104
now we can finally fix traffic jam
this post was submitted on 25 Apr 2026
104 points (98.1% liked)
Fuck Cars
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just... do a roundabout, man
If you want to do a left turn across this intersection on foot or a bicycle, you'll wait at 8 traffic lights, surrounded by 2 dozen lanes full of cars with their engines running, on a football-field sized slab of asphalt with no shade and no grade separation.
Best bring a filter mask, a bottle of water and a hi-viz vest if you want to make it across.
It's not that bad. There's a perfect lil square in the middle, probably place for a playground. (/s)
The designer of this intersection type actually touted that island as a place where you can "beautify" the intersection with a sculpture of landscaping. Lmao
In 10 years they'll form a committee to consider the costs of a pedestrian crossing. It'll get shut down with a bill that also gets rid of 5 more bike lines.
A few things stand out from the demo/concept:
- Proposes to knock over a lot of buildings to grow the intersection footprint by... I'm guessing 3x.
- Avoids constructing an overpass while aping features of a diverging diamond and NJ-style jug-handles. I think this is possibly cheaper, but probably not by a lot.
- Lots of runway for merge zones, far from intersection.
- The "just one more lane" gang is gonna be disappointed with the inevitable bill to widen this monstrosity in ten years.
- Makes it impossible to turn into local parking lots which might be inducing demand for the intersection in the first place.
So, it's not great nor abysmal but man is that a fuckload of extra pavement just to build a pedestrian "dead zone". With respect to the last point, I've seen that kind of thing happen first hand. By the time the project is over, local business astride the new overpass/intersection have already closed their doors since traffic is now optimized to blow past everything at 55MPH.
IMO, if exercising imminent domain is on the table, may as well beef up and/or add secondary relief roads around this intersection instead. Spread the infrastructure build and cost into multiple smaller projects and leave the existing intersection to through and left-turn traffic only. The result should be calmer and less accident prone. Then, make sure that pedestrians and bikes can get around these multiple smaller roads.
if exercising imminent domain is on the table
It isn't. This concept was not ultimately chosen for this intersection. In fact the inventor of this concept was a pretty... interesting guy.
https://www.tampabay.com/news/crime/2024/04/23/greg-parsons-bomb-threat-tampa-fdot-district-7/
4,000 busses were harmed during the making of this video.
Works for citties:skylines but its a nightmare in the real world
Would it? All the cars might just choose to take one of the turning lanes and leave the other half barren.
My thinking was that its good in a game, where you have to manage cars. In the real world, where you want to make it better for people to get somwhere, its stupid to occupy the space of multiple blocks to manage just one ineficient kind of transportation
It's the state level version of endless wars to funnel money to donors. The fact that they will never be done is the point.
That looks like some truly dumbass nonsense
It honestly is quite amazing from an engineering standpoint but would be pretty immoral to build in real life
I disagree, it looks like quite bad engineering to me
How so? It's a total traffic killer, in more ways than one :P
Isn't engineering supposed to involve efficient use of resources? Space, time, cost, maintenance; this looks like an awful design for transporting things.
This is more like art; wasting resources on something grandiose that makes some sort of 'statement', whilst honouring daft constraints like 'each twat must be at least 4m from every other twat at all times'.
It increases the efficiency of car traffic, not moving people. It's still good engineering from a car perspective, but terrible urban design.
That's exactly where this belongs—it's textbook city builder meme material.
Reducing commute time by two (2) minutes and it will cost 30 billion dollars. Seems like a good value proposition.
Why don’t they just build on top por favor existing road or below 🤪
I guarantee you that people will miss the exit ramp and fuck the whole thing up when they try to make a sharp turn in the middle
Ok so obviously it's hideous, costly, wasteful etc, but also, sooo many people would pull into wrong way traffic just trying to get through it
Revolting. All of this just to go eat at Chili's