Alternative Intersections/Interchanges in Commerial Areas: Applications, Misconceptions and Benefits

• Authored by:  Tony Lau
• Event:  2016 International Conference S. Africa

Alternative Intersections/Interchanges in Commerial Areas: Applications, Misconceptions and Benefits – Tony Lau, Utah Department of Transportation, USA  
pdf (968KB)
paper (632KB)

Salt Lake City, Utah, USA has been at the forefront of implementing alternative intersections/interchanges (AII) to address transportation capacity concerns instead of expanding by adding additional lanes. Access management, particularly around an AII often involves restricting or eliminating movements to the nearby land uses. The result has been that an AII can be viewed negatively by commercial developers and property owners in the immediate vicinity. While an AII is typically viewed as being more access restrictive, if designed with access in mind, they can be mutually beneficial to the nearby properties and the operation of the roadway network/intersection. Early Utah projects are compared to more recent projects where continuous flow intersections (CFI) and ThrU Turns have been implemented. In addition, before and after examples of Utah CFI and ThrU Turn projects are presented in this paper and explore the lessons learned through successive implementations of the various AII projects. The result is a summary on how access management can be approached and discussed with developers and property owners to minimize the negative perception while still maintaining the goals of access management for capacity preservation and crash reduction.