Quote:
Originally Posted by Northendzone
my thoughts are stop designing roads that start with three lanes and narrow to two then open up again to three and then narrow again - while i am no traffic engineer, to me the narrowing creates an artificial bottle neck - things would likely flow better with no lane reduction.
Deerfoot also likely needs some left hand merges, which are generally not popular in canada (i have seen some in san diego and minneapolis - they do tkae some time to get used to) - but you would need major onramp designs
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In a perfect world you have unlimited money and space to do what you're suggesting. Money is usually the reason those bottlenecks exist, though. Think of places like Anderson, where they probably saved a ton of money having only two lanes in each direction over the bridges. They also got 20 to 30 years of useful life out of that configuration before it became a real issue. Seems like a good value proposition to me. They did the analysis and the math shows that it was good for a long time for traffic so that would be the likely result for implementing them.
Much like cloverleaf interchanges, left hand merges are no longer recommended anywhere. It has to be an exceptional situation (very high cost or land acquisition to avoid a left hand merge) to require them now. For example, in Calgary they're spending a lot of money to get rid of the ones on Crowchild at the Bow River (though they added one on Memorial to make Crowchild flow better). It's unlikely that you'll see them suggested.
Asking the people who use a road every single day for feedback is good practice. It's likely to reveal some things the engineers could consider.