This is amazing, finally the ideas pioneered in EPCOT are making it to the real world.
The A2 motorway no longer divides Maastricht
91–100 of 122 posts
Re: The A2 motorway no longer divides Maastricht
#92Just 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…
> the A2 tunnel cost only modestly more than it’s costing San Francisco to simply reconfigure Market Street to shut down through traffic Salaries in San Francisco and Maastricht are widely different.
Salaries are one variable.
Re: The A2 motorway no longer divides Maastricht
#93Earlier 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…
To us, that was a disaster yes. I suppose we measure or weigh things differently? Or perhaps we haven't had those monstrosities you mention so we have no local reference.
Re: The A2 motorway no longer divides Maastricht
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
>>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....…
Reminds me of Luik/Liege in Belgium just across the border form Maastricht. It's far worse there especially when you look at how poor the construction is there and how high the pollution seems to be. You can see that city has suffered immensely economically. The journey through Maastricht over the highway generally wasn't all that bad, traffic would generally flow remarkably well. I think the primary concerns to put…
Yeah as someone who travels through all three, Luik / Liège definitely eats the cake. Not only is it slow, it’s also difficult to navigate if you’re not familiar with the area.
Maastricht was always mostly pleasant, and Bad Oeyenhaus I typically use as an excuse to take a break at one of the McDonalds there.
Re: The A2 motorway no longer divides Maastricht
#95There were (mostly dead) plans for a while to do something similar with I-35 in Austin, Texas. https://www.austinmonitor.com/stories/2019/04/the-idea-to-bu... I very much doubt it will come to fruition any time soon given the political climate.
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.
Re: The A2 motorway no longer divides Maastricht
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
Noise and particulate pollution are perhaps the most external of the negative externalities of automobiles, riders being mostly insulated from their own emissions and from those of their peers. It feels fundamentally unfair.
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.
Re: The A2 motorway no longer divides Maastricht
#97Just 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).
Cut and cover is just so much cheaper.
Re: The A2 motorway no longer divides Maastricht
#98To be fair, in Germany, on the A4, they did something similar and the results were awesome. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobdeburgtunnel
Re: The A2 motorway no longer divides Maastricht
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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. This is an all too common sight in small town America, unfortunately. Highways running directly through small towns seems almost the rule, not the exception.
I think this is a causality problem, not anything out of malice or bureaucratic foolishness. Roads connect people. Towns are groups of people. Bigger roads connect larger groups of people. Bigger roads are the reasonable choice to convert to highways. People like/find utility in highways and roads, so they live near them. It's an unfortunate extension of this logical process that results in 18-wheeler jake brakes thu…
I really enjoyed this comment
Re: The A2 motorway no longer divides Maastricht
#100Does burying a whole road like this make it possible to capture and prevent vehicle smog in the streets above?
Any tunnel needs lots of ventilation. That air has to go somewhere, and that's above ground. Unless they employ (expensive) measures to filter and clean the air, most of the pollution has to be released. So it's concentrating the pollution to the few spots where the ventilation systems stand instead of having low but mostly equal levels along the entire road. So the health of anyone who lives far away from those syst…
Unfortunately they decided not to filter the air at the egress points. This has been the subject of much debate and several law suits by people living near the tunnel ends.