So We Are Thinking About Raising Speed Limits...

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CHenry

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it's always amazing to me how people react to stimulus like road lines. I do a lot with our town for alternative transportation and one thing we deal with a lot is how to slow down high speed traffic in neighborhoods and smaller roads (many of our older neighborhoods were build with through roads). Simply adding or narrowing road lines is a very good way to reduce speed in many cases (to a degree, anyway).
We call that Road Diet....yep, skinny them lanes and people slow down. Same is opposite when we add 8' shoulders to a 2 lane highway that is only 24' wide. Once we make it 40', the public response is faster speeds.
 

donner

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We call that Road Diet....yep, skinny them lanes and people slow down. Same is opposite when we add 8' shoulders to a 2 lane highway that is only 24' wide. Once we make it 40', the public response is faster speeds.

We did a 'pop up project' here recently on one stretch of road between a commuter parking lot and the edge of campus. We went in (with permission) and installed bollards along the length of the road to separate the bike lanes from the travel lanes. The intent was to lower the travel speeds to be closer to the posted limit and make it easier for pedestrians to cross the road in designated places. Both were accomplished.

The best part was that we placed the bollards on the outside (away from the travel lane) of the white line (i.e. didn't narrow the lane at all). Several of the negative comments said that they didn't like the design because it felt narrow and forced them to slow down...
 

CHenry

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Biggsly

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A single engineering miscalculation on the proper tension to pull on the pre-stressed beams is to blame.
Exactly like a flatbed semi trailer, its cambered up with no load and designed to flatten out when a dead load of X lbs is applied. Same with those beams, they are prestressed with huge cables inside the concrete and when its cured, the cable its released at both ends and the beams cambers up with no load. The amount of tension has to be calculated for the weight of the bridge deck to flatten them out.
So an engineer consultant goofed on that single calculation and no one caught it until it was way too late.
He should be kicked in the testicles.
 

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