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Category Archives: Categories
Bridges, Freeway, Patreon Locked, Safety, Urban Issues
Foolish to build FACTORIES underneath FREEWAYS? (It’s legal in California)
04
Dec
Dec
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06
Oct
Oct
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19
Aug
Aug
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15
Jul
Jul
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Bridges, Construction, Freeway, Patreon Locked, Urban Issues
But HOW can I-95 re-open… in under TWO WEEKS?
20
Jun
Jun
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20
May
May
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05
Apr
Apr
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09
Mar
Mar
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Construction, Freeway, Patreon Locked, Safety, Signal/Signage
So, they’re painting ORANGE LINES on freeways now?
25
Jan
Jan
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01
Jan
Jan
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22
Oct
Oct
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Patreon Locked, Safety, Signal/Signage, Urban Issues
Los Angeles THREW AWAY all their RED-LIGHT cameras?
27
Aug
Aug
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09
Jul
Jul
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01
Jul
Jul
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16
Apr
Apr
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28
Feb
Feb
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Patreon Locked, Safety, Signal/Signage, Urban Issues
Can this “HAWK” STOP LIGHT make walking feel SAFE again?
17
Jan
Jan
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12
Oct
Oct
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 […]
25
Sep
Sep
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.
24
Jul
Jul
Avid bicyclists roll their eyes as state engineers rebuild a highway through town. Tyranny of the car, right? Here’s a project in Utah which added a raised median that unlocked an avalanche of really cool safety improvements — including a traffic signal just for bikes!
25
Jun
Jun
Raised medians reduce left turns which prevents crashes (and saves lives). But cities only block left turns for some businesses and not others. How can the engineers decide fairly? And what do we do with drivers who still need to turn left? ——————————- Additional reading: ——————————- Federal Highway Administration. https://safety.fhwa.dot.gov/saferjourney1/library/countermeasures/16.htm. Accessed Jun. 9, 2021.
05
May
May
Traffic travels in both directions. So it makes sense we’d have a malicious moniker for two-way left turn lanes (TWLTLs). Are they actually dangerous, though? Let’s look at the safety of these middle lanes. After all, they are on roads pretty much everywhere in the United States. ————– Sources cited: ————– Mukherjee, D. Choosing Between […]
06
Apr
Apr
The light turns yellow and you find yourself in a panic. Should I slam on my brakes and risk getting rear-ended? Or should I run the yellow— and possibly in the process, the red too? Every stop light on the planet has one of these “A BAD PLACES.” Radar technology can act like a life […]
03
Mar
Mar
Getting a red light ticket feels really crummy. When yellow lights (“change intervals”) are set long enough, red light runners vanish. For safety, why don’t we double or triple the length of yellow lights? Check out pt. 2: Our brains and yellow lights — https://youtu.be/P_EmAKRrlBc ——————————- Sources cited: ——————————- “Guidelines for Timing Yellow and All-Red […]
04
Feb
Feb
If we let more people live ¼-mile from the train, everyone saves money.
America is not affordable because building lots are not affordable. And there is not nearly enough people who ride our billion-dollar light/commuter rail trains. Here’s how these two problems solve one another.
Freeway, Patreon Locked, Signal/Signage, Urban Issues
Why do some freeway ramps have an extra red light?
30
Dec
Dec
All you want to do is get on the freeway. Then a seemingly superfluous traffic signal stops you. Do ramp meters work?
02
Dec
Dec
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.
13
Oct
Oct
Trains are wonderful but too expensive for most cities. A bus operating like a train may help smaller places afford quality mass transit.
10
Aug
Aug
How does a traffic signal knows when to turn green? Especially late at night when you are the only driver on the road. In this video, I chat with two traffic signal experts: Mohammed Bendelhoum, an engineer with the California Dept. of Transportation (Caltrans) and Brian Girardo (Iteris) explore the history of vehicle detection (induction […]
04
Dec
Dec
Western America has not built a single mile of new Interstate constructed since 1980. Here’s how Las Vegas and Phoenix teamed up build one which they desperately need.
02
Jul
Jul
Good riddance to those unsafe little buildings which sit in the middle of high-speed roadways. But without a “cash lane,” how are you supposed to pay a toll on vacation?
07
Jun
Jun
Ever freak out how a big earthquake could drop a bridge right on top of you? I talk with a seismic engineer about the six cool secrets they use to make bridges safe.
13
May
May
Thirty years ago a major earthquake destroyed a double-decker freeway, leaving 42 people dead. Here’s the sad history and the lessons engineers have learned.
06
Apr
Apr
Everything is bigger in Texas, including the roads. In the rush to accomodate its swelling population, it may be creating a traffic disaster for the future.
22
Nov
Nov
Signs used to look different at night. Here’s why.
11
Sep
Sep
Here’s the real reason why Caltrans is removing Botts Dots (turtles) from the state’s hundreds of miles of freeway (Hint: It has something to do with Tesla). Enjoy my video? https://www.patreon.com/roadguyrob
11
Aug
Aug
I casually drove Uber and Lyft for a day. The math didn’t add up.
08
Aug
Aug
It’s called a ‘Continuous Flow Intersection.’ I take a quick look at traffic signal engineering and how this new type of displaced left-turn improves traffic flow by 30 percent. Enjoy my video? I wouldn’t say “no” to a chocolate shake 🙂 https://www.patreon.com/roadguyrob
01
Aug
Aug
Traffic signals are not scary. Roundabouts can be, especially if you’ve never driven one before. Let’s take a fun dive into America’s fastest-growing transportation design. Are these spinny circles really better that a traffic light or just a passing fad? Enjoy my video? https://www.patreon.com/roadguyrob
19
Mar
Mar
Marty McFly would struggle to find a safe to skateboard to the Twin Pines Mall. What this tells us about pedestrian safety in the real world.
25
Jan
Jan
Why you should stop fighting the speeders and start blaming the roadway itself.
09
Dec
Dec
I’m exploring a site along Provo’s 500 West, which a SafetyAnalyst project identifies as one of the most crash-prone stretches of road in the county. SafetyAnalyst allows a transportation researcher to combine data and other analytical tools to identify roadway segments and nodes which are statistically more dangerous than others, controlling for many other factors. […]
08
Dec
Dec
The signs all went up today, making Salt Lake City home to America’s fastest urban interstates. Traditionally, urban freeways are 65 miles per hour (or 55 in cities with really twisty road geometry). As far as I’m aware, no state has ever allowed a DOT to raise urban freeways to higher speeds, until now. The […]
07
Dec
Dec
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 […]
21
Nov
Nov
Ouch! That’s what happens Shaq gets distracted in his Porche 911 convertible and forgets to duck. I phoned it into the city engineer as soon as I saw it. The phone went to voicemail. So I called the police dispatcher, and she says they’d already gotten a lot of calls about this already this morning. I […]
02
Oct
Oct
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 […]
02
Jul
Jul
California has America’s least-cost-effective freeways, short of Rhode Island, Hawaii, and Alaska. Well, that’s if you agree with the study-producing think tank’s philosophy of “Advancing a free society by developing, applying, and promoting libertarian principles, including individual liberty, free markets, and the rule of law.” Don’t get me wrong. I’m a huge fan of cost-effectiveness. But […]
27
Jun
Jun
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 […]
25
Jun
Jun
Have you seen these signs along Wilshire Blvd? I don’t often drive Wilshire. But when I do, it always seems to be the peak of afternoon rush hour. (Maybe Wilshire always feels crowded?) So as I sit at another red light, I look at these signs and just shake my head in frustration. It turns […]
10
Jun
Jun
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 […]
01
Jun
Jun
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 […]
17
May
May
There’s a series projects which demonstrate some good long-term thinking in Draper, Utah. When UTA built its Frontrunner commuter rail line, it built this overpass even though there isn’t a road for yards around (I’d say miles, but there are many roads within a mile). Good thing, too, since it’s a looooooong drive around (red). In […]
16
May
May
Campus Drive was a ring road that allowed vehicular access to the internal parking lots of Brigham Young University’s campus in Provo: It’s now closed, as you can see from the barrier in the middle of the street: I liked the old way, but to be fair we humans tend to have a status-quo bias. […]
29
Mar
Mar
North of Brigham Young University’s campus boundary sits a house at a T-intersection. Well, I should say “sat” a house. Because a young adult with a medical issue (I suspect suicidal depression, but we’ll never know) plowed an early-90s Suburban into it. And from the looks of it, the Suburban won: The force from the crash was […]
21
Jan
Jan
I have no idea what this collision’s back story is. I just happened to be driving by and saw this semi tipped on its side. It almost looks like it’s trailer fell off as it turned east onto 1860 South.
09
Dec
Dec
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, […]
13
Aug
Aug
Props to Salt Lake International Airport for deploying this traffic-saving tool. I drove to pick up a friend whose flight was delayed. Normally, I’d probably just be circling the airport’s ring road waiting for his text telling me to come pick him up curbside. To save on vehicle emissions and reduce traffic and appease customer frustration […]
02
Mar
Mar
I had to get on the phone with UDOT right away when I saw this. Crews added two new “right-turn only” arrows. But why? That sounds really unsafe. The intersection does back up a lot during rush hour, but I think painting a protective “free right” stripe would’ve been a better option. What’s UDOT (or […]
13
Sep
Sep
It only took an extra 5-years to settle all the law suits. But I’m happy to say the new Legacy Parkway (SR-67) is open and I’ve driven it! Here’s a photo dump: