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Rougey posted:Just one question; what is the extent of community consultation/engagement (if any) on Road projects in the USA? Word is you’re at least a decade behind Australia at the best of times, but I haven’t really enquired about it before. It varies tremendously between states, but around here, we can't so much as rebuild a bridge without a full public involvement process. It's a flawed process, because the people who insinuate themselves in public involvement tend to be the least affected, but we're doing what we can. Build a website, put all the meeting minutes / flyers / info / FAQs / relevant news articles in it, make a Facebook and Twitter account, and guess what? I think we only have about 80 unique visitors, about 70 of whom leave the site without clicking anything. This is over a year into the public involvement phase of a $5 billion project. I guess what I'm trying to say is, we get hundreds of people at our meetings and everyone has an opinion, but the majority of them are the age of my grandparents and likely are not very computer-savvy. It's tremendously frustrating because we want to keep everyone informed, all stakeholders, but we still don't know how to get the word out even with a dedicated PR firm.
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Jul 22, 2014 02:11
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Cichlidae posted:It varies tremendously between states, but around here, we can't so much as rebuild a bridge without a full public involvement process. It's a flawed process, because the people who insinuate themselves in public involvement tend to be the least affected, but we're doing what we can. Build a website, put all the meeting minutes / flyers / info / FAQs / relevant news articles in it, make a Facebook and Twitter account, and guess what? I think we only have about 80 unique visitors, about 70 of whom leave the site without clicking anything. This is over a year into the public involvement phase of a $5 billion project. This is super true of the development industry or really anything that needs to abide by, or at least go through the motions of listening to local public opinion. It's a good idea, a lot of it came about after highways bulldozed through neighborhoods, or whole areas were demolished for "urban renewal" without any local input or say. But in a lot of situations we have a sort of "tragedy of the anti-commons" where a tiny number of people can hold up or stall a whole project, often simply because they have nothing better to do. It's also expensive doing all this "public engagement". All the media, all the presentations, all the meetings, it's big bucks. I guess it's better to have too much public consultation than too little, but so often it's just "consultation theatre". The city, the developer, who ever already has their mind made up and they just go through the motions to give the illusion of public input. I know for a fact for instance that many developers will pretend they want to build a building bigger than they intend to, so the local nimby's can feel they've scored a victory when they shave a few floors off the building. A lot of these consultations are very old fashioned though. To have any official input you have to go to a meeting in person and officially speak, anything else is just sort of unofficial feedback. So many of these meetings are during working hours, or just too much of a hassle for normal people to go to. So many places don't even put anything online, or if they do it's horrible. I think if anything they should cut the meetings and presentations to an absolute minimum and just put clear information and a system for official feedback online. Boo-hoo you won't get the same 90 year old that comes to every single meeting complaining about everything, but on the other hand you might get input from people with actual jobs and lives.
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Jul 22, 2014 02:32
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Baronjutter posted:I think if anything they should cut the meetings and presentations to an absolute minimum and just put clear information and a system for official feedback online. Boo-hoo you won't get the same 90 year old that comes to every single meeting complaining about everything, but on the other hand you might get input from people with actual jobs and lives. We do this, and respond to every single comment (often spending a lot of time on it), but we just don't get enough of 'em. It's always the same few complaints (that we're very careful to address) and the occasional oddball. We know the power players and their needs very well, but I feel like we know nothing about what the average commuter thinks of the project. And in the end, this road carries more traffic in a single day than there are people in the entire city.
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Jul 22, 2014 03:59
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A lot of those outreach websites totally half rear end it, to be honest. Like the only useful content is some PowerPoint they made for a public presentation six months ago that makes no sense without the actual talk. Even for projects that have shovels in the ground, where stuff is happening. You'd think they could get someone on the team to write a blog post or twitter update once a week saying what's going on.
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Jul 22, 2014 04:45
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smackfu posted:A lot of those outreach websites totally half rear end it, to be honest. Like the only useful content is some PowerPoint they made for a public presentation six months ago that makes no sense without the actual talk. Even for projects that have shovels in the ground, where stuff is happening. You'd think they could get someone on the team to write a blog post or twitter update once a week saying what's going on. Our public relations firm isn't doing the greatest job. They didn't bother updating the website for something like 2 weeks after our latest public meeting, which looks really sloppy if you have an interested citizen who wants to know more and can't find anything.
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Jul 22, 2014 22:06
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What could be the reasoning behind putting stop signs at places that have no collision path? Just to stop traffic? Like in these pictures, if both direction ignored the stop sign and didn't go into the opposing lane, they would not hit each other. The stop sign is at the red mark. At the green box, which looks almost like an identical turn, there are no signs of any kind.  
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Jul 23, 2014 00:26
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You can't take those corners at speed, so there were probably a lot of accidents from people taking it too fast, or cutting the corner off and coming into the oncoming lane.
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Jul 23, 2014 00:32
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Nah, the people planning the signs just didn't know what they were doing, and put stop signs where they don't belong. The proper way to alert people to slow down is a SLOW sign and maybe those arrows indicating a sharp turn. A similar situation happened in my home town where needless stop signs were put up and stop bars painted on the roads, only for the signs to immediately have bags placed over them and the stop bars hastily removed. Then eventually the stop signs themselves were removed.
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Jul 23, 2014 04:05
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I've certainly seen this before on a right angle turn, especially when there is a house on the inside corner so it's relatively blind. The odd thing in this case is that the satellite view shows they added extra space on the outside lanes through the corner, which would be unneeded with the stop signs.
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Jul 23, 2014 19:30
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That's a really weird road arrangement, I've never seen sharp 90 degree turns like that on a public road. Why not just make the whole road in the photo more of an S shape or are curved lots just too hard for a developer building copy-paste grid of houses? I guess the tight turns could be a form of traffic calming. But yeah, you just need a little sharp corner sign with a suggested speed limit. Actually I think there's a single curve like this I've seen in Victoria, way out in a newish suburb/industrial area there's a 90 degree curve and it just has a little warning sign. http://goo.gl/maps/K9hjP Not quite as sharp but it's how you should handle it in terms of signs. Baronjutter fucked around with this message at 20:07 on Jul 23, 2014 |
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Jul 23, 2014 20:03
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I think proper lane markings (just in the corners, mind you) could work wonders here.
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Jul 23, 2014 21:14
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Baronjutter posted:That's a really weird road arrangement, I've never seen sharp 90 degree turns like that on a public road. Why not just make the whole road in the photo more of an S shape or are curved lots just too hard for a developer building copy-paste grid of houses? Curved roads waste space, and they need that extra space to
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Jul 23, 2014 21:32
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My money's on lazy-rear end traffic calming. Or they planned to add a third leg and never did, which is a common situation in subdivisions and commercial parks. We've got one like that in Berlin, CT: http://binged.it/1r960CH
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Jul 23, 2014 21:40
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Just got back from Dallas, and was in awe at the massive construction project I drove through, the LBJ Express. It's adding demand-pricing toll lanes to an existing interstate, but to add all the lanes they needed more width than existed so it's a huge excavation that will end up creating a half-decked roadway for several miles between IH-35E and US-75 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfcn2WZBvM0 It also intersects the High Five Interchange adding more miles of concrete to an already impressive structure. 
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Jul 24, 2014 00:01
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Will this make it easier to get from 75 to 35E? Because the series of lovely interchanges you have to take to get from one to the other is truly something awful. Also what's the story on why there's a 35E and 35W? Shouldn't one of them been like 635 or something?
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Jul 24, 2014 00:04
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ConfusedUs posted:Also what's the story on why there's a 35E and 35W? Shouldn't one of them been like 635 or something? Just like up in Minnesota (where 35W primarily goes through Minneapolis and 35E primarily goes through St. Paul), no one group was able to win out on deciding which branch of I-35 would get to be the mainline and which would be a loop route. To choose would offend either Fort Worth or Dallas.
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Jul 24, 2014 00:09
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ConfusedUs posted:Will this make it easier to get from 75 to 35E? Because the series of lovely interchanges you have to take to get from one to the other is truly something awful. The LBJ IS 635. It's the interstate loop a portion of which is under construction. Conveniently it's the portion that takes you from US 75 to I-35E. The high five interchange pretty well dumps you smoothly into 635 going east (less so going west) under medium traffic conditions, it's the Dallas North Tollway that kicks you through a bunch of weird half-exits and overpasses to get you onto 635. That combined with the smooshed together local exits for surface roads off of 635 is what the project is working to help alleviate. I am horribly pessimistic about the shithole that is Dallas in general, and the cul-de-sac concrete disaster that is Addison and the north suburbs in particular, so I don't think it's going to help much.
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Jul 24, 2014 00:30
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Cichlidae posted:We do this, and respond to every single comment (often spending a lot of time on it), but we just don't get enough of 'em. It's always the same few complaints (that we're very careful to address) and the occasional oddball. We know the power players and their needs very well, but I feel like we know nothing about what the average commuter thinks of the project. And in the end, this road carries more traffic in a single day than there are people in the entire city. Minijaka posted:What could be the reasoning behind putting stop signs at places that have no collision path? Just to stop traffic?
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Jul 25, 2014 00:59
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GWBBQ posted:Does it help at all if people speak out in support of projects in public meetings? We host a handful of DOT hearings a year at work and I could probably round up a few friends to speak out in favor of good projects as a counterpoint to the whiny people. It definitely does, especially when they speak up early in the meeting. There is such a strong herd mentality; if one person starts bashing the project, everyone else feels like it's ok to voice every grievance they have.
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Jul 25, 2014 12:03
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Cichlidae posted:It definitely does, especially when they speak up early in the meeting. There is such a strong herd mentality; if one person starts bashing the project, everyone else feels like it's ok to voice every grievance they have. This 100% when trying to support a development project we'd get in there early and in enough numbers to 'set the tone" for the meeting. After 5-6 people in a row go up and talk about how great the project will be to the neighbourhood, and how all their friends and neighbours in the area are excited to finally see that swampy abandoned parking lot turn into something nice, the old ladies going up saying "It's horrible! It's too modern and 4 stories is too tall!" look like crazy old ladies rather than concerned members of the public. Specially if you know what they are going to complain about and address it first, or contradict it first. I've absolutely been in meetings where people were clearly there to say how some project or some building is the absolute worst and will destroy everything, but after a bunch of positive people go up by the time they do the wind is taken out of their sails and they just mumble something like "Well I was quite opposed to this project but a lot of people have pointed out the good parts I never considered but none of the good things will help me so I'm still against it I guess but at least I understand about it now..." There really is a herd mentality and a lot of these little groups of fussy old people who come to every meeting on every subject all sort of know each other and they absolutely thrive on opposing things, it becomes a social event, a way to bond. they're lonely and have nothing better to do and it's a few moments where they can feel righteous and important. They never consider the merits of anything, they never consider that everything has pros and cons. They just laser in on the cons and go cause a huge stink about everything. Often they just have a sort of generic complaint list that isn't even specific to a project. "I'm against this (bike lane project),(new condo building),(parking regulation),(food truck court) because it does nothing to address affordability for seniors in the city!" Also people generally know it's way more likely that someone would drag them selves to a meeting to complain rather than support, so every voice of support is worth a lot. Specially when it comes from a normal looking working-aged person making clear points and sounding reasonable. These people listen to the same crazies every day on every subject, when a non-crazy comes in it's a breath of fresh air. If you actually do support something, specially something you know is going to bring out the NIMBY's absolutely go down. If anything you'll at least brighten the proponent's day. But from talking with mayors and council, they absolutely do give more weight to supporters than detractors because there will always be way more detractors for anything, because people that are simply ok with a project just don't give any feedback.
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Jul 25, 2014 16:16
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Does it help if you're from the area the project would be working in? Or, conversely, does it harm your case if you're not?
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Jul 25, 2014 20:05
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Hedera Helix posted:Does it help if you're from the area the project would be working in? Or, conversely, does it harm your case if you're not? If the project isn't impacting you why would you care one way or another?
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Jul 25, 2014 20:25
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Baronjutter posted:If the project isn't impacting you why would you care one way or another? I mean, if it's something like transit expansion to a neighboring city when you take transit a lot and have family who live there. Basically, would it have helped if more people from Portland showed up to meetings in Vancouver in support of light rail, when there was a huge push in Vancouver against anything even remotely Portland-ish?
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Jul 25, 2014 20:27
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Oh yeah totally, if it impacts you in some way go talk about it. Here's a good video showing how important the paving and design of streets can be to influence speed and uses. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2Q1mkFCqkI It also shows that if you want proper infrastructure you have to actually rip up streets and poo poo, you can't just paint some white lines on the road, put up a sign, and call it a day. These dutch infrastructure videos are always so depressing to me because the horrible dated awful stuff they are desperately improving is like 100x better than anything here. I wish they could send us their 2nd hand roads. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8krYIfcuk4 Here's another review of some recent infrastructure upgrades. Baronjutter fucked around with this message at 20:32 on Jul 25, 2014 |
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Jul 25, 2014 20:29
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Hedera Helix posted:Does it help if you're from the area the project would be working in? Or, conversely, does it harm your case if you're not? When you go to voice your comment, you don't have to say where you're from. But your remarks will be given more weight (at least by the audience, and that includes reporters) if you are local. "I need this improvement to get through traffic off the streets my kids plan on" is a lot more compelling for a news story than "I don't want to be stuck in traffic for thirty minutes a day."
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Jul 26, 2014 00:00
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Road bridge question! I need to design a road bridge, a simple bridge going over a couple train tracks, then space for supports, then another train track and some terrain. Probably two spans, a 13m span then a ~40m span. It's just a 2 lane road with sidewalks. What sort of bridge would they use for spans like that? I'm guessing the first span could just be a super simple concrete deal like you'd see on a small overpass, but would the 40m span get into any sort of interesting territory or would it most likely be just a boring box? *edit* Just looked up some local bridges. This extremely plain and ugly bridge has exactly 40m spans.  Here's another almost exactly 40m span that's a little more interesting, at least has some arch action going on.  How would you determine what sort of design to use? Baronjutter fucked around with this message at 01:35 on Jul 26, 2014 |
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Jul 26, 2014 01:31
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Baronjutter posted:Road bridge question! Around here, 40m would be a simple steel girder bridge, maybe haunched in order to save on some steel, with a concrete deck.  They probably wouldn't use different bridge types for two spans right next to each other - and rather than have a joint at the middle pier, they prefer to use a continuous span so that the two spans are fastened together. This means that super-unequal length spans are bad (think of it as the flexing of big span torquing the small span) so they would either try harder to make the spans closer in length, or they might omit the pier altogether. It might not make a huge difference in beam size to make the bridge 55m instead of 40m. Edit: quote:Here's another almost exactly 40m span that's a little more interesting, at least has some arch action going on. Fancy bridges like that can be done for reasons like aesthetics, since there's a nice waterway and a pedestrian path near the bridge. Supports like that also would let you use a thinner superstructure (beam + deck thickness) if you had to allow more underclearance without raising the driving surface too high, e.g. to allow large boats underneath. Devor fucked around with this message at 01:51 on Jul 26, 2014 |
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Jul 26, 2014 01:40
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Thanks for the info. I could probably move a support and have it closer to 2 equal spans. Laser cutting something like your example or my first example will be easy!
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Jul 26, 2014 03:05
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Baronjutter posted:Thanks for the info. I could probably move a support and have it closer to 2 equal spans. Laser cutting something like your example or my first example will be easy! So much of it depends on site considerations, but we've been moving to mostly precast concrete bridges here. If the clearance above the railroad is an issue, though, you might want to go with steel instead, since it has a thinner section. And yeah, make it a continuous span. Deck joints are murder.
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Jul 26, 2014 03:24
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Baronjutter posted:That's a really weird road arrangement, I've never seen sharp 90 degree turns like that on a public road. Why not just make the whole road in the photo more of an S shape or are curved lots just too hard for a developer building copy-paste grid of houses? I guess the tight turns could be a form of traffic calming. But yeah, you just need a little sharp corner sign with a suggested speed limit. Oh man, you would love Ohio. Older roads here were laid out along property lines   
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Jul 26, 2014 04:02
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Halah posted:Oh man, you would love Ohio. Older roads here were laid out along property lines Speaking of weird roads in Ohio: 
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Jul 26, 2014 04:06
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Cichlidae posted:My money's on lazy-rear end traffic calming. Or they planned to add a third leg and never did, which is a common situation in subdivisions and commercial parks. We've got one like that in Berlin, CT: http://binged.it/1r960CH Yeah it looks like there's a major road just to the north that it was meant to intersect with. But it could also be lazy traffic calming. It's annoying if it is, though, as there are so many better ways of doing that.
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Jul 26, 2014 07:42
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Nintendo Kid posted:Speaking of weird roads in Ohio: Hitler Road 1 was bad but Hitler Road 2 is kinda excessive.
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Jul 26, 2014 09:06
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Here is the area: http://tinyurl.com/q49vfg5 I don't think they ever intended to connect those those corners to the big street. Around here it's pretty common for corners to be built with extra wide space. I always figured it was to allow space for boat/trailer/RVs, since every other house has at least one of those. There was no stop sign for years after the road and houses were built, it was only sometime last year there was a wave of speed bumps and stop signs that was added the area within like 2 weeks. There 3 of those corner stop signs that I can think of right now in that area. I don't agree with a large portion of the new signs, but I'm not in charge, so I just avoid the area when I could.
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Jul 26, 2014 09:58
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Nintendo Kid posted:Speaking of weird roads in Ohio: Holy poo poo, right near the VFW, too! Must've been named in the 30s when some Americans had a total Hitler-boner. And presumably the adjacent Huber-Hitler road is named after a colleague. While there are a lot of Hubers in the German-speaking world, it might be this guy.
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Jul 26, 2014 15:35
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Nintendo Kid posted:Speaking of weird roads in Ohio: I just love that Hitler Rd 2 is also Rt. 69. I am apparently 12.
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Jul 26, 2014 16:03
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When some random resident flies out of their apartment building and runs across eight lanes of busy traffic to interrupt my car accident investigation so they can demand we install traffic cameras a block away where accidents never occur, is it OK to bother my city's traffic engineer with an email about it?
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Jul 26, 2014 16:17
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Cichlidae posted:Holy poo poo, right near the VFW, too! Must've been named in the 30s when some Americans had a total Hitler-boner. And presumably the adjacent Huber-Hitler road is named after a colleague. While there are a lot of Hubers in the German-speaking world, it might be this guy. Nah, that's not too far from me. The Hitlers and Hubers were pretty big farming families down there. Most of those roads were named after whoever's farms it ran between (or to), or what towns it ran between.
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Jul 26, 2014 16:36
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Minijaka posted:Here is the area: http://tinyurl.com/q49vfg5 Ah, that makes more sense. Wood Rd got cut in half by that freeway. It looks like there's been a general practice of cutting off Wood Rd in fact, I'd guess to minimize the number of intersections (and maximize the number of housing lots.)
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Jul 26, 2014 16:43
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Halah posted:Nah, that's not too far from me. The Hitlers and Hubers were pretty big farming families down there. Most of those roads were named after whoever's farms it ran between (or to), or what towns it ran between. Yeah, there's even an article about the Hitlers of Ohio: http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3103060,00.html
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Jul 26, 2014 18:17
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