Avoiding Forseable Conflicts

Introduction

Foreseeable conflicts between transportation needs and real estate development occur when government entities involved with planning matters fail to consider long term needs when they approve real estate projects so situated to significantly raise the costs of future transportation projects, with forseeability be greater for those involving technologies already in widespread use. Such situations include real estate development placed directly in the path of a new or improved roadway, and those placed close enough with a design that does not guard against increasing the costs of future transportation infrastructure construction, such as new structures placed alongside an existing retaining wall that would have to be shored up to replace the existing retaining wall.

Principles

• Greater Mixed Use of Land via Cataloging existing corridors and right of ways, including adjacent properties.
• Acknowledging Long Term Needs and Existing and Foreseeable Future Technologies
• Ensuring that real estate development respect transportation corridor setbacks for maximizing its potential via not placing relatively expensive structures too close, hence minimizing/avoiding future conflicts, such as the demolition of apartments.
• Leaving room to facilitate future transportation infrastructure construction with less disruption and lower cost, for instance leaving space to construct new slurry walls designed for decking over a roadway, along with some capacity addition, including better ramps and additional mainline lanes at traditional chock points for reducing congestion.
• Long Term Planning with more evolutionary and modular Designs
• Greater "bang for buck" with design consideration for future improvements consolidating and reducing costs per benifit.

Build a Sandpoint, Idaho Tunnel

A Google search on expressway tunnel led to discovering this.

The group, which promotes the concept of putting portions of the highway beneath the city instead of in the creek, formally asked ITD's director and chairman of the Idaho Transportation Board in April to acknowledge that an objective alternatives analysis is compulsory and needs to be redone with a more transparent public review process. More ...

This is a proposal to tunnel a highway beneath a city, as an environmentally preferable alternative to a surface road around a city's waterfront.

"Tunnels of this size, type and depth are quite common, and have been successfully constructed in many developed areas around the world," Stephen Mauss, vice president of Hatch Mott McDonald, said in a July 19 letter to Potter.

Hatch Mott McDonald has constructed some 1,500 miles of tunnel here and abroad, including the tunnel beneath the Detroit River that links the U.S. and Canada and parts of the famed London Underground.

Under the proposal, through-town traffic entering Sandpoint from the Long Bridge would descend below ground near the intersection of Superior Street and First Avenue. Traffic would emerge from the 2,250-foot tunnel near the city's former high school at Pine Street and Euclid Avenue, well within striking distance of U.S. Highway 2. More ...

West Portal - 5th Avenue Tunnel

cross section

East Portal

City of Sandpoint Idaho
Citizens for a Sandpoint Tunnel

Build a Cross Sound Tunnel

across New York's Long Island Sound
connecting I-287 with Route 135

Suggested Tunnel Configuration for I-287 Cross Sound Tunnel connecting Westchester County and Long Island, N.Y.


This would connect existing I-287 with Route 135 in Long Island.



It would be drilled over 100 feet beneath the underwater surface.

Is being proposed by Polimeri International, a family owned Garden City, LI based development company.

It would be built with private funds, and charge a toll of $25 for passenger automobiles and an upwards of $100 for trucks.

It would be a useful evacuation route- a concept that the government has paid lip service.

N.Y. State Senator Carl Marcellino (R- Syosset) has announced hearings to be held on this proposal.


Daily News article
The Cross Sound Link Project

Build a Cross Brooklyn Tunnel

From NYCROADS
by Steve Anderson

Of all the boroughs in New York City, Brooklyn is the least served in limited-access highway mileage vis-à-vis population. Sometime in the future, the Cross Brooklyn Expressway proposal may be resurrected as an Interstate corridor for use by passenger cars and commercial traffic. The new Cross Brooklyn Expressway should utilize the right-of-way along Conduit Boulevard, Linden Boulevard and the LIRR Bay Ridge branch to the Gowanus Expressway (I-278). This project should be done in conjunction with the conversion (and completion) of the Nassau Expressway into a controlled-access facility, and possibly be integrated with the long-proposed plan for a rail tunnel between Bay Ridge, Brooklyn and Bayonne, New Jersey. Strong consideration should be given to its construction as a tunnel facility. (The Saunders-Herrenknecht proposal for the Tappan Zee and Oyster Bay-Rye tunnels, which calls for dual-level tunnels for vehicular and rail traffic, may serve as a model.)

Adopted from misc.transport.road

If New York City planning were more comprehensive with pursuing environmentally advanced designs for projects combining highways and rail, the discussion for this much needed Cross Bay Rail Tunnel to Brooklyn would include a vehicular link to New Jersey, with an eastern extension across Brooklyn to Kennedy Airport.

Like the Cross Brooklyn Expressway proposals of the 1960's, this would employ the right of way of the LIRR freight tracks. Unlike these earlier proposals, this new highway would be designed to not tower over neighborhoods, nor take lengthy swaths from existing neighborhoods, nor increase localized air pollution, nor even be something that could accurately be said as dividing Brooklyn locally. Rather than building a high viaduct over the railroad, or a below ground roadway lined with new buildings (at the expense of homes), build this Cross Brooklyn Expressway as an encased, multi-level, multi-model road tunnel with electrostatic precipitator filtration technology, built beneath a new linear park for much of its length.

This railroad corridor is wide at its western segment, approximately 250 feet wide with a single rail track, and its eastern segment traverses vast industrial areas. In contrast, the middle segment is only about 80 feet wide, and is immediately abutted by residential areas that may not permit widening. Indeed, this width is too narrow for a conventional expressway layout, thus requiring a multi-level underground facility. This would perhaps entail three separate decks, one deck for expanded passenger and freight rail service, and two decks for each expressway carriageway.

A full underground segment for this narrow middle segment, and the area along Linden Boulevard would be required for noise abatement.

The project should connect directly to a new Cross Harbor Railway/Highway Tunnel to I-78 in New Jersey, with new parallel roadways to at least the New Jersey Turnpike. Such a tunnel is currently planned, inexplicitly only with rail.

It would be perhaps the nation's most needed new evacuation route from a major metropolitan area, with the greatest re-use of existing industrialized right of way.

Cross Brooklyn Expressway right of way tour- Old NYC
Cross Harbor - Cross Brooklyn Tunnel (non-multi-model rail only version)