Highways

If you were thinking about driving through southern Louisiana ahead of Gustav….maybe that’s not such a good idea.

Seen at the Times-Picayune:

The contraflow plan to open all lanes of traffic away from coastal areas to speed evacuation from Hurricane Gustav could begin Saturday night and no later than Sunday morning, state officials said this afternoon.

The state will for the first time use "dual contraflow," activating plans at the same time for Southwest and Southeast Louisiana.

Gov. Bobby Jindal encouraged residents in vulnerable areas to begin evacuating before the contraflow plan is put into effect.

We’ll stay in South America for another week, and move a bit to the south, to Buenos Aires:

(View in Google Maps)

When I first spotted this in Google Maps, I was struck by the similarity (at first glance anyway) to Chicago’s Circle interchange.

The north-south road portrayed above is the 9 de Julio Avenue, a broad multi-carriageway surface parkway in the urban center of Buenos Aires.   The east-west freeway is the Autopista 25 de Mayo, which performs a similar function in an east-west orientation, but as a controlled-access facility and with less landscaping.

Tom Condon has an interesting op-ed piece in Sunday’s Courant discussing how I-84 came to its current alignment in Hartford, and what that did to damage the city’s neighborhoods. Also included in the op-ed is word of a consultant being brought in to look at I-84’s future, as the DOT contemplates rehabilitation of the Aetna Viaduct east of Sisson Avenue:

The Hub has now completed a request for proposals to engage a consultant to study alternatives to the viaduct. The city is putting up money, and the state might as well.

If all goes well, there’ll be a report next year on how to redesign and de-emphasize I-84 with the goal of a vital and mixed-use center city — similar to what was there before the highway was built.

The consultant will look at the possibility of burying the highway, lowering and decking over it, or rerouting the interstate traffic and turning the highway into a boulevard.

Although I expect the expense of doing anything other than just repairing the viaduct will be prohibitive, I have to say that the idea of turning I-84 into a surface boulevard, diverting interstate traffic to a different alignment (probably 72-9-91-15) is intriguing.

However, there’s still a ton of commuter traffic that will have to be dealt with in any such proposal.

As a former resident of the Wiregrass region of southeastern Alabama, it’s nice to see some (admittedly slow) progress being made on connecting Dothan to the interstate system. From the Dothan Eagle:

ALDOT is currently soliciting residents’ opinions of three possible routes for the freeway, and no route will be chosen until the department is able to review the feedback.

“I don’t have any exact time frame,” Biddick said. “We have to look at any potential issues brought up in the feedback, then address those to determine which route would be the best.”[...]

ALDOT expects the project to greatly reduce through traffic in the city.

“I think it’ll help reduce a lot of the congestion on Ross Clark Circle and allow for a lot more development around here,” Biddick said.

For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure (misfortune?) of experiencing the Ross Clark Circle, especially when hordes of folks are headed to/from Panama City Beach and the Redneck Riviera…the Circle can be bad.

Dothan has a surprising amount of commercial development for a town its size. Admittedly, a lot of that is the result of Dothan being the only town its size within some distance, and therefore is able to support quite a bit of commercial development due to its role as a regional economic hub.

Talk of connecting Dothan to the Interstate system, either with its own spur, or as part of a larger project extending up to I-185 outside Columbus, GA; or to the new bypass being built around Montgomery, AL, has been around for quite a while.

However, I wonder if regional planners might be asking for trouble by promoting a new freeway as an excuse for more development. After all, even though Dothan is commercially more significant than its census figures would suggest…there is a limit to the amount of development it can sustain.

If local leaders encourage development along a new freeway bypass, I can’t help but expect that the Circle will start to be as blighted as downtown Dothan became when businesses shifted to the Circle.

…and who can blame her?

Seen in Sunday’s Courant:

Gov. M. Jodi Rell announced Saturday that she has submitted legislation directing that no new contracts for billboards on state-owned property be allowed and that existing billboard contracts not be renewed when they expire.

To lessen distraction on state roadways, the bill would also allow the state to stop issuing permits after June 1 for the erection of any outdoor advertising structure whose message periodically changes by electronic means.

The article also mentions that Rell wants to see ConnDOT (or its successor) update highway signs along Connecticut roads, to give the state a better image among visitors.

Considering that Connecticut highways see a mishmash of signage standards, many of which aren’t up-to-snuff with current U.S. standards, this is not necessarily a bad thing. of course, with a budget crunch expected…perhaps now is not the right time to spend that money?

For this week’s highway feature, I thought we’d head to India.

India’s still developing its highway system.  In fact, when trying to find aerial footage of a highway in/around Delhi, I ran into problems in finding anything more significant than an arterial route.

The exception to that would be NH-8, which is being upgraded to the Delhi-Gurgaon Expressway.  The upgrades are so new that, as of this writing, Google Maps imagery hasn’t quite caught up to the construction:

For this week’s highway feature, let us trek to Korea:

This is the northern end of the Gyongbu Expressway, where it intersects the Olympic Expressway just before crossing the Han River, sharing the Hannam Bridge with the Jungang Line of the Korean National Railways. and the Yongsan-Deokso line of the Seoul Metropolitan Subway.

For this week, a trip to the Big Apple is in order:

This is a rather infamous interchange, between I-87 (the Major Deegan Expressway) and I-95 (Alexander Hamilton Bridge / Cross Bronx Expressway), where travelers heading south from upstate (or north, after having escaped Queens) have the opportunity to wind up narrow ramps from the valley floor to gain access to I-95 and either the Cross-Bronx Expressway (northbound/eastbound) or the George Washington Bridge (southbound/westbound).

From I-87, it’s a rather impressive view.  From I-95, less so.

For more information, see information on the Alexander Hamilton Bridge at Steve Anderson’s ncyroads.com.

Seen in the Birmingham Times:

State officials plan to open 26 miles of Corridor X next month, giving motorists a straight shot from Forestdale to Memphis.

A new 20-mile section of highway will open Nov. 14 from Industrial Parkway in Jasper to U.S. 78 in Graysville. At the same time, transportation officials will officially open a six-mile stretch from Graysville to Cherry Avenue in Forestdale that has been open to local traffic only.[...]

The opening will leave about five miles of the corridor leading to Interstate 65 in Birmingham to be finished, plus construction of the interchange at I-65, before the corridor is completed.

With my first post-college job having been in Lower Alabama and my family living in Memphis, I was rather familiar with the hodge-podge of 2-lane and freeway alignments of US 78 between Birmingham and Memphis. (For example, pictures of my most recent trek up US 78 can be found in my gallery, starting here.)

While I’m a fan of back roads, there is quite a bit of truck traffic on that corridor, so seeing the route converted to freeway doesn’t upset me. It’s just amazing, however, when you think about how long the upgrade has taken (over 20 years).

Interstate-standard sections of Corridor X are supposed to be resigned as I-22 once a connection is made to the interstate system, presumably first at the I-65 interchange to be built north of downtown Birmingham.

Folks familiar with highway maps of the state of Connecticut are probably aware of an odd little freeway in southeast Connecticut that looks like it would provide a useful link between New London and Hartford…but for the fact that it abruptly ends in the middle of nowhere (at least by Connecticut standards of “nowhere”).

It sounds like that oddity might be crawling towards resolution. From the Courant:

After a decade of study and manipulation, the final environmental impact statement for completion of the Route 11 extension in southeastern Connecticut was released by officials from the Federal Highway Administration and a division of the Connecticut Department of Transportation.[...]

State officials first envisioned Route 11 in the 1950s as a way to link Hartford and New London along a modern highway. Construction was halted in 1972 because of budget shortfalls, with the road extending 7 miles from Route 2 in Colchester to Route 82 in Salem.

Design of the Route 11 extension could begin as early as 2008 and construction could begin by 2012. Current construction cost estimates range from about $850 million to $925 million.