concrete for roads in Canada or just not in my region (west coast) ?
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Mar 24, 2011 21:04
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Concrete is probably harder to fix when they freeze and crack every year during winter.
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Mar 24, 2011 21:12
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NihilismNow posted:Pretty much all new roads are paved with ZOAB (Very open asphalt concrete). It is much more expensive than concrete or even regular asphalt and only lasts 7 years but it has quite a a extreme reduction on the ammount of noise. Last week i drove on a concrete road and i can't imagine driving on those everyday, even for just a few kilometers the noise was maddening. We tried that out in Rhode Island. The pores quickly got filled with sand from the plows and stopped letting water infiltrating. Too bad, because we really could've used the cost savings on drainage. Also, we used it in a parking lot, and all the turning tires and braking just ripped up the top course. Baronjutter posted:When I drove on a concrete road in LA it was so noisy and you felt every drat bump and it was not pleasant. The concrete spokesman I met a few years back said that the reason people have a perception of concrete roads as noisy is because most of them were built decades ago, before concrete paving was refined to its current art. If we built concrete roads now, they should be as smooth as asphalt. I doubt how true that is, but that's their official explanation.
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Mar 24, 2011 21:49
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The state recently chip and sealed one of the local highways that just got fresh pavement a couple years ago. The road was still in good condition. If they thought it needed work, why chip and seal it instead of just throwing down a new layer of asphalt, which they'll have to do in a few years anyway?
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Mar 24, 2011 22:18
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Maniaman posted:The state recently chip and sealed one of the local highways that just got fresh pavement a couple years ago. The road was still in good condition. If they thought it needed work, why chip and seal it instead of just throwing down a new layer of asphalt, which they'll have to do in a few years anyway? Chip and seal is a lot less expensive. It sucks when the pavement underneath is completely crap and it's treated like a magic fix for a road that is crumbling to dust.
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Mar 24, 2011 22:29
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I can't find it anywhere in press releases or the news, but I've been wondering about the East Rocks Road bridge replacement on the Merritt Parkway. Since it's a historic bridge, any idea if they're going to make it identical to the old one, come up with a new unique design, or just make a boring old bridge?
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Mar 25, 2011 03:07
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GWBBQ posted:I can't find it anywhere in press releases or the news, but I've been wondering about the East Rocks Road bridge replacement on the Merritt Parkway. Since it's a historic bridge, any idea if they're going to make it identical to the old one, come up with a new unique design, or just make a boring old bridge? I'll see if I can find some info on it. I'm heading to a meeting with the bridge folks tomorrow, so I'll bring it up. Any idea what the project number or town is?
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Mar 25, 2011 03:44
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Baronjutter posted:Interesting! I'm not sure if I've ever driven on a concrete road other than when I was in the US. Here I guess it's all 'oil lobby' stuff? Thats asphalt right? Stinky black sandy crap. It's fairly smooth and quiet, but for me that's the baseline. When I drove on a concrete road in LA it was so noisy and you felt every drat bump and it was not pleasant. DO they just not use concrete for roads in Canada or just not in my region (west coast) ? There was plenty of concrete in use about 50 years ago in southern Ontario, but due to it getting all hosed up in short order, most of it lives underneath a layer of asphalt these days. Most of Hwy 401 through Toronto has concrete underneath that dates to the 1960s, along with the 427 and most of the older King's Highways, including the QEW which was originally done in concrete in the 1930s. A modern example is the 407 which utilizes modern concrete techniques between Hwy 403 and Markham.
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Mar 25, 2011 05:06
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Cichlidae posted:I'll see if I can find some info on it. I'm heading to a meeting with the bridge folks tomorrow, so I'll bring it up. Any idea what the project number or town is? 723 in Norwalk.
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Mar 25, 2011 14:54
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GWBBQ posted:723 in Norwalk. They took impressions of the previous bridge's stonework and the new bridge has concrete simulated to fit the original pattern  Construction will be finished in a couple months, provided I got the bridge right.
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Mar 25, 2011 17:37
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Baronjutter posted:What can you tell me about the different types of actual paving different regions use? When is concrete used, when is blacktop used?
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Mar 25, 2011 22:54
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Nesnej posted:Geological concerns are one possible explanation. You need reasonably good aggregate in order to make both asphalt and concrete, but since concrete is much stiffer, you don't need as much high quality aggregate for the base course. Hence it might be a good choice where the hills are predominantly sandstone or some other soft and brittle type of rock. Conversely, if you live far away from the nearest lime but have plenty of rocky outcrops of hard-wearing rock, then it might be cheaper to go with dynamite and bitumen. That would make sense, as we have tons of granite and traprock in New England. Both are excellent for asphalt. One thing to note, though, is that aggregate type does have a big effect on concrete. Use the wrong stone, and it will react with the lime in the cement and essentially explode, spalling the concrete. Aggregate is usually the weakest part of concrete, too, so if you're going for strength, it's extremely important. The wearing surface of a road isn't nearly as strength-critical as, say, a bridge beam.
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Mar 26, 2011 02:07
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135A St.
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Mar 28, 2011 03:13
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Are there two houses on that street, or just the one?
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Mar 28, 2011 03:25
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Guy Axlerod posted:Are there two houses on that street, or just the one? It looks like just one. The driveway on the next house seems to go onto 98b.
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Mar 28, 2011 03:28
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Cichlidae posted:They took impressions of the previous bridge's stonework and the new bridge has concrete simulated to fit the original pattern On the subject of bridges, are inspection reports public records? The newest one I can find says the bridge to Pleasure Beach in Bridgeport is in good condition, so it's just a little out of date. Driving under bridges and seeing that the concrete has spalled off and rusty rebar is exposed is less than comforting, at least one bridge has a piece of the facade missing, and I'm still convinced that the Ponus Ridge overpass (also has the spalling and exposed rebar) is going to split in half and fall over cartoon-style any day now. less than three posted:135A St.
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Mar 28, 2011 09:35
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less than three posted:135A St. Does that actually exist, or is it just a mistake on Google Maps? I've found them not to be terribly accurate in the past. GWBBQ posted:On the subject of bridges, are inspection reports public records? Should be, yeah. I have no idea where you'd get them, though, because they're paper-only and someone has to go scan them every time someone wants a copy. The bridges in question could be rated a 2 or a 3 and still hold up just fine, with repair/replacement scheduled "TBD 2013" or something similar. We really don't have the cash to fix things as they break anymore.
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Mar 28, 2011 12:32
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Cichlidae posted:Does that actually exist, or is it just a mistake on Google Maps? I've found them not to be terribly accurate in the past. I went and looked it up on the city's map viewer and it's the same. 
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Mar 29, 2011 07:25
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While we're at it, what's up with the 5-digit address numbering system here in California (and other places apparently)? Why can't the first house be numbered 1 instead of 10001 dammit? e: here is an example of what I'm talking about http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&sou...rnia+92782&z=17
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Mar 29, 2011 08:01
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Mandalay posted:While we're at it, what's up with the 5-digit address numbering system here in California (and other places apparently)? Why can't the first house be numbered 1 instead of 10001 dammit? Haha yeah. The photo I posted above has houses like 13508. Growing up the two houses I lived in were 34xxx and 31xxx. It seemed there all the addresses were 5 digits and started with 2 or 3 for whatever reason. Certainly didn't make any sense looking at a map. Thankfully now I live in a proper numbering plan, where Main Street divides between [Street Name] E and [Street Name] W, starting at 0 and going up by 100 per block as you travel in each direction.
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Mar 29, 2011 08:18
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Mandalay posted:While we're at it, what's up with the 5-digit address numbering system here in California (and other places apparently)? Why can't the first house be numbered 1 instead of 10001 dammit? Seems to be based on the same block numbers as the major streets in that area. In this area, roads in one direction are numbered around 2200, and roads in the other are around 13400, regardless of how long they are.
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Mar 29, 2011 12:38
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Mandalay posted:While we're at it, what's up with the 5-digit address numbering system here in California (and other places apparently)? Why can't the first house be numbered 1 instead of 10001 dammit? I can't speak to the numbers starting at 10,000 but my county in SC implemented a massive renumbering plan a few years ago as part of offering E-911 services. The new house numbers correspond to the driveway's distance from the end of the road in millimiles, rounded to the nearest even or odd depending on which side of the street it's on. Other places have different systems, your county government should have their numbering plan on the web or available at the courthouse if you're really interested. Any ideas about how to save this notoriously awful interchange in South Carolina? Malfunction Junction is the stuff of legend, the onramp to offramp weave zone is barely 550' no matter which way you go through it, and SCDOT's brilliant plan right now is to add another lane to Westbound 26 and call it a decade. I'm thinking tear out the two acute cloverleaves and try to cram in a halfstack? shame on an IGA fucked around with this message at 18:36 on Mar 29, 2011 |
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Mar 29, 2011 18:22
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The Proc posted:I'm thinking tear out the two acute cloverleaves and try to cram in a halfstack? That'd certainly work. Honestly, though, I'm not sure why such a basic set of interchanges merits a notorious nickname.
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Mar 29, 2011 21:45
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Cichlidae posted:Seems to be based on the same block numbers as the major streets in that area. In this area, roads in one direction are numbered around 2200, and roads in the other are around 13400, regardless of how long they are. Exactly. For example, my town uses the Main Street-style layout less than three mentioned earlier: For roads that cross Main Street perpendicularly, numbers start at 01 right at Main and every block adds another 100, and the street is labeled "East" or "West" depending on the side. Any short length of east-west road that doesn't actually cross Main will still inherit the block number a road in its position on the grid should have. For roads parallel to Main Street, they're also all pinned to Main Street, but based on where the street starts rather than on an East/West divide. Main starts at 01 (conveniently for us this is right at the ocean) and every block adds another 100 until it ends (somewhere around 6000 at the city limit). The street I live on is less than a block long but my address is still 42XX Choad St. rather than just XX Choad St. because my cul-de-sac is parallel to and in the same area as the 4200 block of Main St. My neighbors who live on the street where my cul-se-sac branches off of have addresses in the 700 range, because that street is perpendicular to and 7 blocks away from Main St. It makes a lot of sense when you have a well-structured grid and you know where your reference point (Main St. in this case) is, but if you're in a neighborhood with curving streets that is many miles away from the reference point it is a lot harder to understand why these streets seem to randomly have addresses both in the 13,000 range and the 2,000 range or whatever. So, less than three, the houses where you grew up probably were part of a "proper numbering plan," but you didn't have the necessary information to get the right perspective on it.
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Mar 29, 2011 23:11
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Wait...there are places that just start and stop numbering on a street, rather than based on where the location actually is within a city?  I'm trying to imagine the insanity of a place where a north/south street may start way off to the north but still have street numbers starting at 0.One of the only things I miss about Tucson from a navigational perspective is that since it is just one city, you can look at street numbers and get an idea for where a location is really quickly without even digging up a map; you know that 100 W Broadway is smack in the middle of town, but 6000 E Speedway is way out on the east. In the Phoenix area, each city does that same thing, but almost all of them have their own individual origin. This presents issues sometimes with the east/west roads that run the entire length of the region, such as Baseline, Southern, and University; "100 W Baseline" would be a theoretically valid address in at least four different spots on the same road.
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Mar 29, 2011 23:18
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IOwnCalculus posted:Wait...there are places that just start and stop numbering on a street, rather than based on where the location actually is within a city? That's how things work throughout the Northeast. Most addresses here are under 100, and anything in the thousands indicates a very long road. Roads frequently change names as well, since they have been built and revised for hundreds of years. There was no central planning agency back in the 1600s.
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Mar 30, 2011 00:40
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135a St used to go to that point before it was all developed. Scroll up on the map a bit and you will find other segments of it. The more you know.
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Mar 30, 2011 00:46
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IOwnCalculus posted:In the Phoenix area, each city does that same thing, but almost all of them have their own individual origin. This presents issues sometimes with the east/west roads that run the entire length of the region, such as Baseline, Southern, and University; "100 W Baseline" would be a theoretically valid address in at least four different spots on the same road. The LA area is like this, it's annoying for sure. Take Sepulveda Boulevard, it's 31 miles long from end to end and (travelling from the north end to the south end) changes from "Sepulveda" to "North Sepulveda" to "South Sepulveda" to "Sepulveda" to "South Sepulveda", runs under the runways at LAX (awesome) and changes to "North Sepulveda" and finally to "South Sepulveda" again, and the numbering resets itself at least a half-dozen times along that route. On the other hand, if you're driving in LA and you're getting annoyed by something that isn't traffic, you're probably having a good day.
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Mar 30, 2011 05:00
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