(This is one of a weekly series of posts entitled “Highway Feature of the Week”. The complete collection of Highway Features of the Week is available on a single page, or via a special RSS feed.)
This week brings us to Germany, home of the Autobahns. In the industrial Rhine-Ruhr megalopolis, we can find the answer to the question — how exactly do you design an interchange between two freeways meeting at a shallow angle, with a river and a railroad complicating matters:
This is the Kreuz Kaiserberg, the interchange between the A3 and the A40.
The A3 is the primary north-south freeway through the Rhine-Ruhr metropolis, while the A40 (the Ruhrschnellweg, locally also known as a parking lot) exists theoretically to carry traffic east-west through the region. In the picture above, you can also see the Ruhr River angling from the north to the east edge of the map, as well as several tracks of the Deutsche Bundesbahn.