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Getting away from highways, there's a project near where I live that I'd like to hear your opinion on. Here's the section on Google Maps. I don't know if there's anything you can say about it; I'm mostly just kvetching about it. As you can see, traffic comes from the city center to the West and passes over three bridges to clear the island in the middle of the river. All three bridges are problematic: the Neue Strombrücke has problems with its eastern foundation, so it's currently reduced to one lane + tram in the middle. The Zollbrücke is very narrow and only has one lane each direction which it shares with the tram line. I regularly find car drivers trying to slip onto the bridge in front of the tram and forcing the tram to brake sharply, though fortunately there haven't been any serious accidents there in recent memory. More importantly, this bridge is under pretty harsh heritage protection, which means the structure can't be messed with - it's even still got cobblestones as road surface, which of course make a lot of noise when cars drive over them. It is a fairly serious chokepoint on this route. The Anna-Ebert-Brücke is in okay condition but also quite narrow. All of this runs okay in normal traffic, but events regularly screw it up. The road that goes North just West of the Zollbrücke leads to the city's biggest concert hall, and there's fairgrounds down there, too. Any special event and the whole road backs up something fierce. Further to the East of this is another hall and our main soccer stadium, so that also generates substantial traffic. Now, in theory, all traffic passing through West to East and vice versa is supposed to take this set of bridges further North, which is built with two lanes and generally has acceptable traffic flow. The problem is that the sucky road near where I live is the shortest route (and in the case of the concert hall and fair grounds, the only route), and consequently a lot of people use it. The city, in its infinite wisdom, is considering a plan to remedy this. Their plan is to lenghten the Neue Strombrücke eastward and extend two new bridges to cross the river, bypassing the current narrow bridges completely for East to West traffic. Due to height differential, that means a large earthen mound would have to be created South of the current road to carry the new route about 5 meters above ground level. This new route would have one lane in each direction, plus the tram line in the middle. To summarize the problems with that: 1) The Neue Strombrücke will be fixed, but the second lane it has will disappear on the new bridges, so that's merging problems ahead. (We already have that now, but I don't see a good reason to carry it forward.) 2) The mound would basically kill the sightline into the park South of it. 3) Said park is also under EU habitat protection, so building around that is gonna be a headache. 4) The biggie: the new tram station will sit on that mound. To brave the height differential, they've proposed a ramp, but given the large amount of old folks who live here, that's gonna suck a lot for them. Apparently, elevators are out of the question due to vandalism concerns (?!). 5) Traffic connection for everyone living on the island. To go West, we'd use the Zollbrücke and merge into the new route essentially where the road to the concert hall is now. To the East, however, the new route would eliminate the intersection between Turmschanzenstraße and Brückstraße, so we'd go Anna-Ebert-Brücke, turn North onto Turmschanzenstraße and then go around there. Not exactly a direct route. 6) And of course, costs. Apparently we can get the initial efforts funded, but nobody has any idea what this will cost in upkeep. One counter-proposal to this problem I've heard frequently is to loosen heritage protection on the Zollbrücke and modernize it, maybe run a second bridge parallel to it and just widen the existing route. It's tight, especially with the descending road going into the park to the South, but I think it might be possible. The city isn't entertaining that, however, and in general they seem to be fairly committed to deciding first and informing us later. Anyway, kvetch over, European cities are built narrow and tight, old people don't appreciate being told to walk up long ramps, developing a historically-grown transport network is hard.
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Apr 20, 2010 13:35
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 02:57 |
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grover posted:I found out this project actually has been green-lit as a toll road, and is expected to start construction next July. It will have automated tolling without toll booths. The toll system will read transponders for cars that have them, and take photos of license plates and mail bills to those without. Which just seems utterly absurd. Does this actually work? Are mailed tolls enforceable? Does this sort of toll booth actually work? I know Ireland does this, at least on a section of the M50 motorway that semi-circles Dublin. Other toll roads still have manned booths, but those are some drat nice motorways, too. (The rural roads are...more of an adventure.)
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Aug 7, 2010 20:06
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The "AM peak" note makes me think that's morning rush hour.
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Apr 2, 2014 20:23
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Here's a question from a naive European: I'm sure you guys have heard of the fatal collision involving a Tesla S using Auto-Pilot crashing into a truck trailer. The particulars of the Auto-Pilot system don't really interest me here, what drew my attention was the geometry of the crash site. From what I understand, it took place on a highway with an unsignalled intersection on it, like this: This design seems incredibly unsafe to me, given that it involves unprotected left turns across lanes being driven on at highway speeds. But as per the image source, it's apparently in the MUTCD, so...this is considered kosher? Or is this a legacy design that's only included for reference and no longer being built?
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Jul 2, 2016 17:35
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Also, no sidewalks and a grand total of one bus stop - for sightseeing tours, I guess? Car-centric urban planning at its worst.
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Sep 18, 2016 17:51
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 02:57 |
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Unlurking to clarify that it's 9€ for a whole month, which is a frankly incredible value if you're doing more than two trips with any qualifying local mass transit, nevermind the regional trains. So far it's a one-time program that only covered this year's June, July and August, but there is serious discussion about what a similar ticket could be priced at in the long term. The sexy phrase is the 365€-Ticket, i.e. 1€ per day, which is roughly where the cheaper monthly fares for local transit currently sit.
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Jul 11, 2022 11:22
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