On a unrelated note (but still related to Atlanta), I have a question about the southern I-75/I-85 split. Why aren't there ramps going from I-85 to I-75 south or ramps going from I-75 north to I-85 north?
It's a pet peeve of mine when they make major interchanges without covering all possible directional ramps.
Oh so many reasons. First, there's very little demand for travel in that direction. Second, there are service ramps very close to it along both 75 and 85. I guess the ramp could be strictly from freeway to freeway to avoid cripplingly expensive braided connections and/or crazy-short weaves, but most of the few people actually using such ramps would likely do so in order to access Cleveland and Metropolitan Avenues. Besides that, as it stands, traffic bound between 75 to the south and Metropolitan Avenue to the north could use the ramps provided at Langford Parkway.
I've never thought about it before, but the opportunity to make that connection was when I-85 was first built in the early sixties. They could've built a trumpet interchange with a loop ramp for northbound 75 to southbound 85, merging into 85 from the left as at
the I-20-59 interchange in Birmingham. Yikes! That'd also require a design speed of 45 mph or so on the northbound 85 mainline. Had that happened, I think it's likely that the ramp would've been abandoned during the Freeing the Freeways rebuild in order to increase the design speed of the northbound 85 mainline and to eliminate that dangerous and dysfunctional connection. Admittedly, that wasn't done on the north side, but that connection is a lot more important there and the land consumed by vastly increasing the footprint of the trumpet interchange there was mostly or all nonresidential.
