The High Way, Part 1

I'm on vacation in Minneapolis.  A lot of times, when I come to a new city, my first impression of that city is its highway system.  Some have brilliant, well-designed highway systems.  Others, not so much.  Minneapolis strikes me as the kind of city that is caught in-between - it has a lot of highways, and they crisscross the city in somewhat regular intervals.  This is both good and bad design for a lot of reasons, but let's take the good - it gets traffic around the city quickly and ensures that no matter where you are in the city, you always have easy access to a highway.  That's something Tulsa could learn from, especially in what I like to call the highway desert that is South Tulsa.

Sometimes, when a Minneapolis highway meets up with another Minneapolis highway, the design is good - multiple lanes allow drivers to continue driving at high speeds, plenty of signage ahead of time allows drivers to prepare for their turns, and the lanes remain dedicated for a large distance, meaning that drivers can be back up to speed on the new highway and get comfortable in the flow of traffic there before having to merge.

That's good.

But then Minneapolis also has Tulsa-like highways.  You see, we have only three highway interchanges through town that are reasonable.  When I-244 meets up with 169, there are two dedicated lanes coming from the northbound 169 going to westbound I-244, and those two lanes remain in place all the way to highway 11.  Similar things happen when I-244 meets 51 on the west side of downtown and where 169 meets the Creek Turnpike.

All the rest of Tulsa's highway interchanges are death traps.

One of the busiest interchanges in town is at highways 51 and 169.  People coming from South Tulsa taking 169 attempt to turn to the northwest by getting on highway 51, and on the drive into work in the morning, this is the busiest flow of traffic.  There are, however people having to come in from Broken Arrow and drive toward North Tulsa.  The two flows of traffic cross each other - a giant volume of people slowing down to get on 51, a giant volume of people speeding up to get on 169, and using the same lane:

Image from Google Maps' Satellite Imagery

Unfortunately, finding actual statistics on this interchange is difficult, but there is a plethora of information available about smart design in general.  This type of interchange is known as a Cloverleaf Interchange.  Here's a useful news article to help explain some of the problems and solutions.

So here's the deal - we know these problems exist, we know how to do better design, we know that cloverleaf interchanges typically take up *way more* land than alternatives.  And yet, when we re-did this interchange only a few years ago... we re-did it simply by adding more lanes to the highways themselves and keeping the bloody dangerous interchanges exactly as they were.

Why do we do this?  Well, my theory is that it has to do with money.  We keep proving every bleeping day that money is more important in this city and state than the lives of any of its citizens.  This derives directly from our conservative politics and its resultant "I've got mine" mentality: people who don't drive that interchange don't see a problem with it, partly because statistics are scarce and partly because those things that are out of sight are out of mind.  But, even with campaigning to change this interchange, it won't be enough unless we can change that individualist mindset.

(More to come...)