Category Archives: Freeway

This $100M bridge is made with WOOD and is MOSTLY AIR inside!

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Foolish to build FACTORIES underneath FREEWAYS? (It’s legal in California)

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Why freeway exits and chickens don’t mix!

So, you’re having this really nice walk across town when suddenly, there’s a freeway you have to cross. Seeing a large bridges with nice big sidewalks can be a relief. But what about those pesky interchanges where cars are entering and exiting the freeway? It gets a little bit scarier at newfangled designs which work […]

Would you drive on this flip-flopped freeway interchage?

America loves “diamond” highway exits. Which is too bad, because when life gets busy, they work pretty terribly. Gil Chlewicki, the “adoptive” father of the Diverging Diamond Interchange (DDI), explains why it’s time to untangle our freeway interchanges.

Phoenix without freeways?

In the 1970s, Arizonans resoundingly voted “NO” to completing Interstate 10 through downtown Phoenix. But that’s because I-10 would have been a ten-story tall freeway bridge through the north of downtown. But the “NO” vote canceled all new freeways, including finishing Interstate 10 coast to coast.

Thinking Ahead: CA-210

It looks like Caltrans thought ahead for this 2002 project. That’s the year the state of California extended the 210 freeway from the 57 freeway to I-15 in Rancho Cucamonga, California. The new freeway replaced Highland Avenue, which became a frontage road. As I explored historic aerial photography on Google Earth, I discovered that Caltrans […]

Mountain View Corridor: Another Vanishing Neighborhood

A new freeway is slowly appearing on Salt Lake County, Utah’s west side.  The Mountain View Corridor, SR-85, will parallel Interstate 15 from roughly Salt Lake International Airport south to Saratoga Springs, and possibly one day, west of Utah Lake to Payson. It’s one of the few large-scale, non-tolled urban freeway projects going on in […]

Hoover Dam Bypass

I recently visited the Space Shuttle Endeavour’s permanant home at the California Science Center at USC. I’m a child of the 80s, my father worked in aerospace, and the ole’ reusable shuttles were easily among my largest childhood idols. As I walked around Endeavour’s hangar, plaques line the walls, showing every shuttle mission NASA ever […]

Loop 303 Flyover Progress

Innovative Our friends over in the Valley of the Sun are making great headway with the new Loop 303 freeway, which wraps around Phoenix’s north-western suburbs, and connects here with Interstate 10: It looks like they’re not messing around! That’s a full-fledged stack interchange they appear to be building, even though it may be decades […]

Mountain View Corridor: More Demolition

This is probably the first time since the 1960s that Salt Lake County, Utah has seen serious demolition for a transportation project. In another post, I show some photos of a vanishing neighborhood between 4100 South and 3500 South in West Valley City.  Here are some pictures of a neighborhood just south of 4100, along Timber […]

Mountain View Corridor: Bills Drive

It appears the first major demolition has begun for the future Mountain View Corridor freeway (SR-85). I just drove down Bills Drive a few weeks ago and there was a tree-lined street of landscaped, established 1970s-80s tract homes.  Everyone is gone now.  The photo doesn’t do justice of just how eerie this street feels now, […]