Roads with Lopsided Traffic Volumes

[webny99]

By this I mean one direction of the road carries significantly more traffic than the other over a given 24 hour period.

Here's a (former) example that's pretty wild: NY 31 between the (former) NY 531 ramp and NY 36
Thanks to the one-way ramp which siphoned off all the eastbound traffic, this short segment carried 1900 eastbound and 11200 westbound. (Now, of course, this segment is a dead-end, while NY 31 meets NY 531 at a standard intersection). Any other roads out there that, thanks to some oddity or another, can top a 1:10 directional ratio?

[Flint1979]

M-58 seems to have more westbound traffic than eastbound traffic. M-58 is about 5 miles long running in Saginaw and Saginaw Township and carries around 30,000 vehicles a day at it's max. Westbound has three lanes and eastbound has two lanes for the entire stretch and in the city of Saginaw they run as one way streets, State Street for eastbound and Davenport for westbound then as it enters Saginaw Township it's two way with the same three lanes for westbound and two lanes for eastbound. It keeps the State Street name in Saginaw Township.

[webny99]

That's another whole sub-topic... different amount of lanes depending on the direction.

NY 7 does this near Albany (between I-87 and I-787) and I have never really understood why.

[froggie]

NY 7 does this near Albany (between I-87 and I-787) and I have never really understood why.

Because, functionally, it's a climbing lane.  You're on an uphill climb of some steepness or another until past the Miller Rd overpass, at which point you're about 2/3mi from the northbound Northway ramp so it's basically an auxiliary lane from the top of the hill to the Northway ramp.

[doorknob60]

I don't have the numbers to back it up, but I know it's true by experience, and just by looking at the layout. A half mile segment of Fairview Ave in Boise between Larch St and Bluff St. https://www.google.com/maps/dir/43.6189781,-116.2498349/43.6189596,-116.2399213/@43.6181106,-116.2461857,16.25z/data=!4m2!4m1!3e0

Westbound traffic is your standard stream of traffic coming from the Main St corridor in West Downtown. The thing is, East of Bluff St, the road is one way (WB), so almost no cars are going to make it east of Orchard. But by Larch St, Eastbound traffic heading towards Downtown will exit onto the I-184 ramp (possibly immediately exiting I-184 at the next exit...Fairview Ave, an EB one way). So, East of Curtis, probably 70% of the traffic is taking the ramp to I-184, 25% is turning onto Orchard, and only 5% (if that) make it east of Orchard.

[Flint1979]

That's another whole sub-topic... different amount of lanes depending on the direction.

NY 7 does this near Albany (between I-87 and I-787) and I have never really understood why.

The traffic volumes favor the westbound direction for some reason, eastbound is pretty heavy too but for some reason westbound gets a lot of traffic. It's one of Saginaw's major arteries.

[NoGoodNamesAvailable]

Carpenter Road in East Fishkill, NY, west of the Taconic State Parkway wins the thread so far. The last AADT from 2015 was 1344 southbound, 58 northbound, so southbound traffic outnumbers northbound traffic by around 23 to 1.

2001 figures were nearly perfectly equal in both directions; then two years later the median crossing on the Taconic (the most dangerous on the parkway) was closed permanently.

Now the road basically serves as a shortcut entrance to the Taconic South for local residents. Exiting at Beekman Road is quicker for the majority of drivers coming from the Taconic South, and the turn off the Taconic onto Carpenter is so dicey that lots of drivers, myself included, would refuse to make it even if it were slightly more convenient than the Beekman Rd exit. This means the southbound lane functions like an expressway on-ramp while the northbound lane pretty much exclusively serves the couple dozen residents who live off the road.

Initially NYSDOT seemed quite intent on constructing a full grade-separated interchange at the intersection like what they did at Miller Hill Road, with the current setup being an interim safety fix. The local residents had to find something new to be mad about now that they couldn't complain about the median closing; so instead they basically flipped course and started arguing against the interchange because they theorized it would turn Carpenter Road into a truck bypass between I-84 and NY 82. A combination of that, the low volumes on the road, and the fact that the adjacent interchanges have little trouble handling local traffic make me think the current situation is probably going to stick around for the next 20 years at least.