this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2024
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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I will never talk shit on the diverging diamond it solved a huge traffic problem at an interchange in my city. It does suck for pedestrians but they could always solve that with a bridge or tunnel. Luckily where we have ours there is almost no pedestrian traffic.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

bruh the dig at the ICC

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 month ago (3 children)

What is this meme template called? I always chuckle at the different topics but don't know anything about where it comes from.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

I know it under the name of Stop Doing Science.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago

Not sure, but I think the last line is a suitable commonality to be called a template name.

[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 month ago (4 children)

I think a diverging diamond interchange is actually a pretty elegant solution. That being said, I'd rather have public transport than better traffic infrastructure.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

We have ine and it's eay better than what we had to deal with before. It solved the traffic.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago (2 children)

I've read descriptions of how they work numerous times and cannot wrap my head around how having traffic going opposite directions cross paths does anything helpful.

Great, you're now on the appropriate side to make the turn at the far side of the interchange, so the people making the turn don't have to cross traffic to do so, at the cost of every car that crosses the interchange now having to cross traffic twice.

What?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

The Well There's Your Problem podcast has an excellent episode about traffic engineering where they go into diverging diamonds a bit.

I think this is also the episode where they lay out essentially the mission statement of the show, that engineering decisions reflect the politics of those who mandate them, and how the hard sciencey disciplines we think of as "objective" are anything but.

It's a shame they haven't put it on their main channel, which is here: https://youtube.com/@welltheresyourproblempodca1465

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

More people are turning than crossing.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

Oh. I think I get it. You put the diverging diamond on the route with less traffic where most is expected to be exiting onto the main highway or whatever. You wouldn't put one at a place where two equally busy highways intersected.

That makes more sense.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 month ago

my city is literally prohibited from using public funds for any type of train because of some GOP devil magic thing -- so all we have is busses, which suck because you're still beholden to traffic jams and lights and speed limits and roads. pointless and not even a sense of whimsy or transcendence

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I think the diverging diamond interchange is terrible. Because of the crossover, traffic can only cross the interchange in one direction at a time, so most of the traffic in the interchange is not moving most of the time.

A pair of roundabouts connected to on ramps eliminates the danger of left turns without stopping the majority of traffic most of the time.

A massive overbuilt interchange that cannot function without traffic lights is the opposite of elegant.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

Because of the crossover, traffic can only cross the interchange in one direction at a time, so most of the traffic in the interchange is not moving most of the time.

I'm not so sure about that. The appropriate use of a diverging diamond is when there is a lot of traffic entering and exiting from the ramps, and some of that traffic can go at the same time as the traffic crossing the interchange in one direction.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 month ago

This, but unironically.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 month ago (3 children)

I always wondered that.

Is it traffic engineers who suggest adding another lane? Or is it stupid people who can't read data and demands it?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

Usually the stupid people where I live

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Wanna make a difference? Get some of these stickers and slap em up everywhere. I've still got a few left over to put places.

https://parkingreform.org/products/sticker-10-pack

Go to your city "public opinion" sessions on zoning and highway design. One of our new circumferential highways has the first inverted diamond because some radical urbanists sandbagged the public hearing. Showing up to these things can make a big impact.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Both. 1980s Era civil/traffic engineers in NA were all trained for car=future=build road. Nowadays most traffic engineering/city planning schools teach multimodal transportation as The Way, but decades of car washing our cities has resulted in an almost total collapse of public support for anything except another lane. Luckily, most people sub-30 are aware of this and are slowly becoming politically active. Public opinion will shift slowly over the next decade or two and eventually the traffic engineers will be allowed to do the right thing.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago

I'm reading the Robert Caro biography of Robert Moses - the New York highway builder. By 1950 newspapers were saying "building these highways is a terrible idea, we need mass transit to move all the people that need to be moved unless you paved the entire city so no one could live here"

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

My university's traffic engineering curriculum was still pretty car-centric as of the late 2000s, and that's at a top-tier school so I assume most others were even more backwards.

[–] [email protected] 50 points 1 month ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 month ago

How'd you get my Cities Skylines save?

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 month ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago (1 children)

intersections should either be contractible or homotopy equivalent to the circle. any intersection outside of those two homotopy classes will always be a worse solution than just improving the public transportation infrastructure

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (2 children)

But what would we call that?

A circle-near?

A ball-approximate?

A curved-around?

An oval-almost?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

i like curved-around. it keeps things simple and to the point

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago

Circum-give-or-take

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