Anthony Henday design

[Thorin]

I would be pleasantly surprised if construction on the Henday is finally complete and there are no slow-down zones.  I'm willing to bet you money that if I went and drove that road tonight, I'd still encounter various 50km/h zones with construction equipment kilometers away.

Picture taken from the west, so north is to the left, east is to the top, south is to the right, west is to the bottom:



TEN SEPARATE BRIDGE STRUCTURES  seriously, this is some road architect's wet dream.

[Darren Dirt]

Yup, only 10. Compare to a Google maps satellite view of Toronto, or the Interstate in Los Angeles...

[Thorin]

Yeah, or I dunno, they could've just done a standard cloverleaf with two bridge structures?  It's not like they don't have the space, a cloverleaf would've taken less space.  Okay, sometimes you get fancy like this to get extra lanes in (cloverleafs are normally only one turning lane).  But look at the picture again; those two big sweeping flyovers are both one lane each.

They sunk a bunch of money into making this way more complicated than necessary in an area where space wasn't an issue and a much simpler design would have sufficed.

[Darren Dirt]

Ah, I thought cloverleafs had a similar # of bridge components. Silly me, my ignorance coulda been resolved by Wikipedia 


Maybe those fly-overs are to make the left turns a smooth ride without any stopping? Not really sure if somewhere there's an explanation/justification for the weirdness of the design.

[Darren Dirt]

Yikes, coulda been worse though:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/4c/Kathipara.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathipara_Junction

(hope this ain't in an earthquake zone!)