New lanes on I-285 top-end to cost $11B+. Enough to build 55 miles of MARTA rail. (Atlanta: transfer to, school)
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And how do you know it "needs" to be "fixed up"? (Keep in mind, this thread is on the subject of the added lanes on 285 top-end, not just "fixing up" the interchange. )
Is this a serious question? I needs to be fixed up because it's a massive bottleneck. Traffic backs up for miles from this intersection every day. It is not capable of handling the traffic that goes through it in any direction, because it can't handle what is fed to it. They widened the highway that feeds it 30 and 40 years ago, but never upgraded the intersection itself. That's why. Just like the downtown connector is poorly designed since it's fed 9 lanes but drops down to 7 lanes right away.
Should I ask stupid questions like "How do you know that density is better for the city"?
[quote]And how do you know it doesn't need to be widened? Maybe it needs to be 50 lanes wide? What would indicate that to you?[quote]
I didn't say it doesn't need it. I said it shouldn't. For the most part, it would be able to handle the load if the bottleneck choke points were dealt with. Outside of peak rush hours at bottlenecks , 285 moves along quite well.
This is really not that hard.
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Or maybe we should do something crazy and reduce it to the 6-8 lane size of highways in cities with multiple times the population as Atlanta?
You mean the cities which have more 6-8 lane freeways than we have (instead of 10-lane freeways), covering more area, and more arterial roads to further distribute the load? That would be great!! Unfortunately urbanists and NIMBYs such as yourself prevented any of that from ever happening, thus constraining our entire regional mobility to a handful of larger mega interstates. An utter failure of design, resulting from the very people who were trying to prevent the outcome, who now complain about the outcome.
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So you are arguing against me and you don't even know what I am arguing for?
I know what you think you're arguing for.
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Originally Posted by Need4Camaro
That and anytime jsvh and sami go at it - we're always guaranteed a 20+ page thread, I'll go kayak the Chattahoochee to the local Kroger to grab us some popcorn now.
Sorry. It's one of the few topics I like debating. And I'm between work projects right now, so I have a lot of free time!
I feel sorry for folks that think we need to find a way to cram every person in the city into a car on the highway and don't realize that commuting by walking though Piedmont Park & down the Beltline on a beautiful day or paddling down the Chattahoochee are actual alternatives.
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Originally Posted by samiwas1
Is this a serious question? I needs to be fixed up because it's a massive bottleneck. Traffic backs up for miles from this intersection every day. It is not capable of handling the traffic that goes through it in any direction, because it can't handle what is fed to it. They widened the highway that feeds it 30 and 40 years ago, but never upgraded the intersection itself. That's why. Just like the downtown connector is poorly designed since it's fed 9 lanes but drops down to 7 lanes right away.
You realize they are only "bottlenecks" because we widened the lanes funneling into them, right? And expanding this interchange will not solve it. It will just continue to be a game of whack-a-mole with "bottlenecks" since induced demand will continue to fill every expanded section of roadway. I mean, why not reduce the 9 lanes down to 7 if "bottlenecks" are really your concern?
Do you think every piece infrastructure should have to be rebuilt after 30 - 40 years? What criteria should be used to decide what piece of infrastructure gets limited funding? Why shouldn't we rebuild it every 10 years instead? Or every 100? 1000?
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Originally Posted by samiwas1
I didn't say it doesn't need it. I said it shouldn't. For the most part, it would be able to handle the load if the bottleneck choke points were dealt with. Outside of peak rush hours at bottlenecks , 285 moves along quite well.
This is really not that hard.
So does it need to be widened or not?
Apparently it is that hard. Why didn't our previous highway expansions solve these bottlenecks? Can you name any city that is free of traffic bottlenecks?
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Originally Posted by samiwas1
You mean the cities which have more 6-8 lane freeways than we have (instead of 10-lane freeways), covering more area, and more arterial roads to further distribute the load? That would be great!! Unfortunately urbanists and NIMBYs such as yourself prevented any of that from ever happening, thus constraining our entire regional mobility to a handful of larger mega interstates. An utter failure of design, resulting from the very people who were trying to prevent the outcome, who now complain about the outcome.
Can you give some examples of world cities larger than Atlanta with all these highways cutting through the city that you think we should aspire to?
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Originally Posted by samiwas1
I know what you think you're arguing for.
Ok, you don't know what I am arguing for and the only thing you are arguing for is the opposite of me. So what do you think I "think" I am arguing for?
And how do you know it "needs" to be "fixed up"? (Keep in mind, this thread is on the subject of the added lanes on 285 top-end, not just "fixing up" the interchange. )
And how do you know it doesn't need to be widened? Maybe it needs to be 50 lanes wide? What would indicate that to you? Or maybe we should do something crazy and reduce it to the 6-8 lane size of highways in cities with multiple times the population as Atlanta? How do you know what the correct size of a roadway is?
So you are arguing against me and you don't even know what I am arguing for? Do you at least know what you are arguing for? Or is it just "the opposite of what jsvh says, whatever that may be"?
The GA-400 / I-285 interchange is currently designed well below modern interchange standards, especially due to the left lane merges and high volumes of traffic it handles which is actually considered a safety issue and not just a capacity issue. There is not enough taper in the merging lane for starters, and there is far too much traffic merging in from the left. The interchange is outdated by about 30 years. It is also the cause of several collisions due to slower merging traffic merging into high speed left lane traffic. It isnt rocket science. Traffic merging into high speed traffic is just asking for problems...
...but of course it's the drivers fault that the Chattahoochee doesn't flow to Alpharetta so drivers cant Kayak to work so we should just toll the crap out of them and use the money to expand river capacity in the metro to make Kayaking more viable
Hey, with enough toll funding maybe we can even provide public kayaks with audio and play music for those poor commuters 'row row row your boat gently down the stream'
Last edited by Need4Camaro; 06-04-2019 at 11:52 AM..
The GA-400 / I-285 interchange is currently designed well below modern interchange standards, especially due to the left lane merges and high volumes of traffic it handles which is actually considered a safety issue and not just a capacity issue. There is not enough taper in the merging lane for starters, and there is far too much traffic merging in from the left. The interchange is outdated by about 30 years. It is also the cause of several collisions due to slower merging traffic merging into high speed left lane traffic. It isnt rocket science. Traffic merging into high speed traffic is just asking for problems...
...but of course it's the drivers fault that the Chattahoochee doesn't flow to Alpharetta so drivers cant Kayak to work so we should just toll the crap out of them and use the money to expand river capacity in the metro to make Kayaking more viable
Hey, with enough toll funding maybe we can even provide public kayaks with audio and play music for those poor commuters 'row row row your boat gently down the stream'
Chattahoochee doesn't flow thru or border Alpharetta anyway, but Johns Creek, Roswell, Peachtree Corners, Duluth, Suwanee, Sandy Springs, Dunwoody, and Sugar Hills commuters could kayak to Cumberland
Chattahoochee doesn't flow thru or border Alpharetta anyway, but Johns Creek, Roswell, Peachtree Corners, Duluth, Suwanee, Sandy Springs, Dunwoody, and Sugar Hills commuters could kayak to Cumberland
Indeed, on a 102* F day with full humidity... so we will need to increase the tolls also include air conditioning on said Kayaks and we must make sure that those pesky drivers feel the full cost of water-bound transportation and the full cost of expanding rivers and streams throughout the metro!
Stop obsessing over maximizing the number of cars we can fit on a road. That doesn't fix anything. in fact, it makes things worse.
No one is "not allowing commuting capacity to grow". That is not the same as not spending $11B tax payer dollars to add a few lanes to ~20 miles of highway.
The sprawling, car-dependent development pattern is not sustainable. We cannot keep funding projects on this scale.
Atlanta has spent decades at the top of the list of funding mega projects to build the largest highways in the world. We are the top of the list in car usage for major cities. It doesn't work. Transportation continues to be Atlantan's top concern year-after-year. Atlanta heavily subsidized car-first transportation policy of the last 50 years is an utter failure. Time to stop the "just one more lanes will solve it" insanity.
And, actually those graphics are from a couple articles that is relevant to this discussion, you should read it:
We need to get rid of the BS rules and billion-dollar centrally planned mega projects that are preventing our cities from functioning effectively like they have historically.
Like they have through almost all of human history, people will find and fund their own ways of getting around just fine. Just get the rules and government mega-projects out of the way preventing the city and commute options from developing in a complex way on their own (without central planning, gasp) and let people decide for themselves which options are best for them.
$11 billion will be the final tally for Expresss lanes on I-75 North and South, I-85, the Northern half of I-285, GA400, and maybe conversion of 1-2 lanes of the downtown connector. Then GDOT can return to naptime.
North Carolina is about to start several widenings and the next section of Raleigh's outerloop 540 which goes through a partially developed area but homeowner have know about the "Future I-540 corridor"for 30 years.
The construction of next section of the loop (with only one remaining afterwards) of ~15 miles of brand new freeway 3 lanes in each direction + accommodation for a 4th lane in the future on each side is $403 million.
Granted that doesn't include the land acquisition or design costs, but it's a far cry from $11 billion.
2 lanes in each direction of I-40 South of Raleigh are being added (to become 4 in each direction) for ~$200 million.
SO PLEASE STOP EXAGGERATING THE COSTS!
And I want, love, and support heavy rail transit.
But the New York Subway is the nation's 5th largest debtor, currently owning $34 billion. Every year $2.2 billion of its budget goes to paying on this old debt, likely most of it is just interest.
Last edited by architect77; 06-04-2019 at 01:03 PM..
$11 billion will be the final tally for Expresss lanes on I-75 North and South, I-85, the Northern half of I-285, GA400, and maybe conversion of 1-2 lanes of the downtown connector. Then GDOT can return to naptime.
Not quite correct, but he is also way off on his initial assumptions in the original post that this is the same as 55 miles of rail equivalency by a very, very large margin.
The $11b figure comes from the recently updated regional TIP. Every project along I-285 between I-85 to I-75 and on GA400 up to North Springs Station got rolled into one.
Those TIP line items add up to $11b, but here is the catch, it includes spending up to and beyond 2050 and all of the accounting (matching federal standards) is done as year of the expenditure, so this includes all financing fees and has a built in assumption on inflation.
So the physical construction of the project in today's dollars is not actually $11b, but this becomes a convenient place to go to find sticker shocks for spending on any kind of major project you choose.
$11 billion will be the final tally for Expresss lanes on I-75 North and South, I-85, the Northern half of I-285, GA400, and maybe conversion of 1-2 lanes of the downtown connector. Then GDOT can return to naptime.
I feel sorry for folks that think we need to find a way to cram every person in the city into a car on the highway and don't realize that commuting by walking though Piedmont Park & down the Beltline on a beautiful day or paddling down the Chattahoochee are actual alternatives.
JSVH, you're wrong about many issues, but surely even you can be more fair or simply realistic and thought provoking than this.
I think commuting by walking through Piedmont Park and the Beltline is an excellent idea. I would encourage it for those who are able to. I'm not against it.
But you can't plan a region to rely on that, it is highly unrealistic for the 99%. If we open up to discussing more job areas and neighborhoods through the region, reality is its unrealistic for 95%.
The people who would commute through Piedmont Park to get into the city are essentially coming from old suburban neighborhoods. It is an an area that is expensive, in high demand, and there is extreme NIMBYism and a limited number of land lots for homes.
It clearly does not possess the ability to handle a region of 8 million people to be able to commute like that.
We can't plan for our future based on such ill-formed ideas of how a large metropolitan region can access central business districts and you yourself have advocated for funneling as many of the jobs into the central business district away from suburbs, the more that happens... the more the whole region needs to be able to access the central business district. We are currently planning for the day there is 8 million of us.
I feel sorry for folks that think we need to find a way to cram every person in the city into a car on the highway and don't realize that commuting by walking though Piedmont Park & down the Beltline on a beautiful day or paddling down the Chattahoochee are actual alternatives.
You realize they are only "bottlenecks" because we widened the lanes funneling into them, right? And expanding this interchange will not solve it. It will just continue to be a game of whack-a-mole with "bottlenecks" since induced demand will continue to fill every expanded section of roadway. I mean, why not reduce the 9 lanes down to 7 if "bottlenecks" are really your concern?
Do you think every piece infrastructure should have to be rebuilt after 30 - 40 years? What criteria should be used to decide what piece of infrastructure gets limited funding? Why shouldn't we rebuild it every 10 years instead? Or every 100? 1000?
So does it need to be widened or not?
Apparently it is that hard. Why didn't our previous highway expansions solve these bottlenecks? Can you name any city that is free of traffic bottlenecks?
Can you give some examples of world cities larger than Atlanta with all these highways cutting through the city that you think we should aspire to?
Ok, you don't know what I am arguing for and the only thing you are arguing for is the opposite of me. So what do you think I "think" I am arguing for?
It's obvious that you just want any response so you'll keep arguing non-sense, but the reason for GA400's problems and $1 billion cost to redo is because NO OTHER ROADS WERE BUILT TO SUPPLEMENT OUR BASIC FREEWAY LAYOUT.
NO OTHER TOP 10 MOST POPULATED STATE OR METRO WITH 6 MILLION PEOPLE has as FEW FREEWAYS AS ATLANTA.
So we are where we are BECAUSE OF PEOPLE LIKE YOU! who are against keeping the roads commensurate in size with the population they have to serve.
Only a child would be foolish enough to just look at our very few wide freeways as think they were supposed to accommodate a growing population forever.
All of what you think are subjective opinions are in fact engineering and mobility facts.
4 lanes in each direction is the optimum size for throughput. Beyond that there are diminishing returns on additional lanes.
But that was the least effort GDOT coukd make instead of laying out a web of new smaller freeways that enabled people to avoid accidents and highway shutdowns.
I think you know all of this already but are passing the time here just arguing for the sake of arguing.
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