Know Your Highway Interchanges

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guyver01

Lifer
Sep 25, 2000
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http://www.infrastructurist.com/200...a-field-guide-to-highway-interchanges-part-1/

Everybody knows what a cloverleaf looks like — but could you identify a volleyball, a double trumpet, or a “spooey” if you drove on one in the course of your highway travels? These are among the distinctive designs that transportation engineers have conjured up to keep traffic flowing and motorists headed in the right direction when major roads intersect.
 

CycloWizard

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Sep 10, 2001
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I was wondering why the Spooey was used for a lot of the new interchanges on I-64 in St. Louis, but then not for the rest of them: apparently, even though it's an awesome design, people are too stupid to figure it out. Add 15 minutes per day (bringing my round-trip commute from 10 minutes to 25) simply to cater to the lowest common denominator. Fail.
 
Oct 27, 2007
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To be honest, "butt" wasn't the first piece of anatomy I thought of when I saw this.
parclo-variation.jpg
 

Pollock

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Jan 24, 2004
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I was wondering why the Spooey was used for a lot of the new interchanges on I-64 in St. Louis, but then not for the rest of them: apparently, even though it's an awesome design, people are too stupid to figure it out. Add 15 minutes per day (bringing my round-trip commute from 10 minutes to 25) simply to cater to the lowest common denominator. Fail.

What's so hard to figure out about them? Seems like a pretty good design.
 

bobdole369

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Dec 15, 2004
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What would they call this thing that I drive on every day? If you miss your exit a particular direction, the fastest time to recovery is 20 minutes and 10 miles out of the way on surface streets.

portevergladesexp.jpg



AND further south is this POS - known as the Golden Glades, best known for housing the nice polite Cuban folks at the beginning of Scarface, and better known for being a steaming pile of traffic.

goldenglades.jpg
 

Lounatik

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Oct 10, 1999
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What would they call this thing that I drive on every day? If you miss your exit a particular direction, the fastest time to recovery is 20 minutes and 10 miles out of the way on surface streets.

portevergladesexp.jpg



AND further south is this POS - known as the Golden Glades, best known for housing the nice polite Cuban folks at the beginning of Scarface, and better known for being a steaming pile of traffic.

goldenglades.jpg

Do you remember when 84 used to intersect 441 and there was no highway there? There was the Grand Prix arcade that was the epicenter of video game playing back in the early 80's. Place had about 2000 video games and was open 24 hours.Then the road came through and killed it once it moved across 95.

Funny, but once you got past Pine Island ( or University for that matter) you were out in the sticks! My wife lived "all the way out" on 136th ave. So far away!


Peace

Lounatik
 
Oct 19, 2000
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I use a "butt" intersection to get to and from work 5 days a week. It's not the best configuration IMO because traffic backs up when exiting from the side with the loop. The loop is too tight of a turn and in my instance, there isn't an exit lane for the loop. You basically exit directly towards the loop and have maybe 30 yards to slow from 70MPH to the 35MPH needed to safely go around the curve. Most every morning, even before the rush of traffic, people slow down to 50MPH a good half mile before the exit, causing backups.

When going home, I take the other loop to get back onto the interstate. The main problem with this is that it's uphill after coming out of the curve, and most people don't/can't get up to speed to get onto the interstate properly, so most afternoon's, I'm often merging onto a 70MPH interstate at 45MPH.

The only savior for all of this is that it's a 6-lane highway (3 lanes on each side), so there's at least some room for other cars to maneuver around.
 

bobdole369

Diamond Member
Dec 15, 2004
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Do you remember when 84 used to intersect 441 and there was no highway there?
Nope, I'm a youngin. I moved down roundabout 1999.


There was the Grand Prix arcade that was the epicenter of video game playing back in the early 80's.

The first location - the "largest arcade in the world" was quite impressive but in the new loc they built a roller coaster, bungee jumping, paintball, another go-kart track (nascar style) and a gigantor putt-putt golf course.

I suspect you might also remember the Six Flags Atlantis waterpark that was at the current locale of the Oakwood shopping plaza on the other side of stirling. My wifes father was a foreman at that site, he did steel-fab.

Place had about 2000 video games and was open 24 hours.

The new location was known as "grand prix Dania" and later "Grand Prix Race-a-rama", and was also open 24 hours a day. They have 2 arcade rooms now, neither as big as the original, but due to the decline in arcade gaming, still holds the title.

It is far from dead, Boomers bought it out in the mid-2000's, it is definitely still in operation but is no longer 24 hours.



Oh and back to traffic and interchanges. The current plan is to add "express lanes" along the median of the ever-backed up I-595, and reconfigure teh dangerous (I've personally seen 2 18 wheelers and a tanker full of gasoline go off the road going from SR84 onto tpike NB) short ridiculous weave into a more manageable braid (and hopefully less lethal) within the next 5 years. SR84 will again intersect 441 and continue from Port Everglades "all the way" out to the 869/sawgrass and I-75/alligator alley!

When my wifes family moved down with just about everybody else from jersey/new york in the 70's, she says that the roads were dirt, the atlantic/441 intersection had nothing but a streetlight and huge fields. My other buddy who grew up in margate says that he was the first house in his neighborhood. It's completely built out now. I can't imagine what it was like back then.
 
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