The A2 motorway no longer divides Maastricht • Hacker News Board

Re: The A2 motorway no longer divides Maastricht

#101

Post by PuffinBlue » Wed, Oct 16, 2019, 6:09 PM UTC

gambiting wrote: post #25

apexalpha wrote: post #2

My hometown! Cool to see it on HN. Maastricht uses to be the only traffic lights on route from Amsterdam to Paris. Yes. Traffic lights on a highway, in the middle of a city. As if the highway in the middle of a city wasn't annoyinh enough the traffic lights added some extra noise, fumes and pollution. The new tunnel has been the most magnificent change I've ever seen. And IIRC the entire project was within budget and…

>>Maastricht uses to be the only traffic lights on route from Amsterdam to Paris. Yes. Traffic lights on a highway, in the middle of a city Sounds like the beautiful little town of Bad Oeynhausen, which I came to loathe(a bit) - I used to drive several times a year from Amsterdam to Krakow(~1300km) and literally the moment you got off the ferry in Amsterdam you were on the motorway literally all the way to Krakow....…

Wow, that brings back memories. I travelled that road twice a week, most weeks, for about 2 years. I had almost blocked this from my memory!

That said, I think there was a KFC and a McDonalds there pretty much just off the road that you can stop at which was just about the right time when my bladder ran out of mileage.

It was nice to slow down and stop somewhere other than a motorway service station!

Re: The A2 motorway no longer divides Maastricht

#102

Post by mikeyouse » Wed, Oct 16, 2019, 6:33 PM UTC

PeterStuer wrote: post #96

andrepd wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had the wonderful privilege of, by pure coincidence, having no cars pass through the road that I walk on my way to work, for about 4 or 5 minutes. I was stunned at the sheer peaceful silence of it. No "broooom" noise, no metallic screeching of brakes, no gasoline smell, no burnt clutch smell, no "dirty auto shop" smell in general. Just the trees rustling softly, faint chatter from the primary school kids some 100m…

Above 22Mph it is the tire noise that the most dominant source of noise pollution by cars. In most noise pollution scenarios EV's will change nothing.

Most city driving is below 22mph, so this is a useless bit of info. Living next to a stop sign in San Francisco, 100% of the traffic near my place is at speeds less than 22mph and I can assure you that the tire noise is completely inconsequential compared to the revving engines and obnoxious exhausts.

Re: The A2 motorway no longer divides Maastricht

#103

Post by 205guy » Wed, Oct 16, 2019, 6:34 PM UTC

mrguyorama wrote: post #88

andrepd wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had the wonderful privilege of, by pure coincidence, having no cars pass through the road that I walk on my way to work, for about 4 or 5 minutes. I was stunned at the sheer peaceful silence of it. No "broooom" noise, no metallic screeching of brakes, no gasoline smell, no burnt clutch smell, no "dirty auto shop" smell in general. Just the trees rustling softly, faint chatter from the primary school kids some 100m…

Most car noise on high speed roads is tire noise, not engine noise

GP comment sounded like it was in a town or city (school nearby), where average speeds are lower and "high speed roads" are not the norm. In towns and cities, engine noise definitely dominates tire and wind noise, especially revving from stops, and would thus be vastly improved by electric vehicles. Not to mention smell and air pollution which are always worse in fossil-fuel vehicles.

Re: The A2 motorway no longer divides Maastricht

#104

Post by hinkley » Wed, Oct 16, 2019, 6:53 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #52

Just 850 million euros of public money to build a mile and a half long tunnel under downtown! (Under a billion euros total.) A bi-level tunnel, with separate express and local levels, and four lanes on each level. By contrast, the SR99 tunnel in Seattle was about 1/3 longer, cost $3-4 billion, depending on how lawsuits shake out, and has half the capacity (two levels with two lanes each). The Big Dig in Boston was th…

Is that 22 times as much for just the downtown part or the whole thing?

I saw a documentary on the Dig and it was a lot more involved than I would have guessed. Route to the airport if I recall, and a tunnel under a river, and by 'under the river' I mean that pretty literally. The tunnel wasn't far below the riverbed due to other obstructions so they came in essentially from above to lay it. They filled most of an hour just talking about that section.

Re: The A2 motorway no longer divides Maastricht

#105

Post by showerst » Wed, Oct 16, 2019, 7:02 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #85

skrebbel wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "Noord-Zuid-Lijn" new metro line in Amsterdam was a classic disaster like so many others. I guess the answer is "we have fuckups too but not all the time". Could it be the case though that the same holds for the US? I mean usually if something is on time and within budget it doesn't make the news just as much :D

That’s your “disaster?” 6 miles of new train line (4.5 underground) for $3.5 billion. Total construction time 15 years. The first phase of the Second Avenue subway cost $4.5 billion for just 2 miles, and took 10 years. The next 1.5 mile segment will cost $6 billion (that’s just the estimate) and take another 10 years. And that’s not even all that over budget or delayed. I’ve never encountered a major public project i…

Just as a minor counterpoint, the Anacostia River Tunnel project was finished on time, and the overall clean rivers project is on time and under budget by nearly 100MM so far.

Granted, it doesn't face WMATA's absolutely insane leadership and funding structure, but it can be done, and even in one of the most complex jurisdictional messes in the US.

Re: The A2 motorway no longer divides Maastricht

#106

Post by scarejunba » Wed, Oct 16, 2019, 7:32 PM UTC

cesarb wrote: post #66

rayiner wrote: post #52

Just 850 million euros of public money to build a mile and a half long tunnel under downtown! (Under a billion euros total.) A bi-level tunnel, with separate express and local levels, and four lanes on each level. By contrast, the SR99 tunnel in Seattle was about 1/3 longer, cost $3-4 billion, depending on how lawsuits shake out, and has half the capacity (two levels with two lanes each). The Big Dig in Boston was th…

Different technologies. Judging from this article, this Maastricht tunnel seems to have been built as a "cut and cover" tunnel, while according to Wikipedia, that SR99 tunnel was built with a tunnel boring machine. AFAIK, the cut and cover method is much cheaper (but more disruptive during the construction, and can only be used for shallow tunnels like this one).

The SF Market St plan doesn't have that and the Central Subway has got to be cut and cover since they just shut down the road.

Re: The A2 motorway no longer divides Maastricht

#107

Post by timerol » Wed, Oct 16, 2019, 7:48 PM UTC

oneplane wrote: post #95

jdhawk wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But, where would the homeless camp? All joking aside, if its not a toll road is not getting built in Austin. I'd love to Dig & Cap I-35 all the way to airport blvd.

Why would they still want to make toll roads? I makes no sense aside from someone wanting to profit from essential public needs. You'd think if a bunch of people designate a small group to do government stuff on their behalf to make life better they do those sensible things centrally.

Responsive tolling on roads makes a lot of sense. Roads carry more people at 50 mph than they do at 30mph. So if you use the price of the road to keep the road moving, you can make a more effective road, rather than letting it be overwhelmed and less useful.

Re: The A2 motorway no longer divides Maastricht

#108

Post by notJim » Wed, Oct 16, 2019, 7:59 PM UTC

melling wrote: post #5

Los Angeles is going to build a wildlife overpass: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/worlds-largest-highway-overpass... Pedestrians and nature need to be given a higher priority.

We have one over I-90 in Washington! I think I heard they're building another one as well. Apparently they have them in Banff in Canada as well.

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/its-a-long-time-co...

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/2019/04/wildlife-...

Re: The A2 motorway no longer divides Maastricht

#109

Post by sailfast » Wed, Oct 16, 2019, 8:50 PM UTC

LeonM wrote: post #19

melling wrote: post #5

Los Angeles is going to build a wildlife overpass: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/worlds-largest-highway-overpass... Pedestrians and nature need to be given a higher priority.

The Netherlands is also well known for their ecopassages over highways (also known as ecoducts), according to Wikipedia there are 66 eco passages in the Netherlands as of 2015 [0]. There are some nice pictures of them in the wiki article as well. [0] https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecopassage

More remarkable than ecopassages are the underpasses built specifically for canals or major rivers. There are a few of these on the way from Den Haag to Utrecht that are pretty mind-boggling. It's also interesting to see cargo shipping going OVER the highway.

Re: The A2 motorway no longer divides Maastricht

#110

Post by lucb1e » Wed, Oct 16, 2019, 9:20 PM UTC

apexalpha wrote: post #53

Merrill wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Google satellite view, there appears to be a railway about 400 meters west which similarly divides the city. Will that be buried as well?

No it doesn't for a few reasons. One is that most rail traffic doesn't continu 24/7. A train comes by, the crossings open again and it's anormal road for 15 minutes until the next train. Cars just run constantly. Cars also have exhausts that blast fumes in your face. Furthermore the rails are usually 2 or 3 tracks next to each other outside the station. That's 20 meter or so vs a whopping 50m+ for a highway.

> Cars also have exhausts that blast fumes in your face

Yeah I never noticed this as much as the small city where I live now. Both bus stops (near home and near work) are next to a busy road, which is one thing, but one is also right before a traffic light, so lots of accelerating traffic. (The other one is right after, which is much better already.) I regularly hold my breath for a few seconds as a particularly bad cloud (invisibly) passes over me.

I sometimes wonder if, instead of speed limits, we need acceleration limits. Or just emission limits. Accelerate to highway speed in 50 seconds instead of in 20: so long as you're not in traffic that goes from 0 to 100 km/h every two minutes, it should hardly matter for your arrival time. Yet most of the time when I accelerate at a reasonable (not slow) speed onto the (uphill-going) highway, the person behind me thinks they should go alongside to accelerate 5% faster and lock me into the merging lane that is by now running out of space. Must spend 80% more CO2 for 20 seconds to arrive 4 seconds faster at the destination!