Saturday, 25 February 2012

Diverging diamond interchange- Traffic engineering innovation

For this week I will take a break from my commuter thoughts and comments and present a small video that I found with some help from Institute of Transportation Engineers newsletter about Diverging Diamond Interchange (DDI)
Wikipedia defines  diverging diamond interchange as a rare form of diamond interchange in which the two directions of traffic on the non-freeway road cross to the opposite side on both sides of the bridge at the freeway. It is unusual in that it requires traffic on the freeway overpass (or underpass) to briefly drive on the opposite side of the road from what they are accustomed.

For many years traffic engineers were only concerned on how to find ways to reduce congestion and provide better traffic flow. Network capacity was in the heart of their research and providing more lanes and better intersections was a priority. But as years past by, everyone realised that providing more road resulted on ending up with more traffic. So over the last decade the research shifted to network efficiency. One of the latest attempts is this new type of  interchange that was was listed by Popular Science magazine as one of the best innovations in 2009 (engineering category) in "Best of What's New 2009".

A picture is worth a thousand words so this 5.15 minute video is worth almost 7.5 million words (or almost 19 million words depending on video quality). :-)




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