Georgia

[Gnutella]

Last weekend I took a drive south from Athens via U.S. 129/U.S. 441, and then east through rural east Georgia via GA 16, and I noticed that GDOT has begun clearing trees in preparation for the construction of a four-lane bypass around Bishop, which is a small town in Oconee County just south of Watkinsville. The bypass will pass to the east of the town. Once this is complete, the process of four-laning U.S. 129/U.S. 441 between the Athens Perimeter (GA 10 Loop) and I-20 will be halfway done, with only 14 out of 28 miles left to be done.

[Buck87]

I'm not really one that knows much about sign fonts, so I have the following question...

What is it with lower case i's not being dotted on Georgia's big green signs? That's something I've noticed on my last several trips down here...and makes me want to joke that they should bring in the Ohio State marching band to do the job of dotting the i's...

Back in the day, before lowercase letters for FHWA Series A-D were added to the MUTCD, Georgia designed (or paid someone to design) its own custom lowercase characters for Series D; they also modified a few of the uppercase letters as well; notably the curve on uppercase "D" is more squared off than in real Series D, I guess to make it more distinct from "O". Part of this design was omitting the dots from the lowercase "i" and "j" characters, presumably because GDOT/the designer believed that at night the dot would blend into the stem due to reflective halation. At some point towards the end though they did add the dots back, before abandoning its use on most freeway guide signs in favor of FHWA a few years ago.

I think in-house some of the sign shops still haven't switched over from "Georgia D" but these days anything that goes to contract will use FHWA Series, usually Series E(M) on freeway BGSes although some supplemental signs are mixed-case Series D. I think the last GDOT freeway contract that used any form of series D for most guide signs was the most recent Truman Pkwy extension in Savannah, and even that was a bit of an outlier (they probably dusted off old plan sheets from the 1990s).

Interesting, thanks.

Another question I have about Georgia is...what's with the "Keep Off Median" signs? Seems like a pretty self explanatory concept not needing to be expressed with signage, so what is it that prompted these signs to be put up?

Everytime I see one my reaction is a sarcastic "Well damnit, I was really wanting to drive on that grass" 

[afguy]

I'm surprised SR 247 has been upgraded to a limited access highway...

According to Georgia Department of Transportation crash data, it's where you're more likely to be hurt or even die in an accident than any other road in Bibb County.

Lewis Merriano knows traffic on Pio Nono Avenue. He sells cars from a lot near the intersection of Guy Paine Road.

"You hear the brakes locking up, you hear 'Errrrrrrrrr,' then you hear horns beeping,"

Many times, that leads to wrecks near the lot.



Gregg Lewis works at Raffield Tire Master just down the road. In his forty years there, he says he's seen wreck after wreck.

"You see traffic accidents out here all the time out here,"  Lewis said. People get killed, trucks turning over, you see a ton of pretty bad things out here."

Highway 247 is more than 20 miles long, and spans most of Bibb County.

According to data from GDOT, more than 213 crashes with injuries happened along this track in 2016, more than any other road in the county. Four people even died on the road many travel every day.

"I'm not really surprised by that, because in my years of experience, Highway 247 is one of the major arteries in Bibb County, so there's a high volume of traffic all day,"  Captain Brad Wolfe said.

http://www.13wmaz.com/news/local/hwy-247-macons-most-dangerous-road/411200070

[lordsutch]

I think GDOT is hoping that the Sardis Church Road extension from I-75 to US 129/GA 247 will divert some of the traffic off it.

That said, from I-75 south to the creek it's a pretty substandard road and could do with some access management - businesses are just plopped down on the side of the road without even a curb or real driveway in places. There are plans to widen it to 6 lanes and to put in a roundabout at the odd-angled confluence of Broadway and Houston Avenue and SR 247; presumably a better design will be part of the widening.

[Tom958]

I'm surprised SR 247 has been upgraded to a limited access highway...

You must mean "hasn't," because it hasn't. Ironically, the article goes on to say that the most accident-prone section is between Houston Road and Rocky Creek, which is the area with the least development along it since it's in a floodplain. That section dates from 1943, presumably having been built to provide access to Robins AFB.

I'd photograph it if I had reason to go down there, but it's really not very photogenic.

EDIT:

That said, from I-75 south to the creek it's a pretty substandard road and could do with some access management - businesses are just plopped down on the side of the road without even a curb or real driveway in places. There are plans to widen it to 6 lanes and to put in a roundabout at the odd-angled confluence of Broadway and Houston Avenue and SR 247; presumably a better design will be part of the widening.

Agreed on the access management and possibly the six lanes, but that'd be a terrible place for a roundabout.

[Tomahawkin]

Has anyone done the commute in rush hour on the new IH-75 toll lanes south of Atlanta? I was going to go down there today but reconsidered, knowing It was a race weekend. No way was I going to bleep with that traffic. Also I need opinions about it and the progress of the toll lanes on the 75N/575N Corridor? IMO 575 should be  widened to 8-10 lanes in each direction. Make a plan that will hold traffic for 15+ years. 3 lanes on 575 will not do nothing, especially if there is an accident...

[afguy]

Looking through the pages of the 2040 long range transportation plan for Macon, some interesting things came up. GDOT is planning to add auxiliary lanes on I-75 between Arkwright Road and Bass Road. It also plans to add the lanes between Forsyth and Mercer University Dr by 2030. GDOT will also add auxiliary lanes to I-75 between Mercer University Drive and Pio Nono Ave by 2040.
http://mats2040.org/lrtp/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Table-5-2-Continued-MATS-2040-LRTP-Roads-and-Bridges-Projects-List-Approved-11-9-2016.jpg

[adventurernumber1]

Looking through the pages of the 2040 long range transportation plan for Macon, some interesting things came up. GDOT is planning to add auxiliary lanes on I-75 between Arkwright Road and Bass Road. It also plans to add the lanes between Forsyth and Mercer University Dr by 2030. GDOT will also add auxiliary lanes to I-75 between Mercer University Drive and Pio Nono Ave by 2040.
http://mats2040.org/lrtp/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Table-5-2-Continued-MATS-2040-LRTP-Roads-and-Bridges-Projects-List-Approved-11-9-2016.jpg

I think Interstate 75 in Macon could use some auxiliary lanes. Slowly but surely they are shaping up I-75 through the Macon area.

Has anyone done the commute in rush hour on the new IH-75 toll lanes south of Atlanta? I was going to go down there today but reconsidered, knowing It was a race weekend. No way was I going to bleep with that traffic. Also I need opinions about it and the progress of the toll lanes on the 75N/575N Corridor? IMO 575 should be  widened to 8-10 lanes in each direction. Make a plan that will hold traffic for 15+ years. 3 lanes on 575 will not do nothing, especially if there is an accident...

Frankly, I am mindblown that Interstate 575 is even 2 lanes each way for such a long distance. And as for the part that is 3 lanes each way, I echo your opinion that even that is not enough. My personal preference for the I-575 corridor is that both reversible express toll lanes be built, and the main lanes be widened as well - I carry that same opinion over to the nearby I-75 corridor as well. I think that combination would be very nice for the transportation on those roads.

(all photos posted taken out for the sake of being scroll-friendly)

Those new reversible express toll lanes on I-75 south of Atlanta turned out to be quite interesting, and that striping is certainly intriguing. 

[afguy]

This project proposes to redesign the interchange of I-85 at SR 138/Jonesboro Road, as well as to make improvements along SR 138/Jonesboro Road from Goodson Connector to Buffington Road. The proposed alternative includes a Diverging Diamond Interchange (DDI), with lengthened entrance/exit ramps on I-85, as well as the addition of a shared through and right-tum lane, pedestrian and bicycle facilities, signal upgrades, and landscaping.
I-85/Jonesboro Rd Interchange DDI by brandon walker, on Flickr
http://www.dot.ga.gov/PS/Public/PublicOutreach

[Tom958]

This project proposes to redesign the interchange of I-85 at SR 138/Jonesboro Road, as well as to make improvements along SR 138/Jonesboro Road from Goodson Connector to Buffington Road. The proposed alternative includes a Diverging Diamond Interchange (DDI), with lengthened entrance/exit ramps on I-85, as well as the addition of a shared through and right-tum lane, pedestrian and bicycle facilities, signal upgrades, and landscaping.

And, two novel features:

First, the bridge will be replaced. This is the first DDI in Georgia that hasn't used the existing bridge, even if said bridge is quite elderly.

Second, the low-speed S-curves that are inherent to the DDI concept will be exploited to allow the new bridge to be offset from the current alignment. This will allow near-completion of the new bridge while the existing bridge remains fully operational. I hadn't noticed because it's not my part of town, but I'm told that the reconstruction of the I-285-Flat Shoals Road interchange is into its third year with much more work to be done, largely due to the difficulty of replacing a major arterial bridge under traffic.

[afguy]

Phase I could start soon and wrap up by 2021...
http://www.13wmaz.com/news/local/gdot-soon-starting-construction-on-i-75-i-16/424036427

[afguy]

GDOT is planning to spend $730 million in Gwinnett County in the coming years to combat rising congestion there. Projects include widening 85 and 985, new interchanges at Sprout Springs Road and McGinnis Ferry Road at 85 and converting 316 to a freeway to Harbin Road.

The projects that are either already underway or in the planning stages in Gwinnett are designed to ease some of the traffic backups in the area. McMurry said the metro Atlanta area has the dubious distinction of being ranked on three lists for the worst metro area congestion.

One list said the area was the fourth most congested city in America, and another pegged it as being in the top 10 worst congested areas in the world, he said.

"That's not exactly where we want to be,"  McMurry said. "Those are not the Top 10 lists we want to be in."

The state is currently extending the high occupancy toll lanes in Gwinnett, but future plans also call for widening Interstates 85 and 985 to six lanes each in northern Gwinnett, a continuous flow interchange conversion at Highways 78 and 124 in Snellville, new interchanges in I-85 at McGinnis Ferry Road and Gravel Springs Road and additional limited access interchanges conversions on state Highway 316 east of Highway 20.

McMurry said the $178 million, 10-mile HOT lane extension is expected to be finished next year, and funding for the Gravel Springs interchange is expected to be available in the fiscal year 2019 budget with Gwinnett transportation officials leading the way on design and right of way.

"(The Gravel Springs) project is underway now and we're getting pretty close to being out of right of way,"  McMurry said.

Meanwhile, the McGinnis Ferry Road interchange is still in the concept design stages, and work isn't expected to begin until 2022. The county and the state are expected to partner on that project as well.

Meanwhile, the state is expected to receive bids this summer on the I-85 widening. McMurry said it will add a third lane in each direction between Hamilton Mill Road and the Chateau Elan area up at Highway 211. The state has plans to eventually widen the interstate to six lanes all the way out to Jefferson.

McMurry said the state expects the widened highway will help ease traffic headaches in the area.

"What we see when we do a traffic forecast out to the year 2030 is a 56 percent reduction in traffic delays,"  he said. "So as you're stopping and going and you're congested now, when those lanes are built, congestion will basically be reduced by half. That's quite an improvement."

Similarly, the $85 million I-985 widening will take that corridor to six lanes up into Hall County, with funding expected to be available four years from now.

http://www.gwinnettdailypost.com/local/gdot-spending-more-than-million-in-gwinnett-in-coming-years/article_f3a7d01a-34e8-510d-b96c-8b08e0519e44.html

[afguy]

A second U.S. 280 bridge will be built across Lake Blackshear, one of several construction contracts awarded by the Georgia Department of Transportation this month that will benefit southwest counties.

Other local projects of interest will resurface approximately 75 miles of roads and replace two off-system aging bridges, one that closed last year due to its poor condition.

The Lake Blackshear bridge will be built to the south of the existing bridge. The project was awarded to Scott Bridge Co. Inc. of Opelika, Ala. and has a completion date of May 2019. This is a Transportation Investment Act (TIA) funded project. It is expected to mitigate congestion, facilitate the flow of freight and connect the Cordele Intermodal Center to cities west, which could spur economic development, according to the TIA project page.

Though the construction cost is $19.2 million, the total cost of the project including preliminary engineering, construction and right of way acquisition is approximately $30 million. Georgia DOT's west central district will supervise construction. The project is on the line between Crisp County in the southwest district and Sumter County in the west central district.

- See more at: http://valdostatoday.com/2017/03/lake-blackshear-bridge-construction-contract-awarded/#sthash.CnGxD0pT.dpuf

http://valdostatoday.com/2017/03/lake-blackshear-bridge-construction-contract-awarded/

[Tomahawkin]

Any word on when the 75/575 toll lanes will be done? I drove to Woodstock today and there is a crap load left to do if they want a 2018 completion. Once baseball starts they can't have roadwork during game nights in Cobb County. I wonder if they ever considered that. That area by SunTrust park is a mess both 75 north and 285 reduce to 3 lanes in one direction. In which there should be 6+ lanes in each direction because of the truck traffic. If there is a crash with an 18 wheeler involved. That whole area will be a mess. Crashes are a common occurrence up there due to the at grade cloverleaf ramps

[afguy]

"We heard a noise and looked out the window and saw that there was a wreck,"  says Pitts. He works across the street and says something needs to be done to make the intersection safer.


"People are usually speeding when they're coming down from 7 bridges and then when they get up here they're going too fast to get off at Broadway or stop for the red light,"  says Pitts.


GDOT proposed seven different options on how to address traffic concerns in the area.

Northbound flyover, remove signal
Northbound flyover, retain signal and realign broadway
Three-leg roundabout
Four-leg rounabout (includes Houston Ave)
Retain signal and realign Broadway
Convert signal to Green-T and realign Broadway
Broadway westbound flyover, remove signal
After looking into all seven options, the DOT says a three-leg roundabout and realigned signal were deemed to be the two best options. However, the presentation says the three-leg roundabout addresses safety concerns and high speeds whereas the signal does not.

http://www.13wmaz.com/news/traffic/gdot-proposes-macon-roundabout-on-highway-247/430980252

[lordsutch]

Another week, another multi-lane roundabout being proposed. It's almost like they're trolling AARoads at GDOT.

http://www.macon.com/news/local/article145325989.html

Pretty confident the roundabout won't kill 3 people in its first five days.

[Tom958]

Gee, I dunno. To me it appears that there'll be very little traffic on the one-lane section of the roundabout because most people who want to go from Pio Nono (the northwest leg) to Broadway (the northeast leg) will take Guy Paine Road (which runs east-west to the north) and bypass the roundabout entirely. If that happens, unmoderated traffic flows from northbound 247 will likely block traffic trying to enter the roundabout from Broadway, leading to backups and possibly to aggressive driving.resulting in crashes.

[lordsutch]

Gee, I dunno. To me it appears that there'll be very little traffic on the one-lane section of the roundabout because most people who want to go from Pio Nono (the northwest leg) to Broadway (the northeast leg) will take Guy Paine Road (which runs east-west to the north) and bypass the roundabout entirely. If that happens, unmoderated traffic flows from northbound 247 will likely block traffic trying to enter the roundabout from Broadway, leading to backups and possibly to aggressive driving.resulting in crashes.

Looking at the traffic counts at the GDOT website, the traffic split is only about 2.5 to 1; since most of the Houston Avenue traffic will probably shift to Broadway the net will be closer to 2.2:1. Even in the PM rush you're not going to get an uninterrupted flow northbound - there's also a signal at Allen Road a couple of miles to the south that should platoon northbound 247 traffic somewhat.

My major concern driving around these parts is that drivers don't seem to be getting the message that they need to look for circulating traffic and yield on entry. More liberal use of rumble strips on approach or optical lane narrowing to slow traffic would probably help in this regard.

Hopefully by the time this roundabout is built (it's not in the TIP yet that I'm aware of, so I'm guessing several years minimum) drivers will be more familiar with them due to the others coming on line in Macon in the next few years - US 23 at Bass Road/Arkwright Road and US 80 at Fulton Mill should be done by the time they start turning dirt here.

[Tom958]

They fixed it, presumably when they added SunTrust Park to the sign. I am agog.



Previously:

[lordsutch]

Another week, another multi-lane roundabout being proposed. It's almost like they're trolling AARoads at GDOT.

http://www.macon.com/news/local/article145325989.html

Pretty confident the roundabout won't kill 3 people in its first five days.

Here's a rough diagram of the proposed change from a presentation GDOT made last week: https://twitter.com/RaymondTubbWGXA/status/854441659630845952

[afguy]

GDOT should have built the Outer Perimeter when they had the chance...

ot waiting for some traffic study to plot out potential routes, a residents group is pushing ahead with a look of its own at a potential roadway crossing North Hall.

"A lot of these studies don't go out and interview people,"  said Wayne Stradley, one of the group's members. "They don't drive out to see what (a potential route) looks like."

He added: "We can't stop growth in this county, but we at least should have some control of it."

The group will serve as a subcommittee of the larger Citizens Advisory Committee in the Gainesville-Hall Metropolitan Planning Organization, the Hall area's main transportation planning agency.

The advisory committee gave its OK Thursday for the subcommittee to explore the possibility of what's been dubbed the North Hall Parkway.

"Hopefully, we're going to come up with some good, common-sense ideas,"  Stradley said.

"These (studies) were done by people who don't live here, who don't know what's important to people here,"  said Renee Gerrell, another subcommittee member. "Our goal ... is to try to come up with a plan that will be amenable to most people and have a higher likelihood of support and success."

A project known as the Northern Connector came up as a concept 7 ½ years ago – and was quickly shot down.

http://www.gainesvilletimes.com/section/6/article/123210/

[J N Winkler]

Further up in this thread, there was some discussion of GDOT's recent change from TransPI to GeoPI as the front end for access to its online archive of construction plans sets.  At the time I observed that GeoPI was essentially a mapping application that had no facility for users to search for construction plans sets by project identifier ("PI number" being the GDOT house term) or by sheet category (e.g. plan sheet group 26 for signing and marking plans, plan sheet group 27 for signal plans).  However, this search functionality is now part of the general website search, which can be narrowed down to construction plans only.

Last November I wrote a script to try to elicit a complete list of signing plan sheets through the website search, but had to give up.  Later pages of results are called using the HTTP POST method with postdata in JSON format and XMLHttpRequest in the headers (a fairly typical Ajax setup), and I was getting either HTTP 500 or HTTP 403 errors because my postdata was not matching what my browser was supplying to the server and I could not find the errors in my postdata confection routines.  Two days ago I returned to the project with a fresh mind and had better results.

In what follows I propose to discuss how retrieval of new signing plans has changed between TransPI and GeoPI.

Under TransPI, which did not offer direct search of plan sheets, the logical way to begin a search for signing was to obtain a complete listing of all the projects under a given category (a category had to be selected because the search engine did not permit empty searches).  The categories available included "Complete" (basically as-builts), "Under Construction" (current projects, including some recently completed ones), and some others.  There were about 7500 projects in "Under Construction" and over 55,000 in "Complete."  Some of the 7500 projects in "Under Construction" did not have any plans sheets and in fact were not construction projects at all, since GDOT uses the PI numbering system for non-construction-related expenditure activities like transit grants, research programs, project planning, etc.  TransPI project search was buggy and would sometimes re-load the same page of results instead of moving on to the next one:  this happened with both the browser and the script, and I eventually had to write code to detect and reject re-loads.

Then, once a complete project listing had been obtained, each project number had to be checked for plans.  It was possible to eliminate some of the non-construction-related PIs by string selection on the PI numbers themselves, and projects for which plans had previously been found could be blocked out, but this still left several thousand projects to check each run, of which only a few dozen typically had new plans.  Each PI for which new plans was found then had to be checked for non-empty sheet groups 26 and 27 (i.e., signing and signals sheets).

The bottom line is that obtaining a complete listing of search results just for the "Under Construction" category could take 1 hour 20 minutes, and then going through each of the PIs individually could take a further 2 hours 30 minutes (or even longer) before download of plan sheets could launch.  I attempted "Complete" just once:  that run took close to 24 hours.  I didn't feel comfortable trying it again, and simply accepted the risk of missing projects that graduated from "Under Construction" to "Complete" before being seen by the script.

With website search as the current complement to GeoPI, however, search takes longer but is more direct and yields cleaner results without any duplicates or page reloads.  It is now possible to search by sheet group across all projects, though the categorization of "Under Construction" and "Complete" seems to have been abandoned.  For sheet group 26 (I have given up on 27 because mast arm signs are boring), there are currently 87,315 sheets out of a total plans sheet count a bit north of 1.5 million.  Loading a complete list of all 87,315 sheets 20 sheets at a time entailed about 4400 page loads over the course of 2 hours 35 minutes.  (20 sheets per page is the default; one possible later experiment is to see if the server will accept row counts of 100 or even 500.)  Then loading complete sheet lists for all of the projects found with new signing took a further 1 hour 10 minutes.  Easy!

The net result is that while total runtime has decreased only modestly (five minutes at most), the search function itself is much more robust and the risk of missing early graduates from "Under Construction" to "Complete" has disappeared.

[afguy]

One phase of the project – expanding Jeffersonville from two to four lanes, with a continuous left-turn lane from Walnut Creek to Recreation Road – had its budget adjusted from $4.5 million to $9.3 million.

The project also includes widening Millerfield Road by two to five lanes from Jeffersonville to Bristol Drive. And the new construction estimate for expanding Jeffersonville from Emery Highway to Walnut Creek Bridge went from $1.9 million to $4.3 million. The Walnut Creek Bridge project's cost was reduced from about $2 million to $1.76 million.

The changing costs are "a combination of an old estimate and changes that have occurred in the project over the course of the designs,"  Macon-Bibb County Engineer David Fortson said.

The major interstate interchange project is also high on the list, with the first major portion costing about $77 million as part of Interstate 16 that will be widened from four to six lanes.

Other major road work would be construction of a $6 million overpass and tunnel around Sardis Church Road as part of a proposed Middle Georgia Regional Airport runway extension.

http://www.macon.com/news/local/article148339359.html

[lordsutch]

The full LRTP for Macon can be found here: http://mats2040.org/lrtp/

Also of note it includes the widening of Bass Road in northwest Macon from Zebulon Road to the future roundabout on US 23, including the interchange at I-75. The Sardis Church Road/Sgoda Road extension from US 129/GA 247 east to I-16 is also in the plans (albeit for 2040), which would provide a viable route for finishing the Fall Line Freeway corridor around Macon.

[afguy]

Some photos I took today of the C.W. Grant Parkway grade separation project in Clayton County
Atlanta by brandon walker, on Flickr

Atlanta by brandon walker, on Flickr

Atlanta by brandon walker, on Flickr