MOTORWAY WIDENING

Motorway widening: Adding capacity to highways with minimal impact



Motorway Widening: Adding capacity to highways with minimal impact

Introduction

In recent years, especially in the early nineties, the increases in demand for transport have caused road traffic, particularly in larger cities more congestion, delays, accidents and environmental problems has been experienced. This is due to the explosive growth that has increased as increase purchasing power of middle income families improved. This has also increase traffic on the road which results in additional road constructions which is not possible. Hence, adding lanes within the road might be useful as it will increase the speed of traffic along with less over-crowding traffic. This paper will focus on Motorway widening i.e. Adding capacity to highways.

Discussion

Roads with narrow road lanes constitute of many accidents that occur quite frequently with increasing traffic. The narrow roadway provides the driver with much less space to maneuver and control the vehicle and thus fewer opportunities to evaluate the erroneous actions than broad roadway. In particular, with such maneuvers as braking, passing with counter movement, turns and turns and overtaking area available roadway is essential for normal movement and the possibility of preventing accidents. Cyclists & Pedestrians are too has much lesser room for movement during the narrow roadway, wider than the roadway, especially at high intensity of vehicular traffic (www.bettertransport.org.uk/).

The intention of improvement in cross section road is proposed to grant the entire traffic enhanced safety margin, in particular through expanding roadway, a safety strip, adding more lanes on the roads & the unit of median between opposing streams of cars. Another important aim of cross-section road improvement is to boost the road capacity.

Description of event

Under the transverse profile of the road, it is easy to understand the cross-section. The elements of the cross section road are:

The road includes roadside roadway and safety strip. Safety strip is suitable for the passage of the space between the frame of the roadway and shoulder. Carriage-way comprises of more than one lane that are usually isolated lines marking (marking the centre line on a two-lane road). The average of the median can be in the form of the shaft from the soil or turf V-shaped profile or on the fence installed (Cummings M., 1991, pp. 171).

Through improvement in the cross-section road, it is importance to understand the following:

Enhancing the no #of lanes;

Enhancing the roadway width;

Increase in width of the lane;

Device overtaking lanes (one-way or two-way);

Band device security;

Increase the bandwidth of security;

Simultaneous change in the width of the lane and the bandwidth of security;

Unit of the median;

Installation of curbs on the dividing strip and increase the width of the median;

Increasing the width of the carriageway on the bridges (bridge size).

Impact on accident

Increasing the no #of lanes

Influence of the no #of lanes of traffic safety has been studied in Norway (project team Nordtip, 1980; Muskaug, 1981, 1985; Blakstad og Giaever, 1989), Denmark (Thorson og Mouritsen, 1971; Andersen, 1974, 1977; Road Office, 1980; Krenk, 1985) and the USA (Kihlberg Tharp, 1968; Rogness, Fambro Turner, 1982; Harwood, 1986; Levine, ...