Highway and Road Construction Updates

[Chester Cheeto]

57 minutes ago, x99 said:

Whether that actually improves the mess on the highway.... who knows.  

I think one way to fix the slowdowns that happen at some of these on-ramps is to educate people on how to properly enter a highway.  I for the life of me cannot figure out why people have this belief that if they don't merge before they are going 35 mph onto the highway their car will just straight up explode...

I've lived in a few states over the past couple of years, and nowhere else (to my knowledge) does this occur, where somebody trying to get onto the highway, instead of speeding up to get going to the flow of traffic, will instead slow down or even come to a complete stop until somebody on the highway slows down or stops to let the merging traffic from the on-ramp in.  Maybe this happens in other places around the states, I don't know, but to me it is absolutely befuddling. I mean the solid white line on the pavement screams *DO NOT CROSS ME* yet everybody is trying to merge before the solid white line stops and the dashed white line which means *THIS IS A LANE BUT YOU ARE FREE TO ENTER OTHER LANES OF TRAFFIC* begins.

I work on 28th Street and live just north of downtown, so I enter I-96 at the 28th street on-ramp and have to go through the Cascade interchange everyday, and I firmly believe that if people knew how to properly merge with the flow of traffic my drive time could be cut in half. That, and a third lane between Cascade and Fulton so the Cascade traffic doesn't have to even merge, but that is unlikely and I'll take any small victory at this point.

*end rant* (man that felt good )

Place some of these white sticks between the merge lane and the highway so people cannot cross the solid white line, along with some signage stating the fact that you should get up to speed before any attempt to merge would be a big help.  Hopefully this diverging diamond will help as well.

I apologize this in no way furthered the discussion for the topic at hand and that you are all now stupider for having read my rant.

[getemngo]

The diverging diamond interchange is meant to help with the traffic on Cascade, not the traffic on I-96.

As I said in the East Beltline topic:

There's nothing about [widening East Beltline] in MDOT's 2015-19 plan. My understanding is that MDOT's next widening priority (well, after the I-196 bridge over the Grand River) is to extend the 6-lane portion of I-196 all the way east to I-96, totally rebuild the I-96/I-196 and I-96/East Beltline interchanges, and widen I-96 to 6 lanes between Leonard and 28th. But none of that shows up on the 5-year plan, either. In fact, it looks like I-196 is going to get significant rebuilding work east of Fuller, including replacing the bridges over Plymouth, with no widening at all.

[Guest]

1 hour ago, mielsonwheels said:

I think one way to fix the slowdowns that happen at some of these on-ramps is to educate people on how to properly enter a highway.  I for the life of me cannot figure out why people have this belief that if they don't merge before they are going 35 mph onto the highway their car will just straight up explode...

I've lived in a few states over the past couple of years, and nowhere else (to my knowledge) does this occur, where somebody trying to get onto the highway, instead of speeding up to get going to the flow of traffic, will instead slow down or even come to a complete stop until somebody on the highway slows down or stops to let the merging traffic from the on-ramp in.  Maybe this happens in other places around the states, I don't know, but to me it is absolutely befuddling. I mean the solid white line on the pavement screams *DO NOT CROSS ME* yet everybody is trying to merge before the solid white line stops and the dashed white line which means *THIS IS A LANE BUT YOU ARE FREE TO ENTER OTHER LANES OF TRAFFIC* begins.

I work on 28th Street and live just north of downtown, so I enter I-96 at the 28th street on-ramp and have to go through the Cascade interchange everyday, and I firmly believe that if people knew how to properly merge with the flow of traffic my drive time could be cut in half. That, and a third lane between Cascade and Fulton so the Cascade traffic doesn't have to even merge, but that is unlikely and I'll take any small victory at this point.

*end rant* (man that felt good )

Place some of these white sticks between the merge lane and the highway so people cannot cross the solid white line, along with some signage stating the fact that you should get up to speed before any attempt to merge would be a big help.  Hopefully this diverging diamond will help as well.

I apologize this in no way furthered the discussion for the topic at hand and that you are all now stupider for having read my rant.

 

It's not just Michigan.  I lived in Colorado and pretty much daily people would get on the on ramp, slowly accelerate to 35-40 mph and then try to merge when they entered the highway.  I'm fairly certain these are the same people that would slow down to about 45 mph on the highway BEFORE leaving the highway via an offramp.  There are bad drivers everywhere, but I do agree W. Michigan is particularly bad.  There are a lot of Sunday drivers.  I prefer the Metro Detroit way of driving; fast, aggressive, and with a purpose.  

[wingbert]

15 minutes ago, getemngo said:

The diverging diamond interchange is meant to help with the traffic on Cascade, not the traffic on I-96.

As I said in the East Beltline topic:

That is the story but that's treating the symptom, not the cause.

[GR8scott]

21 minutes ago, wingbert said:

That is the story but that's treating the symptom, not the cause.

I totally agree here, they will fix the bridge that gets backed up because the highway is severely undersized. Realistically there should be at least 3 through lanes in each direction plus a weave/merge lane to the Ada/Lowell exit which should be a full exit for both directions! Not to mention a wall and lights along with widen to M6 and added an exit at Leonard. I know this is unlikely but shows poor planning, even though this would be relatively inexpensive because they have enough right of way property plus there would be no bridges that need to be widened. Im a nut for infrastructure and for the most part the region severely underutilizes what it has. I am talking highways, river, airport, ect. Rant over

[Scotland Tom]

Has anyone else noticed the new drainage problem at the end of the Market St. ramp off SB 131 since they widened it? My wife and I have driven through that intersection nearly every day for 2 years and have never noticed an issue. Now, since they've finished the expansion, a huge pool of water materializes at the end of the ramp and covers a good portion of the intersection nearly every time we get a measurable amount of rain. Traffic off the ramp seems to have improved, but it's like someone forgot to add a drainage inlet on the north corner. There were people in the left turn lane coming off the ramp who were swerving into the center lane to avoid the street pond this morning.

[arcturus]

On 8/24/2016 at 5:42 PM, Floyd_Z said:

There are bad drivers everywhere, but I do agree W. Michigan is particularly bad.

Yep, drive around 44th Street and notice the drivers.  Many ethnicities behind the wheel, many of whom are new to driving and it shows.  One thing all too common regardless of background - STOPPING before entering a free and clear roundabout.  

[ChevalierNoir]

On 8/26/2016 at 10:28 AM, arcturus said:

One thing all too common regardless of background - STOPPING before entering a free and clear roundabout.  

Even worse, as I have experienced twice in one week at Jefferson and Wealthy, stopping in the middle of a roundabout to let other drivers in! I know these are new in relative terms to West Michigan drivers, but come on, they're not that hard to navigate!

[joeDowntown]

I experienced a figure eight, two lane roundabout followed by a bridge, then another 2-land roundabout with entrances to northbound and southbound US-23 this weekend. I felt like a first time driver on that thing. I can't even fathom how that beast eases congestion.  

[x99]

I'll post this in the right topic this time.  An article confirming what we all pretty much knew:  M6 is shot, and they have to replace it a decade or decades ahead of schedule:  http://www.mlive.com/news/grand-rapids/index.ssf/2016/09/no_solution_for_crumbling_m-6.html

To recap what I covered in the East Beltline post, what happened (at least, the best educated guess) was they substituted a synthetic air entrainment admixture for Vinsol, which has been used for decades.  MDOT blames this on a "shortage".  The company that makes the admixture says there was no shortage.  Most likely, the synthetic was cheaper so they just went ahead and used it without ever having done adequate testing.  Now the interesting thing that I found, in my rather brief research into the subject, was that the problems with the synthetics have been known for quite some time.  There is a New Jersey DOT document from the late '90s which begins to hint that there is a problem.  You can read it here:  http://www.state.nj.us/transportation/refdata/research/reports/FHWA-NJ-2001-021.pdf.  By 2005, the feds built on that, and started raising more alarms:  https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/research/infrastructure/pavements/pccp/06117/04.cfm.  

The benefits of using air entrainment have been known since, oh, the 1940s.  https://www.michigan.gov/documents/mdot/R-54_441829_7.pdf.  It drastically increases freeze-thaw resistance.  The synthetics result in different size and distribution of air bubbles than what had been tried and tested for decades.  Basically, you get too many big bubbles that don't do for freeze-thaw resistance what a bunch of smaller bubbles do.  Somewhat hilariously, there is another 1948 MDOT study which says that the size and distribution of the air bubbles is critical, and that you want a bunch of very small bubbles for air entrainment to work properly.  So someone approved putting in hundreds of millions of dollars of pavement with a critical component altered--something they had known was critical for half a century--while having no idea whether the substitute they picked would actually work, while studies existed which strongly suggested it would not.  Brilliant.

I find this rather interesting because it's a complete and total  failure.  It's a road, and roads go bad, so we don't think about it.  But they aren't supposed to go bad nearly this fast.  I don't even want to think what the cost of a screw up of this magnitude is, not just in terms of dollars to remove and replace, which will likely be hundreds of millions of dollars, but also the cost in lost productivity, fuel, etc of the affected motorists and commerce.  And just how much more of this stuff got poured because someone thought saving a buck a yard for the materials cost was a good idea?  Checking construction dates, it seems that the concrete phases were built after 1999 -- so there were already studies out saying this might not be the world's best idea.  But they did it anyway.  It's pretty shocking just how truly incompetent this was, really.

There you go, more investigative journalism RESEARCH in 30 minutes than MLive will bother to do all year.

 

Edited September 20, 2016 by x99

[joeDowntown]

45 minutes ago, x99 said:

I'll post this in the right topic this time.  An article confirming what we all pretty much knew:  M6 is shot, and they have to replace it a decade or decades ahead of schedule:  http://www.mlive.com/news/grand-rapids/index.ssf/2016/09/no_solution_for_crumbling_m-6.html

To recap what I covered in the East Beltline post, what happened (at least, the best educated guess) was they substituted a synthetic air entrainment admixture for Vinsol, which has been used for decades.  MDOT blames this on a "shortage".  The company that makes the admixture says there was no shortage.  Most likely, the synthetic was cheaper so they just went ahead and used it without ever having done adequate testing.  Now the interesting thing that I found, in my rather brief research into the subject, was that the problems with the synthetics have been known for quite some time.  There is a New Jersey DOT document from the late '90s which begins to hint that there is a problem.  You can read it here:  http://www.state.nj.us/transportation/refdata/research/reports/FHWA-NJ-2001-021.pdf.  By 2005, the feds built on that, and started raising more alarms:  https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/research/infrastructure/pavements/pccp/06117/04.cfm.  

The benefits of using air entrainment have been known since, oh, the 1940s.  https://www.michigan.gov/documents/mdot/R-54_441829_7.pdf.  It drastically increases freeze-thaw resistance.  The synthetics result in different size and distribution of air bubbles than what had been tried and tested for decades.  Basically, you get too many big bubbles that don't do for freeze-thaw resistance what a bunch of smaller bubbles do.  Somewhat hilariously, there is another 1948 MDOT study which says that the size and distribution of the air bubbles is critical, and that you want a bunch of very small bubbles for air entrainment to work properly.  So someone approved putting in hundreds of millions of dollars of pavement with a critical component altered--something they had known was critical for half a century--while having no idea whether the substitute they picked would actually work, while studies existed which strongly suggested it would not.  Brilliant.

I find this rather interesting because it's a complete and total  failure.  It's a road, and roads go bad, so we don't think about it.  But they aren't supposed to go bad nearly this fast.  I don't even want to think what the cost of a screw up of this magnitude is, not just in terms of dollars to remove and replace, which will likely be hundreds of millions of dollars, but also the cost in lost productivity, fuel, etc of the affected motorists and commerce.  And just how much more of this stuff got poured because someone thought saving a buck a yard for the materials cost was a good idea?  Checking construction dates, it seems that the concrete phases were built after 1999 -- so there were already studies out saying this might not be the world's best idea.  But they did it anyway.  It's pretty shocking just how truly incompetent this was, really.

There you go, more investigative journalism RESEARCH in 30 minutes than MLive will bother to do all year.

 

I remember when they were trying to sell the whole idea that "Asphalt will last as long as Concrete" when they were planning M-6. Sounds like maybe they were right (but for all the wrong reasons). They also royally screwed up the bridge (was it over 96 or 131?). It sounds like they were cutting corners in multiple areas.

Joe

[MJLO]

2 hours ago, x99 said:

I'll post this in the right topic this time.  An article confirming what we all pretty much knew:  M6 is shot, and they have to replace it a decade or decades ahead of schedule:  http://www.mlive.com/news/grand-rapids/index.ssf/2016/09/no_solution_for_crumbling_m-6.html

To recap what I covered in the East Beltline post, what happened (at least, the best educated guess) was they substituted a synthetic air entrainment admixture for Vinsol, which has been used for decades.  MDOT blames this on a "shortage".  The company that makes the admixture says there was no shortage.  Most likely, the synthetic was cheaper so they just went ahead and used it without ever having done adequate testing.  Now the interesting thing that I found, in my rather brief research into the subject, was that the problems with the synthetics have been known for quite some time.  There is a New Jersey DOT document from the late '90s which begins to hint that there is a problem.  You can read it here:  http://www.state.nj.us/transportation/refdata/research/reports/FHWA-NJ-2001-021.pdf.  By 2005, the feds built on that, and started raising more alarms:  https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/research/infrastructure/pavements/pccp/06117/04.cfm.  

The benefits of using air entrainment have been known since, oh, the 1940s.  https://www.michigan.gov/documents/mdot/R-54_441829_7.pdf.  It drastically increases freeze-thaw resistance.  The synthetics result in different size and distribution of air bubbles than what had been tried and tested for decades.  Basically, you get too many big bubbles that don't do for freeze-thaw resistance what a bunch of smaller bubbles do.  Somewhat hilariously, there is another 1948 MDOT study which says that the size and distribution of the air bubbles is critical, and that you want a bunch of very small bubbles for air entrainment to work properly.  So someone approved putting in hundreds of millions of dollars of pavement with a critical component altered--something they had known was critical for half a century--while having no idea whether the substitute they picked would actually work, while studies existed which strongly suggested it would not.  Brilliant.

I find this rather interesting because it's a complete and total  failure.  It's a road, and roads go bad, so we don't think about it.  But they aren't supposed to go bad nearly this fast.  I don't even want to think what the cost of a screw up of this magnitude is, not just in terms of dollars to remove and replace, which will likely be hundreds of millions of dollars, but also the cost in lost productivity, fuel, etc of the affected motorists and commerce.  And just how much more of this stuff got poured because someone thought saving a buck a yard for the materials cost was a good idea?  Checking construction dates, it seems that the concrete phases were built after 1999 -- so there were already studies out saying this might not be the world's best idea.  But they did it anyway.  It's pretty shocking just how truly incompetent this was, really.

There you go, more investigative journalism RESEARCH in 30 minutes than MLive will bother to do all year.

 

My understanding is that the section of road that is shot, is from I-196 to Wilson,  your post is making it sound like all 20 miles of the South Beltline need to be replaced.  When driving on it you notice significant wear from Wilson to the Ford.  The rest of it seems fine to me.  What am I missing?

[Raildude's dad]

I'm not going to try an defend MDOT. They are not the organization of a 3 decades ago. They had early buyouts in the Engler and Granholm administrations and lost a lot of their experience. Lots of job shuffling goes on. They rely heavily on consulting firms as well. Consultants just move on to the next project, they don't deal with the future maintenance issues. Today on Mlive there's an article where the so called expert is blaming it on too much salt. That's BS. East of Wilson is fine. I tend to believe the material substitution is the reason. If you remember, it was a hurry up, construct M-6 by Engler. "Haste makes waste".

[elcelc]

Wasn't there also a bonus to finish early??

[Raildude's dad]

There were 7 or 8 separate contracts, i don't remember if there was an incentive in the last contracts. l did notice the research reports the previous poster quoted were done while M-6 was being constructed. No gov't agency moves fast enough to incorporate research that is is being published into current designs and construction projects. That's just a fact of life. I'm never quick to incorporate some of that stuff in my projects. I'll let others be the guinea pigs:)

[GRLaker]

15 hours ago, MJLO said:

My understanding is that the section of road that is shot, is from I-196 to Wilson,  your post is making it sound like all 20 miles of the South Beltline need to be replaced.  When driving on it you notice significant wear from Wilson to the Ford.  The rest of it seems fine to me.  What am I missing?

They had to replace or repair the bridge over the Thornapple River at I-96 due to a structural "whoops."

[arcturus]

15 hours ago, Raildude's dad said:

I tend to believe the material substitution is the reason. If you remember, it was a hurry up, construct M-6 by Engler. "Haste makes waste".

Looks like you've changed your position in reply to my assertion the state knowingly and deliberately accepted substandard materials.

'Something went wrong is wrong with that section of pavement but you're off base saying the state deliberately accepted substandard material.'

 

 

[WMrapids]

I remember that portion near Hudsonville always had some trouble when they were originally constructing it. I was younger at the time but I remember someone close to my family saying that stretch took longer to construct for some reason.

[Raildude's dad]

3 hours ago, arcturus said:

Looks like you've changed your position in reply to my assertion the state knowingly and deliberately accepted substandard materials.

'Something went wrong is wrong with that section of pavement but you're off base saying the state deliberately accepted substandard material.'

 

 

The key word is " substandard" material. Materials the meet or exceed the specifications can be considered for substitution. At this point I don't know if the substitution of the additive is in fact what happened. 

3 hours ago, WMrapids said:

I remember that portion near Hudsonville always had some trouble when they were originally constructing it. I was younger at the time but I remember someone close to my family saying that stretch took longer to construct for some reason.

The piece of I-196 west of Grandville was constructed beginning in 1972 with continuously reinforced concrete pavement. That means no expansion joints, rather they rely on extra steel reinforcement to control the expansion. That was the new innovative technology back then. It didn't work out very well. When it failed at a location, it did so violently. There were instances where the failure occurred right under a vehicle causing a lot of damage. That pavement is still all there, just covered up with asphalt. They milled off some of the asphalt near Byron Road 2? years ago and overlaid with with 250+ degree asphalt on a warm sunny day. The 200+ degree temperature change caused the old concrete with a new asphalt to heave about 7pm at night while the lane was still closed. 

 

 

 

[mpchicago]

5 hours ago, WMrapids said:

I remember that portion near Hudsonville always had some trouble when they were originally constructing it. I was younger at the time but I remember someone close to my family saying that stretch took longer to construct for some reason.

You Maybe taking about the bridge work that connected M-6 with I-196.   The engineering was fraught with design flaws, and I think the bridge(s) had to be rebuilt, causing the delay in opening the freeway at that end.   

[WMrapids]

3 hours ago, mpchicago said:

You Maybe taking about the bridge work that connected M-6 with I-196.   The engineering was fraught with design flaws, and I think the bridge(s) had to be rebuilt, causing the delay in opening the freeway at that end.   

Could have been just that, I have heard so many stories from family members. I know it had something to do with the concrete and the temperature changes.

They said something about the S-curve too when it was redesigned, something about a de-icing system built into it that never functioned properly.

[Raildude's dad]

55 minutes ago, WMrapids said:

Could have been just that, I have heard so many stories from family members. I know it had something to do with the concrete and the temperature changes.

They said something about the S-curve too when it was redesigned, something about a de-icing system built into it that never functioned properly.

The bridges on M-6 at both 131 and the west  end at 196 that are on skews had design flaws. I had a family member who was on the project who knows the facts in the issue. I also talked to 2 of the contractors who built the bridges.

  The pavement on 196 west of Grandville is continuously reinforced with no expansion joints as I said before. Thus the comments about the temperature changes. A mile of concrete "grows" 39 inches from 20 degrees to 120 degrees. At 120 degrees for many days as in a heat wave puts the slab in in extreme compression thus the blowups.

The S-curve de-icing system was the largest designed by the supplier. It was much larger than the others they had supplied. MDOT specified potassium acetate as the material to be used in the system. Potassium acetate does not melt snow or ice, it prevents the snow from icing up. So to the average motorist,. it appears the system isn't doing anything.  Last time I knew it is operational.

I am supposed to get a copy of the report talked about i the news conference yesterday. I'll share anything I think may be interesting once I read it.

Edited September 21, 2016 by Raildude's dad

[WMrapids]

35 minutes ago, Raildude's dad said:

The S-curve de-icing system was the largest designed by the supplier. It was much larger than the others they had supplied. MDOT specified potassium acetate as the material to be used in the system. Potassium acetate does not melt snow or ice, it prevents the snow from icing up. So to the average motorist,. it appears the system isn't doing anything.  Last time I knew it is operational.

Yeah this was all over 10 years ago so it could be different now. Thanks for the info though!

[arcturus]

18 hours ago, Raildude's dad said:

The key word is " substandard" material. Materials the meet or exceed the specifications can be considered for substitution. At this point I don't know if the substitution of the additive is in fact what happened. 

What we do know is it failed early and the ultimate responsibility lies with the state regardless of semantics and their definition of what's considered at spec at what isn't.  At the very least their accepted use criteria was faulty and therefore doesn't relieve them of fault.

[GRLaker]

Let's just make all of the highways solar roads. Problem solved.