09-26-2016, 04:37 PM
(09-26-2016, 12:35 PM)Viewfromthe42 Wrote: It's actually quite smart. One of the biggest bottlenecks at Caroline and Erb is that when north/south traffic has a green light, you can be either south/northbound on Caroline and wanting to turn westbound onto Erb. The drivers from each are notorious for wide turns, meaning instead of a steady stream going into each lane from each direction, you have a situation where a driver turning NB-WB puts a scare into the driver trying to turn SB-WB, and they will hesitate, and it goes back and forth with hesitations from drivers both NB and SB on Caroline. SB drivers had to look south across erb for pedestrians, then south across erb for cars, then east across Caroline for pedestrians, and then to their right to the sidewalk for more pedestrians. Now, they only have to look left and right for pedestrians, creating a much easier information flow without overloading their observational responsibilities.
Time will tell, but as long as drivers aren't trying to force illegal wide turns into this situation, I think it will actually be much easier.
The left-turning traffic you refer to consists only of buses. They could easily have a protected phase. Or, the right turn island could have been larger and the right turn lane further from the actual intersection. Then vehicles, having turned left, could have a yield sign to yield to right-turning traffic. There are doubtless other potential solutions.
Also, you failed to address my fundamental objection to the design, which is that westbound traffic on the single artery that runs in some places on Bridgeport and in some places on Erb is restricted down to a single lane at one single bottleneck even though it has at least two lanes everywhere else. How can that be logical? Only if that intersection were a low point for the traffic on that artery, which hardly seems believable.