UDOT will begin construction in April 2011 on Utah’s first Thru Turn Intersection (TTI) at 12300 South and Minuteman Drive in Draper. The TTI is based on an innovative intersection design successfully implemented in other states to improve traffic flow.
via http://www.udot.utah.gov/thruturn/.
Check out the video on the site, gives a good visual of what they want to do.
I drive through that intersection regularly, it is only 3 miles from my home. My gut feeling is that the thru turn intersection isn’t going to be as helpful as they are predicting. I’d rather see road projects that allow people to take other routes to reach their destinations, eliminating the need to go through the 12300 intersection in the first place. There are already projects in the works that will do that, like the work on 11400 South.
My bigger concern is that the thru turn intersection could potentially make things worse. What happens when someone tries to turn left any way? Will the creation of new intersections (via the new lights) result in traffic being backed up even further and provide another space for additional accidents?
<starwars> I’ve got a bad feeling about this. </starwars>
6 replies on “Thru Turn Intersection in Draper”
Interesting comment, Joseph. Traffic is so interesting to me.
I’m honestly not sure how excited I will be to go “through” the intersection to do a u-turn, then a right turn. Feels like a lot of rig-a-ma-roll to me. I’m guessing this will actually encourage people to seek alternate routes in the long-run 😉
I think there should be more rotarys, myself, but I lived in (and loved driving in) Boston… MORE ROTARYS!
Yeah, hard to get over the feeling that this will be more work.
Now:
– Turn left at the intersection
After:
– Go past the intersection you want to turn left at
– Wait for another intersection light
– Make a u-turn, putting you at the back of the line to get back to the intersection you just drove through
– Make a right onto the street you wanted to turn left onto
Unless you are coming from the east, in which case you need to make a right, and follow a different set of steps.
How many people will just cut through the shopping center parking lot. A left turn BEFORE the intersection seems smarter to me than a “thrUturn”, no matter how clever your marketing…
Is this a unique intersection design or there are existing ones in US cause I think I’ve never seen that idea before?
No matter how good solution is, you should be lucky that your public services do like what is done on site you linked (especially if timeline is true), there is no way that something like that we can see here, ever.
There probably are other places that have this, but I’ve never seen them 🙂
Just real quickly I want to say that the treatment is used consistently through Michigan.
The additional intersections may not cause the delay you might expect because they are all two phase intersections so they can be timed better together.
Every time you are waiting at this intersection pay attention to which vehicles are taking up a lot of time without a lot of vehicles going through the intersection. When the lefts are redirected all that poorly used time can be given to the much more efficient through movements. Just some quick thoughts I wanted to throw out for consideration.