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- The Bus Routes Sunday’s Macy’s Implosion Will Impact [Click2Houston]
- What’s the Capacity of the Expanded Katy Freeway? [Off the Kuff]
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Photo of 2929 Wesleyan: Russell Hancock via Swamplot Flickr Pool
If you think the Katy freeway is bad now, check back in 10-20 years after the Grandparkway is completed and the umpteen master planned communities are created on what is now just Katy prairie.
Even with an expanded 290, it’s going to get real bad.
Without learning the lessons of the past, there will be a groundswell of support for a FM 529 or Clay Rd tollroad to mimic the Westpark toll road for northwest Harris county.
Count on it.
However it might be calculated, the issue of quantifying the capacity of an entire freeway in terms of vehicles per day (vpd) seems misleading on its face.
First of all, any VPD metric is for a cross-section, not for the entire freeway as a project. It is important to know whether we are discussing I-10 at Wirt or I-10 at Eldridge. There is a difference in the infrastructure between these two locations and there is a difference in commuting patterns (bidirectionality, timing of flows, vehicular types and occupancy characteristics) as well.
Second, capacity doesn’t matter except during peak periods, once the threshold for congestion has been exceeded; and that might best be expressed in terms of vehicles per minute. If capacity is defined as a volume of traffic below which congestion does not occur, then applying that to a 24-hour interval would yield some crazy high figure for daily capacity. It might be relevant as an obscure component of an analysis of a hypothetical Cat5 hurricane evacuation, but not from day to day for the purposes of commuting. They’re not doing that. Whatever they actually are doing would seem rather capricious, though.
One would think the numbers wouldn’t have risen to such a high level in such a short period considering the face that the Westpark Tollway was opened during this interval to ease traffic on the Katy. Personality I with they would rid the freeway of the toll down the middle and just open all the lanes, the Katy is I-10, which means it’s part of one of the busiest interstates in the Nation, thus a great deal of the traffic is trucks cutting thru the city not actual Houstonians, making it different than the other freeways, except of course Baytown East which is of course the same freeway, just in a less populated part of the city.