One of my first projects out of college was doing final quantity check for the construction plans for the last phase of the South Midtown Freeway. Fresh out of school, I was in for rude awakening. Rather than doing all sorts of cool design stuff, I was using simple math and geometry checking work done by others. It was rather tedious but it did help me later in my career by stressing the importance showing your work and doing it so that someone could understand it easily in the future.
One of the first things I had to check was the concrete slope protection and brick pavers underneath the bridges. Concrete slope protection is put underneath the bridges since the area is always shaded so nothing ever grows and also to prevent rainwater from eroding out and exposing the bridge piers.
Anyways, enough filler. I guess at some point someone thought putting an interchange at 18th Street so people could get onto the new US 71 freeway was a worthy idea and completed a study. Three options were evaluated and either it cost to much to do or people realized having an interchange three blocks away from an interstate to interstate interchange was a bad idea.
You can download and read the whole 59+MB study this weekend. The only thing that I noticed skimming it was the land use prediction for the area.
Obviously the land use changed. No one even considered that the whole swath of the Crossroads would de-industrialize and become what it is. That's why I always question traffic studies or projections. There needs to be a little intuition or comparison to similar areas rather than blindly believing something a computer model spits out. especially when massive increases in traffic are predicted in developed areas. Any predictive model is only as good as the assumptions behind the variables in it are.
Download US71-18thStreet-InterchangeStudy
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