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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
I'm assuming they are referring to the fact that this is an unironic usage of a format that typically contains an ironic message. But I think this format is used to express counter narratives of all kinds, both serious and unserious, so I wouldn't call this an incorrect usage. I mean, the format already has some bone hurting juice energy to start with, so I think gatekeeping its usage is maybe outside of the spirit of the template
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
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.