Official: Some Marquette Interchange reconfiguring (West bound)

[colinstu]

"Project" Page talking about it: http://repave94.org/newsroom/i-794-westbound-to-marquette-interchange-reconfiguration-project-informatio

And two PDFs:
I94+I794+I43 changes
I794+Jackson St+Lincoln Memorial Dr changes

Personally, I love them! Having driven through the snaggle of traffic in the first pdf for a whole semester at uni, this should greatly improve the situation and prevent me and many others from raging!

I usually want to exit onto 35th st (I'm coming from I43), but the traffic was so crappy that I'd get off at 25th. The problem is... all the lanes were full of people trying to merge onto the main 3 lanes of traffic heading out... leaving most of the fourth totally stopped. Every day me and many other drivers would use the right shoulder to exit onto 25th. Yeah it's illegal, yeah it's bad, but sitting in 30min traffic beforehand only to wait another 15-30min is enough to make anyone go a little insane. This reconfig fixes all of that... straight shot right to 25th st now! Not only that, you don't get 94+43 traffic trying to get into the left and middle lane slowing stuff down as badly now (cutting through the merge nose only to get stuck into a jammed 794 cars).

What do you guys think of the reconfig?

EDIT: P.S.: I made sure my Spring semester classes were finished at or before 3pm... so no longer had to do these bad things. 

[JREwing78]

I don't use the interchange often enough to have any strong opinions on it, but the changes look reasonable enough.

[triplemultiplex]

I know I haven't been doing much traveling by car recently, but damn, how did I miss this?

I'll start with the Lake Interchange re-striping.  Sure, that's a good idea.  Move left twice instead of three times.  I like it.

Now to the WB Marquette merge.  The one weakness of the Marquette Interchange rebuild was always how soon traffic gets back to three lanes WB and SB out of the interchange.  WB is worse because of the distances involved.   6 lanes need to get down to three far too quickly.  During outbound rush hour, there's lots of cutting across gores, using the shoulders and poorly executed merges.

A late change to the western limits of the Marquette Interchange made the problem worse than it would have been.  Originally, 94 WB was to keep its 4th lane until St. Paul Avenue as illustrated here:

Note the 25th Street ramps were to terminate on St. Paul Avenue with access across the freeway at 25th Street eliminated.  This would've added at least another 1500 feet to the 4th WB lane on I-94 giving a lot more room for merging.
Also note how the freeway would've been straightened between 25th and 16th Streets.  The elevation would also have been flattened on this segment.  The downhill slope leading into the corner under 25th & St. Paul contributes to excessive braking and further screws up traffic flow at present.

This change happened purely for political reasons in 2003.  The new Democratic governor (Jim Doyle) ordered WisDOT to trim a few million from the Marquette project (an $800 million project) as part of an attempt to save some money on road projects.  It was an era where Wisconsin was doing a lot of stupid things related to road funding.  The Democratic governor is cutting money from major highway projects and raiding a highway trust fund to balance the state's budget while at the same time, a Republican legislature is decoupling Wisconsin's gas tax from inflation in a short-sighted, futile attempt to reduce gas prices.  I think it contributed greatly to those cheap-ass bypasses that were built in Wisconsin in the last 10 years.

[colinstu]

So you approve of the changes, I take it triple? xD Better than what's currently there... but not as good as what was initially planned and shot down.

Where did you get that picture?

I wonder if these plans would be brought back eventually.

[triplemultiplex]

Well for me personally, I come through the Marquette WB on 794 a lot, so loosing a lane for "my" route at the big crunch will likely delay my personal travel a small fraction, but it should flow better overall.

That pic is from a file I grabbed early in the project that highlighted what WisDOT was doing to trim a couple million from the project.  Most of the rest of the stuff was minor changes to shoulder widths.  The only other interesting change was downgrading the WB -> NB ramp from 2 lanes to 1; something that worked out just fine.