Do you even need a high school education to design highways?

[Brian Elfert]

Do highway departments actually have any engineers designing roads, or do they just hire high school dropouts? Minneapolis area freeways are famous for having lane weaves where major freeways only have one continuous lane and those in the right lane all have to shift to the left lane to stay on the same freeway. MNDOT has spent nearly $500 million in the past decade to remove lane weaving to improve safety and increase traffic capacity.

The final project that MNDOT said was supposed to remove the last of the lane weaving was just finished on Friday. It turns out there is STILL a lane weave in the final design and it turns out they did it INTENTIONALLY! I looked at the project plan posted on the MNDOT website and the lane weave is actually on the plan! This is a complete waste of the $40 million tax dollars they just spent on this project. Even when they expand the highway to three lanes 20 years down the road they still can't eliminate the lane weaving unless they tear up a bunch of the just finished project. The highway actually had more traffic capacity during construction than afterwards as there were two continuous lanes during construction. I find it hard to believe MNDOT actually has any engineers with actual engineering degrees or even high school degrees after seeing this fiasco.

[Curt Fuller]

Actually, it would be my guess that all the high school drop out construction workers like me were scratching their heads and wondering what some college educated engineer was thinking while they were building the roads you're wondering about.

[Phil Thien]

What do you mean by weave, Brian?

Here in Milwaukee they have some instances of traffic that enters from an on-ramp from the right, but much of that traffic wants to get in the left-hand lane to take a ramp to a different expressway. My favorite is one by our zoo where there is only about a mile between an on-ramp to where you have to be in the left-hand lane if you want to go downtown.

As they've been rebuilding expressways, they've been changing the configuration so everything is on the right-hand side. All on/off is keep right. A little less intuitive maybe in terms of figuring out what direction an exit heads, but better traffic patterns. Safer, too.

[glenn bradley]

It is a simple misunderstanding of the purpose of highway contracts. They have nothing to do with intelligent design and everything to do with employment duration. Why do you think so many improvements are completed just in time to be out of date?

I will agree with Curt though. Despite going to college I have been involved with way to many people who actually do the work to ignore the number of times we would all stand around scratching our heads whilst examining the latest batch of revised "cartoons" that got handed down as corrected "plans".

[Jim Matthews]

Weave lanes in Massachusetts are known as the alternate passing lane.

I had to buy a higher output vehicle, just to handle the basic merge due to this charming Masshole habit.
Weave lanes are designed to make merging possible, where traffic is travelling at high rates of speed.

I'm impressed by the stability of road beds, in the OP's neck of the woods.
The condition of roads above the frost line are remarkably good, considering the annual frost heave.

[Don Morris]

When I lived in Europe and traveled the Autobahn, Germany's main high speed highway, and their other roads, I marveled at how the design of interchanges and onramps flowed into them. For example, there were no onramps from the left into the fast lanes, which to me is inherently dangerous. I thought we ought to send our highway designers to Germany for a course in design before they are freed on the citizens of the USA.

[Mike Cutler]

They spent hundreds of millions on the highways in and out of Hartford to ease congestion, and bottlenecks. At the end of it all, I 84 still drops down to two lanes through Hartford, and 91 North/South to Springfield really didn't get any better. The lane weaving going west out of Hartford is something else. You have to know which side of the road the lanes drop off of way ahead of time.
I'm with Curt though. Sometimes you have to wonder if the person(s) designing the roads actually drive to work. You know the construction guys at least have to drive the same highways.

[Larry Edgerton]

You are confusing education and intelligence.

Larry

[Dan Hintz]

You are confusing education and intelligence.

^^^ This ^^^

[rogers kevin]

Yes of course you need to have a master degree in Engineering,If people who were less educated could design highways without proper knowledge then,Assumptions would be less but Deaths and accidents would be more.

[Matt Meiser]

They spent hundreds of millions on the highways in and out of Hartford to ease congestion, and bottlenecks. At the end of it all, I 84 still drops down to two lanes through Hartford, and 91 North/South to Springfield really didn't get any better. The lane weaving going west out of Hartford is something else. You have to know which side of the road the lanes drop off of way ahead of time.

Oh yeah...NOW I remember driving through Hartford on the way home from Maine. Its really fun towing.

[Mike Wilkins]

It's called self-preservation. Purposefully design and build a sub-standard product, only to have to come back a couple of years from now to make repairs. Keeps the department working, forces them to hire more people, preserves the budget, and wastes our tax dollars. Here in NC, I have seen pavement made thinner than what was spec'ed and former 2 lane streets turned into 3 lanes. I believe the highway engineers went to the same Three Stooges Academy.

[Bill Edwards(2)]

After driving through some of the interchanges in Detroit, I always assumed you need at least a Phd in geometry.:D

[Jerry Thompson]

The Florida DOT has found a way to cut back on employment. Someone invented a shovel that will stand up by its self.

[Chuck Wintle]

one issue that gets in the way for designers are bureaucrats who insist on the cheapest solution. Something must be compromised to meet the budget and often its the design that takes the hit. In Germany they don't seem to compromise on the design given the speeds that they routinely drive at.

[Myk Rian]

Try driving I-94 through Chicago sometime.

[Jim Rimmer]

Here in Texas, TxDOT should patent the on-off ramp configuration they have designed. It is especially prevalent in Houston. As you try to merge on to the freeway you find yourself in a MUST EXIT lane and only a few hundred yards from the exit. There is one on Loop 610 where 3 lanes are must exit so you are trying to get on and immediately move 3 lanes to the left while the traffic already on the freeway won't budge because they are trying to get into the exit lanes so they can get off the Loop.

They also have a design inconsistency that will keep your blood pressure up. They have an overpass on the frontage road so you can get to the opposite side of the freeway to get on that access road. It's usually 2- 3 lanes wide. It has enough of a rise that you can't see the other side. Some are left turns to the access road and some are right turns (what you would expect on a cloverleaf design). Whatever you expect, it will be th opposite and now your in the wrong lane to make a turn.

[Bruce Page]

Here in Texas, TxDOT should patent the on-off ramp configuration they have designed. It is especially prevalent in Houston. As you try to merge on to the freeway you find yourself in a MUST EXIT lane and only a few hundred yards from the exit. There is one on Loop 610 where 3 lanes are must exit so you are trying to get on and immediately move 3 lanes to the left while the traffic already on the freeway won't budge because they are trying to get into the exit lanes so they can get off the Loop.

They also have a design inconsistency that will keep your blood pressure up. They have an overpass on the frontage road so you can get to the opposite side of the freeway to get on that access road. It's usually 2- 3 lanes wide. It has enough of a rise that you can't see the other side. Some are left turns to the access road and some are right turns (what you would expect on a cloverleaf design). Whatever you expect, it will be th opposite and now your in the wrong lane to make a turn.
I recommend the High-Five in Dallas if you're ever in need of raising your BP a notch or two.

[Brian Elfert]

one issue that gets in the way for designers are bureaucrats who insist on the cheapest solution. Something must be compromised to meet the budget and often its the design that takes the hit. In Germany they don't seem to compromise on the design given the speeds that they routinely drive at.

This project was absolutely done on the cheap. It was originally budgeted at $140 million, but the project was postponed to 2030 due to lack of money. MNDOT decided that the bridges in the area needed replacement due to being at end of design life and they had $25 million to replace the bridges. MNDOT found another $15 million so the interchange could be totally redesigned and rebuilt instead of just replacing the bridges in a poor design. Total project budget was $40 million. I talked to some of the engineers on the project at an open house. The engineers said the project was $2 million over budget before they even started construction. I noticed that several less traveled sections of the project were done in asphalt instead of concrete presumably to save money.

The project had two goals: Replace old bridges and get rid of two lane weaves in the original interchange design to improve safety and traffic capacity. They built some really nice bridges, but the final project still has a lane weave! So much for safety and extra traffic capacity! Another $30,000 to $50,000 in asphalt and road base and they could have shifted the two original lanes over so traffic in the right lane wouldn't need to switch to the left lane. $50,000 is a rounding error in the $1 billion plus that MNDOT will spend this year.

[Jim Koepke]

Makes me think of an interchange that eventually got replaced on I80 near Berkeley, CA. For years the curve was banked in the wrong direction. For years it had more than its share of fender benders in wet weather.

That one was changed because it was a left exit that USDOT decided eventually to not allow.

jtk

[Jim Rimmer]

I recommend the High-Five in Dallas if you're ever in need of raising your BP a notch or two.

Is that the new LBJ/US 75 interchange? I moved away from there before it was finished. The overpasses on Central Expressway are notorious for what I described in my other post and they are not consistent from one to the next.