I live just south of the Capital Beltway, the loop of freeway that wraps loosely around the Washington D.C. metro area. There are currently two major construction projects underway on the beltway, both within several miles of my home.
About four miles to the north of me the crumbling Woodrow Wilson Bridge, which crosses the Potomac River south of DC, is being replaced. The new bridge is projected to be finished in mid-2008, at a cost of just over $2.5 billion. The politics and PR of this project have been a nightmare, but it's okay now: they have a friendly website that includes a Kid's Corner, complete with games.
The WWB is the worst bottleneck on the beltway, but its awfulness is trumped by the mess about five miles west of it, the notorious Springfield Interchange, aka the Mixing Bowl, the most dangerous interchange on the beltway. The current design of the Mixing Bowl is known to be laughably, while tragically, bad. Part of the problem is illustrated by this photo:
This is the approach to the Mixing Bowl of one traveling north on 95, the highway that stretches from Miami, Florida, through Baltimore, New York, Boston, Bangor, Maine, and up into Canada. If one has good enough resolution to read the signs in this photo, one will see that the sign on the left indicates "North to Washington", the sign in the middle indicates "North to Tyson's Corner", and the sign on the right is "North to Baltimore". After a mind-boggling criss-crossing, the lanes on the left continue north, while the lanes in the middle fold over to the left, heading west, and the lanes on the right split off to the east. Before that happens more lanes merge in from both the right and the left, resulting in a panic of lane-changing and three-lane-suicide-sweeps.
Since the beltway is a loop and this is its southern tip, all three routes eventually turn north. To the uninitiated driver, the choice of "north, north, or north" can produce a "wtf?" moment, resulting in about 90 accidents per year.
This interchange is being redesigned. The eight-year project, which is about half finished, is projected to be completed by the end of 2007 at a cost of about two-thirds of a billion dollars. The raised span shown in the photo above is part of the new design, and is not yet in use. This second photo shows another new span, as yet untravelled:
Neither of these pictures shows the spans from the perspective of a motorist travelling on the existing lanes of the beltway. Seen from the beltway, these sweeping ramps rise above a background of trees and produce a striking visual image. Seeing these deserted highways against a wooded background brought to mind a vision of a far-future time, when civilization has disappeared leaving behind a silent infrastructure, covered in vines a la Logan's Run.
What will end civilization as we know it? Nuclear war? Nah-- probably a force of nature, a natural evolutionary event, or a new strain of virus-- the Cleveland Flu.
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