Worst roads in America?

[bluedogok]

Not necessarily. They still crack and buckle under Oklahoma weather, and break up on the surface when the mix is off a little and the road ages. And when they need fixed/replaced can be very expensive. At least if the sub-structure is good, asphalt can be ground off, recycled, and used again.

Yep, all roads are pretty much entirely dependent on how well the base was constructed whether it is asphalt or concrete. A poorly done base with cause either topping material to fail quickly.

[bradh]

But if you don't put the infrastructure under the street then we can't have those wonderful zero setback buildings [/urbanist]



Seriously though, there are a lot of manholes in the road here in OKC as well, and most contractors when streets are repaved just use .50 bricks to bring them to grade, which probably fail soon after install and the cover is sunken back in. There are adjustment rings made of recycle tires that hold their shape that are great, but obviously come with an expense.

[Just the facts]

But if you don't put the infrastructure under the street then we can't have those wonderful zero setback buildings [/urbanist]

Thank you. You saved me from having to say that.

To Catch22's comment about Portland by the airport - I happen to drive down that road during the rain on Monday. There were a couple of times I thought I had gone down an abandoned road and just missed the 'Road Closed' sign.

[bradh]

Thank you. You saved me from having to say that.

I was making a joke. I actually don't have enough information to make an informed decision on what's better. Aesthetically you love the buildings as close to the street, but having so much in the street can be a huge PITA at times. Pick your poison I guess.

I'm sure you've read a hundred books on it and will now proceed to tell me how you have the answer.

[Just the facts]

No, you got it right on your own. However, if you want to talk about utility placement in relation to the street I can go on about it for hours. It is one of my favorite subjects.

[bradh]

No, you got it right on your own. However, if you want to talk about utility placement in relation to the street I can go on about it for hours. It is one of my favorite subjects.

Was it you that posted about some deal LA did with all their utilities under the streets?

Just put them in alley ways behind the buildings

[Just the facts]

I don't remember the LA thing, but it is possible. If alleys are present they are the perfect place to put utilities. If you walk around some of the alleys around downtown OKC even the power lines are located there.

[Buffalo Bill]

If you're talking about state maintained roads, it's because we're so scared of debt that we won't even take advantage of cheap credit to completely build projects that should be done all at once (235/44).

Interesting take on things here:

DOT chief: Small highway fixes 'killing our will to build' | TheHill

[Just the facts]

Interesting take on things here:

DOT chief: Small highway fixes 'killing our will to build' | TheHill

It's like we don't even have a national debt. They want to generate more revenue, but instead of using that money to pay back what we already owe, they want to use it to build more stuff we can't afford to maintain. It is borderline unbelievable, if it wasn't so believable.

[HangryHippo]

Just put them in alley ways behind the buildings

This is a great idea.

[bluedogok]

But if you don't put the infrastructure under the street then we can't have those wonderful zero setback buildings [/urbanist]



Seriously though, there are a lot of manholes in the road here in OKC as well, and most contractors when streets are repaved just use .50 bricks to bring them to grade, which probably fail soon after install and the cover is sunken back in. There are adjustment rings made of recycle tires that hold their shape that are great, but obviously come with an expense.

They are everywhere here, urban, suburban and rural. Just like I disagree with a lot of the opinions that Kerry has, in the urban area I understand that the street or alley is where there is room for them but out here in my suburban neighborhood with 20 feet between the curb and back fence there is absolutely no need to do it that way.

Manhole adjustment should be part of any paving contract, too many around here are never adjusted because you still have a 3" depression when they pick up the cones. Too many things anymore are built for trucks/SUV's with big tires never thinking about cars which in many places are still pretty common. Playing manhole slalom in the roads shouldn't be necessary on pretty much every road.

[ChrisHayes]

As someone who moved from Ohio, I'll just say this. Despite the roads not being great around Oklahoma City, they're in fantastic shape compared to what I lived with while living in Ohio. Many roads up there are in deplorable condition, even during the summer after the potholes have been filled in.

[Scott5114]

I think there is something more wrong with Oklahoma's roads than just lack of money. Take a close look at the signs next time you're on an Oklahoma interstate; often times the text will be off-center, margins will be missing or uneven, etc. When road work happens, instead of applying temporary striping as a tape that can be removed later like most states do, we just use paint and grind it off, leaving big rough ruts in the brand new road. ODOT and the city of OKC allow their contractors to get away with some really sloppy work.

[Just the facts]

I think there is something more wrong with Oklahoma's roads than just lack of money. Take a close look at the signs next time you're on an Oklahoma interstate; often times the text will be off-center, margins will be missing or uneven, etc. When road work happens, instead of applying temporary striping as a tape that can be removed later like most states do, we just use paint and grind it off, leaving big rough ruts in the brand new road. ODOT and the city of OKC allow their contractors to get away with some really sloppy work.

I have noticed that as well. Its just sloppy.

[Tritone]

Read somewhere a while back that we (Oklahoma) needed to replace our highway signs because the font was not the preferred one. It was not easy enough to read. I can see a slight difference but is it really easier to read? How much did all these new signs cost us?

At least the spellings are correct. Thirty some years ago the Hydro Carnegie exit on I 40 was signed as Hydro Carnegei. Anyone else remember that?

[Mel]

Read somewhere a while back that we (Oklahoma) needed to replace our highway signs because the font was not the preferred one. It was not easy enough to read. I can see a slight difference but is it really easier to read? How much did all these new signs cost us?

At least the spellings are correct. Thirty some years ago the Hydro Carnegie exit on I 40 was signed as Hydro Carnegei. Anyone else remember that?

sum peepol r huked on fonix.

[Scott5114]

Read somewhere a while back that we (Oklahoma) needed to replace our highway signs because the font was not the preferred one. It was not easy enough to read. I can see a slight difference but is it really easier to read? How much did all these new signs cost us?

We were never required to replace them, at least not for that reason. There's a little more to the story here, and it's something I'm somewhat familiar with (I'm a road geek), so forgive me for the following infodump on stuff nobody ever needed to know about road signs.

The font ODOT is currently using, Clearview, was shown under some conditions to be superior to the traditional font, which is called FHWA Series. For this reason, FHWA (the Federal Highway Administration, a division of USDOT) issued a document called an Interim Approval to many state DOTs and other transportation authorities allowing them to use Clearview in place of FHWA Series. This is, essentially, a permission slip for anyone who wanted to use the new font. However, recent research has indicated that the situations in which Clearview are superior are limited in scope, and that for the majority of conditions the traditional FHWA Series font is more legible. FHWA has been refusing to issue new Interim Approvals, with at least one of these refusals mentioning that FHWA intends to cancel the existing IAs at some unspecified future date.

So does that mean the signs done in Clearview have been a waste of money? No, not exactly. Many of them needed to be replaced anyway. In years past, ODOT has used basically the minimum level of reflectivity that they could get away with. Recently, with the advent of better reflectivity technology, the bar has been raised, and many of ODOT's older signs no longer meet standards. Even barring the new standards, signs gradually wear out and lose their reflectivity and need to be replaced. Also, a number of the signs bearing Clearview legends are in places where new signs had to be placed anyway (I-35 widening in Norman, new I-40 Crosstown, etc.) We did have to spend some money acquiring the Clearview software, but this expense—which is already negligible compared to the rest of the ODOT budget—can be divided among so many signs that it's basically insignificant.

We are not alone in having jumped on the Clearview hype train. Texas was an early adopter and practically every sign in the state has been switched over. Other states have been less enthusiastic; Kansas has applied it on the Kansas Turnpike but not anywhere else, and Missouri hasn't used it at all. Likewise, many city governments have opted to use the traditional fonts; Norman has never used Clearview on any city-owned signs.

That being said, the Clearview fonts have some design quirks that tend to make ODOT/contractor sloppiness more apparent. The lowercase Ls are taller than the uppercase letters, for instance, which means that they whiff the vertical alignment sometimes. There is something about Clearview's kerning that appears to be difficult to get right (the signs on the newly-widened section of Highway 9 in East Norman are a good example of this). Also, there are some rather technical rules on where Clearview should and shouldn't be used, which are derived from the above-mentioned studies, all of which ODOT simply disregards. (Not that disregarding rules is anything new for them; technically, almost all of US-377 in Oklahoma was never approved, but ODOT just sent the sign truck out anyway.)

At least the spellings are correct. Thirty some years ago the Hydro Carnegie exit on I 40 was signed as Hydro Carnegei. Anyone else remember that?

Spelling errors are a time-honored ODOT tradition. Back in the 90s, there was a sign installed that referred to "Lindsay St" in Norman (a little green square patch with an "e" was added a couple of weeks later). And there's still signs up on I-40 referring to the "Infant Jesus of Praque" and on SH-152 referring to "Cordel".

Then there's this, which I have no explanation for. Money alone can't fix an agency that would OK something like this.

[Jim Kyle]

They should focus on replacing and fixing existing roads prior to widening ANY ROAD.

I fixed it for you. :3

And I fixed it again. No point in adding more paving, either by widening or by lengthening, when we can't maintain what we already have.

[Jim Kyle]

The explanation is quite simple. The guy who wrote the work order suffered from dyslexia, not at all a handicap when working for Oklahoma's Dysfunctional Office of Transportation...

[Tritone]

Scott5114,

Thanks for the info.

[Spartan]

Whenever I am back in OKC I am always surprised at the smooth, wide luxurious lanes of OKC's streets and the lack of traffic anywhere but a few spots.

[Scott5114]

I'm no expert on traffic in particular, but my guess is the lack of traffic is mostly due to the fact that Oklahoma City operates on a near-perfect, evenly spaced grid rather than anything the city has done in particular. That makes it easy for drivers to average out traffic and dodge jams. If Penn backs up, you can just cut over to May or Western to get around it. We have few geographical features that cause choke points (the only real one is the Oklahoma River, and there are enough bridges over it that it's usually not a real issue).

Our freeway system also flows well in comparison to most cities because it was fully built out as it was designed. Many other cities had at least one segment of their freeway system cancelled due to community opposition or cost. As a result, the system can't work as designed, and the traffic that would be on the cancelled segment has to shift to other roads, overloading them. OKC never had to compensate for this, so our Interstates operate efficiently for the most part; the only snags tend to be caused by outdated intrasystem interchanges (which are slowly being corrected).

[catch22]

Thanks Scott.

I never noticed a difference in fonts compared to out of state. Can anyone post some side by side examples of each?

[Spartan]

I'm no expert on traffic in particular, but my guess is the lack of traffic is mostly due to the fact that Oklahoma City operates on a near-perfect, evenly spaced grid rather than anything the city has done in particular. That makes it easy for drivers to average out traffic and dodge jams. If Penn backs up, you can just cut over to May or Western to get around it. We have few geographical features that cause choke points (the only real one is the Oklahoma River, and there are enough bridges over it that it's usually not a real issue).

Our freeway system also flows well in comparison to most cities because it was fully built out as it was designed. Many other cities had at least one segment of their freeway system cancelled due to community opposition or cost. As a result, the system can't work as designed, and the traffic that would be on the cancelled segment has to shift to other roads, overloading them. OKC never had to compensate for this, so our Interstates operate efficiently for the most part; the only snags tend to be caused by outdated intrasystem interchanges (which are slowly being corrected).

Also no expert in traffic planning either, but I agree with this. Our freeway network is pretty much tops.

[Scott5114]

Thanks Scott.

I never noticed a difference in fonts compared to out of state. Can anyone post some side by side examples of each?

Sure, I've got you. The first one is a drawing I did just now (I didn't bother to follow the MUTCD specifications to the letter when it comes to letter height and such, so the exit tab is a little goofy-looking, but I did at least glance at them, which is more than ODOT does, probably). The font size is nominally equivalent on both, but Clearview appears "larger" because its lowercase letters are larger in comparison to the uppercase letters. Clearview also has larger "counter spaces" (the negative space inside the o, a, and d are larger than on the FHWA Series example). This is done to reduce what is called halation, which is when bright lights on reflective surfaces cause lighter colors to appear to "bleed" into the darker areas (imagine a fuzzy halo around the characters and you get the idea). While this works well on white-on-green applications like this, it has the opposite effect in dark-on-light-background applications, with the light background washing out the text. FHWA only approved Clearview for light-on-dark applications, but getting 50 state DOTs to actually follow the rules has proven challenging.




The photo is from I-35 in Payne County. Somehow this sign assembly came out with FHWA Series E-Modified on the left panel and Clearview on the right, even though they both were installed at the same time. (The exit tab and the digits on the SH-51 shield are in FHWA Series fonts, as is recommended by FHWA, even for signs that are primarily in Clearview.) This sign is an excellent example of ODOT sloppiness in action: notice how badly "Wichita" is off-center, and the unnecessary inclusion of "Jct" on the right panel (if there was no junction, there would be no sign here, and even if there was a need for "Jct" to be here, it's supposed to be in all caps, like NORTH over there). Lane arrows do a bad job at lining up with the lanes they're referring to. You'll also spy black text set in Clearview on a yellow background—this is an example of one of those dark-on-light-background applications I was talking about above that aren't allowed by the Interim Approval.

If you commute any distance on Oklahoma City's freeways at the moment, you'll almost certainly see both fonts. I-35 in Norman, for example, is a Clearview zone, but once you hit Indian Hills Road and pass into Moore, you'll start to see slightly older FHWA Series signs, with random Clearview panels here and there. You don't get to a particularly Clearview-heavy area again until you reach the Dallas Junction, and if you continue on I-235, you have all Clearview all the time (particularly badly-done Clearview too—not all the letters are even the same size!) until you reach the Broadway Extension.

As with all things aesthetic, there is some degree of personal taste to it. I personally prefer the traditional fonts, so I will be rather happy the day FHWA revokes the Interim Approval. In the meantime, some states are dumping Clearview early; I read recently that Iowa has transitioned back to the old fonts after using Clearview for a few years.