If you make 90% the area of your city dedicated to roads leaving only 10% buildings, you can barely just get traffic under control trust me. Just like in real life.
Texas has big access roads on almost every mile of highway, and it’s glorious. If there’s one thing Texas does right, it’s highway infrastructure. Except for its obsession with tolls.
Are you being serious? I can’t tell because you didn’t provide any clue what the benefit is. It looks pretty god damned stupid, so good luck dispelling that impression.
Hard disagree there. Driving on the interstate south of San Antonio, there are these overpasses that are, inexplicably, on the highway itself. These are artificial hills that are steep enough at highway speeds, that your visibility is made shorter than your stopping distance. You can’t see past the top until you’re there, and they completely obscure the entire highway on the other side because it’s so straight. Obstructions, stopped vehicles, pile ups, anything could be on the other side and you wouldn’t know. Anyone on cruise control or driving a semi has their trip peppered with these possibly lethal moments at regular intervals.
Everywhere else I’ve been in the lower 48, (slower) local roads pass over freeways, because it literally takes less dirt to make that safe.
I’ve never seen a highway with a hill so steep that your visibility is less than stopping distance. There’s an exception to every rule, but I’d wager that it is at most exceedingly rare. It’s definitely not regular.
Texas has u-turns at basically every highway intersection, with exceptions like this photo. The u-turns bypass the stop sign/lights so that it’s just a yield. I’m not sure if any other states do that at the same frequency. With that design, it’s probably easier to just raise the highway since it’s a straight road rather than raise an intersection. I’m sure it also depends on which road was there first.
The huge access roads also typically stop at intersections, unlike in this photo. In order to support that and have the smaller road use an overpass, the access roads would either need to be built much further away from the highway or curve out and in at every intersection in order to reduce the grade of the overpass’s slope. The overpass would need to be longer too since it’s crossing more lanes.
If the smaller road goes over the highway, it’s pretty common that the highway actually goes down so that the smaller road needs to be raised less.
I’m sure there are plenty of other positives and negatives, but I’m not a structural engineer. I’m just pointing out that it’s not an arbitrary decision and it comes with some benefits like robust access roads and u-turns.
Yeah. That’s how cloverleafs look. Is this the first time you’ve ever seen one? In case it is, they’re incredibly common and the most efficient and safe way to allow cars to go all directions without any stoplights at an intersection of two highways.
Yes, it is more common to have them be in a single direction, but the extra lane and bidirectional traffic doesn’t make it look any less like a leaf of clover.
They are actually pretty dangerous because they force traffic weaving. You have high speed traffic exiting the highway crossing low speed traffic entering the highway. In times of high volume traffic they get very hard to navigate and tend to cause a big choke point. That is why you will find many cloverleaf interchanges are being replaced.
Sounds like the danger you’re describing is a problem with all exits and on-ramps since all allow faster traffic to exit and slower traffic to enter the highway. I’m confused as to why it would be worse with cloverleaf as long as all of the exits are right exits. In my head, the dangerous merges are the left side on-ramps since you’re required to merge into the fastest traveling lane.
But isnt weaving a problem with any exit that’s immediately following an on-ramp rather than an issue specifically with cloverleafs? Pretty much every exit/on-ramp combination in the dense cities that i know has this problem of needing to weave into traffic so that you aren’t forced to exit at the next exit, all while others are trying to weave from traffic into the exit.
Because I already sent you two links that explain it. Your last comment doesn’t make it seem like you actually used the sources already provided. What you described in that comment is not weaving.
I completely read/watched the two links you provided (because I’m more interested with learning where I’m wrong than with being right), but it is now clear from your more elaborate reply that you did not even bother. If you had, you’d realize that your first link specifically mentions the exact situation that I called out.
Your wiki link states that the weaving problem “is most prevalent either where the junction designer has placed the on-slip [on-ramp] to the road before the off-slip [exit] at a junction (for example, the cloverleaf interchange), or in urban areas with many close-spaced junctions.” It makes it very clear that the cloverleaf presents just one example of the weaving problem, and the other example mentioned in the same breath is exactly what I presented to you.
Your YouTube link also explains that the smaller the cloverleaf, the more dangerous it is, and it says making the loops larger is better but not always possible because of the amount of land they take up. That’s why I have always noticed smoother weaving at larger cloverleafs like often exist in Texas rather than at a smaller cloverleafs that you often see in dense urban areas like in the northeast or western US.
Your one word answer didn’t make your ignorance clear, but now it is absolutely crystal clear that you either couldn’t be bothered to check your own bias with the links you shared before telling me “no” or you’re just trying to gaslight me in order to troll my downvoted comments.
Either way, whether you like it or not, the evidence you provided proves my point that the weaving problem is not simply a problem with cloverleafs but with all high speed junctions that are close together. It is not an inherent problem with cloverleafs entirely but the distance between on and off junctions.
But whatever your intentions, thanks for your links anyway. I did learn something and more than anything, they showed me that I’m already familiar with some of the alternatives to cloverleafs that I had always thought of as “modified cloverleafs.”
The difference being the use of frontage roads. The entrances and exits from the main carriageway onto the frontage roads will be between this exit and the next.
I stumbled upon this civil engineer on YouTube for a different road planning game and enjoyed way more than I expected. He also has a set for Cities Skylines.
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