For this week’s installment, we go to to Dallas:
This is the Dallas High Five interchange, on the north side of the city. It was the first five-level stack interchange in the U.S. The interchange is particularly complex due to Texas’ penchant for frontage roads along most freeways, and the sheer amount of traffic passing through this interchange daily.
1 response so far ↓
1 Rich // 12 Mar 2007 at 9:02 pm
That is actually the High Five Interchange before it was the “High Five”. What you are looking at is the interchange before the major reconstruction. It was built in the 50’s or 60’s. It featured left lane exits and entrances for 635/LBJ (the E-W freeway), crumbling concrete, sharp turns, and closely spaced ramps with a lot of weaving. On top of that… it only had two thru lanes for the N-S road (US 75 - Central Expressway), even though 75 had been reconstructed on both sides of the interchange and widened to 4 lanes each way. Needless to say, that was a major bottleneck. I should know… I used to drive it everyday. I would leave for work at 5.30am just to beat the jam-up. Google Earth has not updated the aerial photos for North Dallas in a long time… the new “High Five” interchange is much more impressive looking than that. It’s also possibly more imposing… but it has solved a major traffic choke point in the Dallas area.