Tag Archives: highways

Imagine corporate highways with autonomous vehicles

Posted on by

Pair self-driving vehicles with highways that can coordinate their movement and corporations may be interested. More on those highways:

Amazon was awarded a patent for a network that manages a very specific aspect of the self-driving experience: How autonomous cars navigate reversible lanes…

In the patent, Amazon outlines a network that can communicate with self-driving vehicles so they can adjust to the change in traffic flow. That’s particularly important for self-driving vehicles traveling across state lines onto new roads with unfamiliar traffic laws…

The patent also indicates that the roadway management system will help “assign” lanes to autonomous vehicles depending on where the vehicle is going and what would best alleviate traffic…

The main difference is that Amazon’s proposed network would be owned and operated by Amazon, not each individual automaker. It also appears to be designed so any carmaker’s vehicles can take advantage of the technology.

We’ve seen highways funded or operated with private money. But, imagine a highway built and run by Amazon for the primary purposes of moving Amazon traffic. With the traffic management capabilities and the autonomous vehicles, you could reduce the number of required lanes, increase speeds, and cut labor costs. Roads still aren’t cheap to construct but this may be feasible monetarily in particular corridors.

Even better: an Amazon Hyperloop.

Successful: reversing highway lanes to evacuate people ahead of a hurricane

Posted on by

As Hurricane Matthew approached, officials used all the lanes of highways:

Across swaths of Florida, South Carolina, Georgia, and North Carolina, half the highway lanes have reversed. Traffic engineers call this “contraflow,” the volte-face of normal traffic. Now, on both sides of these roads, vehicles only run one way—away from Hurricane Matthew…

To select the exit routes months or even years before hurricane season, transportation planners turn to flood maps and atmospheric modeling. They predict hazards: wind, storm surge, freshwater flooding. They rely on traffic counts and experience to predict if and when residents will decide to finally leave their homes, and how…

The planners build computer simulations of their predictions, and tinker with the variables—down to specific intersections’ traffic signals—to speed up the process. With a few days notice, some regions choose to evacuate in waves, asking those living at low elevations to depart hours or even days before inland residents.

Rural regions often direct their residents toward one major highway, physically blocking off smaller roads. This undoubtedly results in jams, but some officials would rather have their populations—with their attendant gas, medical, and food needs—bunched together than spread throughout the hinterlands. Metropolitan areas are more likely to shut down an entire stretch of interstate, forcing cars onto side roads until they converge on bumper-to-bumper congestion miles from a flood zone.

It makes sense to use all available lanes going away from the hurricane, especially toward the end when few people would want to go the other direction. I would still be intrigued to see how many police such an effort requires and how drivers navigate on and off ramps going the opposite direction than normal. Even with all the lanes open one way, I imagine the traffic is not moving too fast.

If I remember correctly, reversing the lanes of highways was also on the table during the Cold War to quickly evacuate a major city. You can read a current-day guide to preparing for a nuclear blast here – there is no mention of highways. However, it does suggest more scenarios when people might be asked to evacuate:

Evacuations are more common than many people realize. Fires and floods cause evacuations most frequently across the U.S. and almost every year, people along coastlines evacuate as hurricanes approach. In addition, hundreds of times a year, transportation and industrial accidents release harmful substances, forcing many people to leave their homes.

While people may not think about evacuations much, I don’t think the highway lane reversals are common at all.

What can a political sociology class do? Perhaps change a highway name

Posted on by

Many highways and roads in the United States have local honorary names and one political sociology class wants to change who a nearby road honors:

University of Mary Washington students are all familiar with Jefferson Davis Highway, the road that leads to campus, Mary Washington Hospital and even Carl’s. Students walk over it to get to Giant, Eagle Landing and Home Team Grill but many students do not know the origin of its name. Students in the Political Sociology Class want to change that…

“The ultimate goal of our class project is to get the City Council of Fredericksburg’s approval to rename the Jefferson Davis Highway in the Fredericksburg area,” Greene said. “We are doing this project to show the public that we care about what our community represents, Jefferson Davis was a Confederate leader who owned approximately 100 slaves, why should we honor a leader who stood for inequality and the superiority of one race over another?”

Jefferson Davis was the owner of at least 113 slaves in his lifetime and was the president of the Confederate States of America from 1861 to 1865, and an embodiment of the values of the planter class. The United Daughters of the Confederacy decided to honor his memory by naming the highway after him…

For students who wish to get involved, Greene suggests showing support by “attending City Council meetings with our class, spreading the word amongst the campus and Fredericksburg community to help promote our mission by word of mouth and our Facebook page, and signing a petition that we plan to create in the near future. The more support we have from UMW, the more likely we are to make a change.”

I bet an analysis of all the honorary names in the United States would turn up a lot of figures who could be controversial. Take Chicago as an example: this helpful website helps makes sense of all of the honorary streets in the city. Given that roads and highways are built with taxpayer money, it makes some sense to have honorary figures who can appeal to everyone.

I like this class idea as a tangible goal for a political sociology course. Undergraduate students often ask how they can make an actual difference and this seems like an attainable goal. Along the way, the students will get opportunities to interact with local officials, the public, and other students and learn how to make such appeals.

Gov’t plan to reduce infrastructure barriers between communities

Posted on by

Several months ago, the Department of Transportation started a project intended to reverse infrastructure barriers between communities:

Wednesday marks the launch of an initiative from the Department of Transportation aimed at mending some of those old wounds. The Every Place Counts Design Challenge calls on local governments to identify neighborhoods that face barriers to (or created by) existing transportation infrastructure, and to compete to work with experts who’ll assist in knocking them down.

Four communities around the U.S. will be selected to receive a specialized DOT design session in their hometowns, which will offer “in-depth facilitation of design strategies, on-site advice from subject-matter experts, targeted guidance related to USDOT program funds, and identification of resources to address an existing transportation infrastructure project challenge,” according to a federal notice provided to CityLab.

To be eligible, elected officials, urban planners, designers, and a cross-section of local residents must all convene around a transportation project that is already in the works and has the potential to reconnect communities to essential services such as jobs, healthcare, and schools. Applications (due June 3) must demonstrate how the existing infrastructure cuts people off from those needs, and how working with transportation and design experts could help these areas achieve better outcomes.

As this later article suggests, such monies could be used to counter earlier efforts that often emphasized driving (particularly in the form of highways in urban areas) or development at the expense of poorer neighborhoods. There are numerous classic cases of this including the construction of the Dan Ryan Expressway in Chicago between the Bridgeport (white) and Bronzeville (black) neighborhoods or Gans’ classic study Urban Villagers involving an Italian neighborhood in Boston. Instead of enforcing outside interests on existing communities – usually along racial/ethnic or class lines – planning today would often advocate for more community input. At the same time, there are still plenty of current situations where neighborhood and outside interests are not aligned and conflict can arise. Additionally, what may look advisable now may seem crazy in a few decades even as we would often imagine that we would never do something as destructive as post-war urban renewal.

Perhaps efforts like this are simply necessary: while better planning could help limit future remediation, monies should always be available to address past plans that didn’t quite work as intended or that were more misguided.

Illinois Tollway, Canadian Pacific Railroad fighting over railyard land

Posted on by

Both railroads and tollways are important in the Chicago region so which should get their way when they both want the same land?

The Tollway has already built part of I-390 with the intention of extending it east to O’Hare. A new tollway would meet I-390 and connect it north to I-90 and south to the Tri-State Tollway along the airport’s western border. The project is expected to cost about $3.5 billion…

In March 2014, Canadian Pacific asked for $114 million for land acquisition and improvements to its Bensenville yard. The Tollway wants to use about 36 acres of the yard for the highway project. But the Tollway said CP restricted Tollway access to the yard, interfering with its ability to study the area to respond to the offer.

Schillerstrom said that the Tollway presented plans that addressed the railroad’s operational and land acquisition worries in November 2015, but CP ended discussions and since then has not been willing to discuss anything…

“With $140 million in federal dollars already invested in the project, Sen. Durbin is concerned about Canadian Pacific’s newfound unwillingness to work with the Tollway and other stakeholders,” Marter said. “After years of working toward a mutually beneficial solution, the railroad’s about-face is troubling.”

I’m a little surprised the state let this go so long and/or they didn’t wrap this piece of the puzzle up before they put themselves between a rock and a hard place. I imagine the public might rally around the cause of the tollway here – the road could help a number of drivers – but CP is correct about the level of railroad gridlock in the Chicago region. Say more about this particular railyard here; the picture at the top highlights the size of the facility.

Might this call for some sort of deal where the land in this railyard is traded for some other land or access elsewhere in the region? One solution to railroad congestion is to funnel more traffic around the edges of the region.

 

Suburbs don’t mind money spent on highways, services that help them

Posted on by

Alana Semuels looks at who supports the widening of highways even as research suggests building more lanes just adds to traffic:

The support for highways could be because people in the region are moving further from the city center, to suburbs served by the highways. Between 2010 and 2015, suburbs such as Austin grew 25 percent between 2010 and 2015, while Bryant grew 19.6 percent, according to the region’s Metropolitan Planning Organization, called Metroplan. Little Rock grew up 3.1 percent in population, and Pulaski County, where Little Rock is located, grew just 3.3 percent, while Saline County grew 8.7 percent.

Suburbs often grow when highways are particularly robust; if people can quickly get out of the city center to far-flung neighborhoods, there’s little incentive for them to stay in the city. But the causal arrow runs both ways: Once there are robust suburbs, the residents there tend to support projects that will benefit them, and those projects include roads that will supposedly make their commutes faster.

Regional politics often favor spending on resources to suburbs, especially when their populations grow so quickly, according to Joseph DiMento, a professor at UC Irvine who has studied the construction of urban freeways.

“Once people move to the suburbs, they want to be serviced, and historically, the suburbs were wealthier and more politically important, so their votes would go for replacing the freeway and improving it, rather than displacing it,” he said.

But, try to raise tax monies on a regional scale for mass transit and suburbanites are often not pleased as they don’t perceive this as a benefit for them.

Come to think of it, I haven’t seen a study that shows the statistical relationship between suburban population growth and highway building. What is the strength of the relationship? This is the general argument: after World War II, the government spent money in certain ways and one path that spurred suburban growth was the construction of a federal highway system. Of course, suburbs were already growing at this point but highways certainly helped.

Highway sign fonts and other fixes for American roads

Posted on by

The use of Clearview font on highway signs is ending:

In a notice posted in the Federal Register on Monday, the U.S. Federal Highway Administration announced a small change that has huge implications for the nation. The agency terminated an order it had issued back in 2004 approving the use of a new font in highway signs. Now those signs are going to change. Again…

Clearview was made to improve upon its predecessor, a 1940s font called Highway Gothic, at a time when an aging Baby Boomer generation meant lots of older drivers on the road. Certain letters appeared to pose visibility problems, especially those with tight interstices (or internal spacing)—namely lowercase e, a, and s. At night, any of these reflective letters might appear to be a lowercase o in the glare of headlights…

Officials in Canada and Indonesia have promoted Clearview as a standard. Transport, which was designed for U.K. roads by Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert, is the most famous example of a systemic transportation font standard. Clearview evolved as an outside recommendation, a best-practices approach from the private sphere, not as a regulatory shift. In the U.S., Meeker says, institutional interest in better standardization is tepid.“Traffic design is the greatest public manifestation of government on any given day,” Meeker says, “and yet it’s the most dreadful, tired, unresearched, undesigned part of the public interface with government.”

For a country that emphasizes driving, Americans can be oddly disinterested in best practices for road design. Perhaps that love of the freedom that driving offers carries over to thinking about roads: every driver for themselves. Beyond this story about moving away from an easier-to-read font, here are some other ways American roads could be improved:

–Road diets – limiting or taking away lanes – would actually help limit traffic and can improve safety.

-Encouraging mass transit use (though often difficult) can help reduce congestion.

–Zipper merges are more efficient for drivers.

-Paying for road maintenance now may not be thrilling or seem as pressing as other concerns but it can pay off down the road.

–Synchronizing traffic signals can reduce congestion and save time.

-Certain road signs, such as those asking drivers to slow down for children, do not necessarily help. In fact, they may be ignored or even distract.

Taking a meat axe to Manhattan for a highway

Posted on by

This retelling of efforts to build a highway across lower Manhattan include this graphic description of what Robert Moses was proposing:

Even Moses acknowledged that his methods were extreme. In fact, he had a term for it: The meat ax. New York, he argued, was already so dense and complex that you had to make cuts somewhere. Sure, other newly-planned metropolises could preserve history and make sure everyone was happy. But according to Moses, New York City needed drastic measures, as he argued in a quote from The Power Broker:

“You can draw any kind of pictures you like on a clean slate and indulge your every whim in the wilderness in laying out a New Delhi, Canberra and Brasilia, but when you operate in an overbuilt metropolis you have to hack your way with a meat ax.”

Imagine a bureaucrat saying that today! It was a time before preservation and urban advocacy existed in organised form. Preserving the grit of the city was a laughable idea — the city needed to be purged of its dirt, not protected…

This strange, antiseptic mindset can be traced alllllll the way back to Europe at the turn of the century, when academics and architects first started thinking about cities as living networks. The sociologist Georg Simmel, writing in 1903, was the first to really describe how cities affected the mental outlook of their inhabitants — city dwellers, Simmel reasoned, were blasé, even neurotic, because of the impersonal, overwhelming, and money-obsessed demands of the city.

But to the architects of 1920s and ’30s Europe, the city wasn’t just neurotic. It was actually sick. The thinking went that a city’s ills — crime, poverty, you name it — could be linked to its poor design its thoughtlessly narrow alleys and dirty streets, its crumbling tenements and poor plumbing. Le Corbusier described “the Cancer of Paris,” as Andrew Lees recounts in his book about the urbanism of the time.

If cities or neighborhoods are diseased, planners and others can justify all sorts of actions. Urban renewal in the mid 1900s operated on a similar premise: slums (often home to non-whites or immigrants) could not be redeemed and instead should be replaced with land use that would be much more valuable (and make a lot more money for developers and politicians). Why should older buildings or poorer residents stand in the way of progress for the city and region? Thus, many American cities moved forward with plans that did what Moses suggested: used a meat axe to chop away land from existing neighborhoods for highways, high-rises, and other land uses. While some of these projects have since been reversed (think the Embarcadero Freeway in San Francisco) or others never got off the ground (see freeway protests as detailed by historian Eric Avila), other projects continue to influence city life. In Chicago alone, think the major expressways in the city including the Eisenhower, the Dan Ryan, and the Kennedy as well as the University of Illinois at Chicago campus.

I survived the new Route 59 diamond interchange

Posted on by

I went out of my way a bit this weekend in order to try the recently opened diamond interchange at I-88 and Route 59. There wasn’t much traffic but I found it pretty easy to navigate and it looks like it will help move traffic onto I-88 more quickly. Here were some reactions from drivers earlier in the week:

“Am I doing this right?” one Daily Herald reporter wondered while test driving the new route. There was bemusement on the faces of some other drivers, but Illinois Department of Transportation spokesman Guy Tridgell reported no major problems Monday afternoon.

“We have observed folks maybe driving a little tentatively, a little slowly, perhaps because they’re curious, but everything is going according to plan,” Tridgell said.

While it may take drivers some time to adjust – though there are plenty of signs and traffic light indicators – the improved safety and traffic flow of such interchanges means more are coming:

A similar interchange will be completed at the Jane Addams Tollway (I-90) and Elmhurst Road near Des Plaines in 2016.

The Illinois Department of Transportation opened another diamond interchange at I-57 and Route 13 this summer in Marion, in southern Illinois.

Given that more cars can now move through this interchange, does that mean traffic will increase? Generally, if you add lanes to a highway, drivers see that as a feature and this can lead to more congestion. (Conversely, road diets that limit lanes can reduce traffic.) This is already a busy area along I-88 with numerous crowded interchanges both east and west. Perhaps safety through a reduction of accidents in busy intersections is the number one goal here…

This particular type of interchange is relatively new – see a 2010 post here.

Building a suburban truck stop in Carol Stream

Posted on by

Many truck stops line American highways yet few are located several miles away from the highway in a suburban community on the former site of a bowling alley:

Though it looks like a heavy construction zone, it could take weeks before developers begin building what some neighbors worry will be a noisy truck strop on Gary and North avenues in Carol Stream…

“It’s kind of a redevelopment of Carol Stream going on here,” Assistant Village Engineer Bill Cleveland said…

In July, the village board approved Pilot plans over the complaints of retirees in the upscale Windsor Park community. The $9 million project will build a sprawling gas station for semitrailer trucks and passenger cars, as well as a 9,000-square-foot building that will house a convenience store and three “fast casual” restaurants — all open round-the-clock.

After the village gives the go-ahead, developers hope to break ground in “days or weeks,” a Pilot representative said Tuesday. Construction could take three months.

North Avenue is a busy road yet the location is at least four miles from the nearest highway – I-355 – which doesn’t handle the same level of truck traffic as other major Chicago highways. On the other hand, Carol Stream has a number of industrial parks and warehouses. This was intentional on the part of founder Jay Stream who had his start building houses in Wheaton and later turned to grander plans for a new suburban community. Stream wanted to have a broader tax base so he left plenty of land for industrial parks. The zoning map of Carol Stream shows a broad stretch of industrial uses – marked in purple – as well as commercial properties along major roads and a range of housing options including apartments and cul-de-sac single-family home neighborhoods.

Thus, there may just be a business opportunity for a suburban truck stop in this particular location. Two remaining thoughts:

  1. I have a hard time imagining such plans could be made in wealthier suburbs. Could Pilot find support in a community like Elmhurst or Naperville which could provide a location much closer to a highway?
  2. I wonder if there will be any particular requests from Carol Stream regarding the design of the facility. Seeing a truck stop in this location could be jarring, even with North Avenue lined with numerous commercial uses in both directions. I wouldn’t be surprised if the owners were asked to limit signs and lights as well as provide some barriers between this location and nearby uses.