Plus paying tolls on roads our fucking taxes paid for.
That I’m actually for, let the people who use these roads pay for them. All the while, I’ll be laughing at them as I bike on through.
except when your government pays full price for it and sells it off to a company for a tiny bit of money so they can make money with tolls
Well I don’t live in NJ/NY so I’d map it out.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/vr7jaMhtuywupgAP8?g_st=i
Funnyish story though, this no bikes thing has happened to me thrice on my bicycle adventures.
- In Norfolk, VA I went straight instead of making a right and promptly landed on 64, with no way to go backwards, I hopped a fence and landed in an industrial park with a decent coffee shop, remapped my route and then gave it another go.
- In trying to flee hurricane Irene on a particularly long road trip, I ended up having to cross the St John’s river bridge because the ferries by that time of night were closed and I had to get into Newport News to stay at my friend’s for the night. It was a shitty situation all around. I feel it was the closest to death I have ever been in my life and I have had a few doozies. I do not recommend ever ever doing this and will never do it again, ever.
- Recently from El Escorial to Madrid with limited cell service, I landed myself on M-503 for a stretch. While this kind of road with broad shoulders in the US permits bikes, they do not in Spain. I was able to pull off onto a finca road and then eventually a greenway, but not before crossing a beautiful large rust colored bridge (with a decent shoulder).
I’ve been long distance biking for 20 years now and have had some excellent adventures, so fortunately these kind of wrong turn experiences have been few and far between.
There is a really great documentary on PBS right now about a group of kids who crossed the entire US on bike for charity in the early 80s, I highly recommend it. https://www.pbs.org/video/once-in-a-lifetime-qtroq8/
I think a diverging diamond interchange is actually a pretty elegant solution. That being said, I’d rather have public transport than better traffic infrastructure.
my city is literally prohibited from using public funds for any type of train because of some GOP devil magic thing – so all we have is busses, which suck because you’re still beholden to traffic jams and lights and speed limits and roads. pointless and not even a sense of whimsy or transcendence
I think the diverging diamond interchange is terrible. Because of the crossover, traffic can only cross the interchange in one direction at a time, so most of the traffic in the interchange is not moving most of the time.
A pair of roundabouts connected to on ramps eliminates the danger of left turns without stopping the majority of traffic most of the time.
A massive overbuilt interchange that cannot function without traffic lights is the opposite of elegant.
Because of the crossover, traffic can only cross the interchange in one direction at a time, so most of the traffic in the interchange is not moving most of the time.
I’m not so sure about that. The appropriate use of a diverging diamond is when there is a lot of traffic entering and exiting from the ramps, and some of that traffic can go at the same time as the traffic crossing the interchange in one direction.
I’ve read descriptions of how they work numerous times and cannot wrap my head around how having traffic going opposite directions cross paths does anything helpful.
Great, you’re now on the appropriate side to make the turn at the far side of the interchange, so the people making the turn don’t have to cross traffic to do so, at the cost of every car that crosses the interchange now having to cross traffic twice.
What?
The Well There’s Your Problem podcast has an excellent episode about traffic engineering where they go into diverging diamonds a bit.
I think this is also the episode where they lay out essentially the mission statement of the show, that engineering decisions reflect the politics of those who mandate them, and how the hard sciencey disciplines we think of as “objective” are anything but.
It’s a shame they haven’t put it on their main channel, which is here: https://youtube.com/@welltheresyourproblempodca1465
I always wondered that.
Is it traffic engineers who suggest adding another lane? Or is it stupid people who can’t read data and demands it?
Both. 1980s Era civil/traffic engineers in NA were all trained for car=future=build road. Nowadays most traffic engineering/city planning schools teach multimodal transportation as The Way, but decades of car washing our cities has resulted in an almost total collapse of public support for anything except another lane. Luckily, most people sub-30 are aware of this and are slowly becoming politically active. Public opinion will shift slowly over the next decade or two and eventually the traffic engineers will be allowed to do the right thing.
I’m reading the Robert Caro biography of Robert Moses - the New York highway builder. By 1950 newspapers were saying “building these highways is a terrible idea, we need mass transit to move all the people that need to be moved unless you paved the entire city so no one could live here”
Wanna make a difference? Get some of these stickers and slap em up everywhere. I’ve still got a few left over to put places.
https://parkingreform.org/products/sticker-10-pack
Go to your city “public opinion” sessions on zoning and highway design. One of our new circumferential highways has the first inverted diamond because some radical urbanists sandbagged the public hearing. Showing up to these things can make a big impact.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Roundabout_(Swindon)?wprov=sfla1
This one I think.
