nought said:
Seriously, good luck setting your cruise control on 55 and hanging in the right lane with the new X ramps we have -- they are the real reason the speed limit had to be dropped as they have had a serious negative impact on how well traffic moves along on Highway 6 between Rock Prairie and Briarcrest.
No, they aren't. The traffic along Highway 6 has just gotten too consistently heavy to allow 70 MPH speeds. It's one of the reasons why urban highways don't even reach 65 mph legally because of that very problem. The traffic entering the highway is going to be the same no matter how the ramps are configured, at rush hour (and other hours too), cars pour onto the ramp from Texas Avenue, sometimes backing up halfway to Harvey Mitchell Parkway. Meanwhile, at certain hours of night, traffic locks up near University and Briarcrest because too many cars try to enter the freeway at one time, and it would happen just the same with the old ramps too.
The two real solutions are:
1. Expand to six lanes from Highway 40 to Old Reliance.
2. Add metered ramps to problem on-ramps to stem too many cars coming up on the ramp at once. It would be a cheap and effective but, given the consistent blaming of the X-ramps, I can't imagine the mess would result in.
Traffic-related threads on TexAgs always crack me up. Everyone cries about how students don't know how to drive, yet there's all this hand-wringing any time an intersection is redesigned because it's "too confusing".
Not too long ago there was that thread about the University/2818 intersection being redesigned and there were some people unironically arguing for just unadulterated 1960s-style cloverleafs. It was funny and sad at the same time.