What would happen if a major Texas highway had to shut down?

[H.Ham]

A major fire caused a bridge over Georgia’s integral I-85 to collapse Thursday evening. According to the Associated Press, Georgia’s transportation chief is saying the highway has no opening date set for the foreseeable future and no way to forecast when it might be safe enough to travel again along the major highway. I-85 is home to 250,000 cars traveling back and forth through Atlanta per day. “We will have to continue to evaluate the situation and adjust as we do,” Department of Transportation Commissioner Russell McMurry said. “This incident—make no bones about it—will have a tremendous impact on travel.”

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[august948]

Through traffic can just take the Perimeter, either east or west side.  Commuter traffic coming from the north and northeast is going to suck for a while.  They do have Marta service paralleling 85 and up GA 400.  My guess is that's going to be pretty popular, if it wasn't already.  I've commuted the back roads of Atlanta and it's a pain so I feel for those folks right now.  If I had to go downtown from Dunwoody or Gwinnett and couldn't do public transport (bus service in the ATL area isn't nearly as good as in Houston, or at least it wasn't when I lived there) I'd seriously consider taking the Perimeter around to I20.

 

As for here, it all depends on where the shut down happens.  And freeways shut down all the time for a variety of reasons so this happens frequently.  You just plan for more time on the surface streets.  Outside of town, you can take the network of FM and RM roads to detour.

 

[intencity77]

Topic posted does not pertain to Covering Kingwood section. Move to Transportation. 

[JLWM8609]

On 3/31/2017 at 5:05 PM, august948 said:

Through traffic can just take the Perimeter, either east or west side.  Commuter traffic coming from the north and northeast is going to suck for a while.  They do have Marta service paralleling 85 and up GA 400.  My guess is that's going to be pretty popular, if it wasn't already.  I've commuted the back roads of Atlanta and it's a pain so I feel for those folks right now.  If I had to go downtown from Dunwoody or Gwinnett and couldn't do public transport (bus service in the ATL area isn't nearly as good as in Houston, or at least it wasn't when I lived there) I'd seriously consider taking the Perimeter around to I20.

 

As for here, it all depends on where the shut down happens.  And freeways shut down all the time for a variety of reasons so this happens frequently.  You just plan for more time on the surface streets.  Outside of town, you can take the network of FM and RM roads to detour.

 

 

Houston has more extensive feeder roads than Atlanta, too. If a section of Houston freeway had to shut down for an extended period of time, it would help if that section had parallel feeders that were unaffected by whatever caused the mainlanes to shut down.

[gnu]

In 1995 (I think), something damaged the bridge over the San Jacinto River on the East Freeway.

The bridge was closed for at least two or three weeks, but probably longer (bad memory).  No feeder roads there, of course.  TxDot had diverted through traffic over to US90.

I believe the freeway part of 90 over the river between the Beltway and Crosby was still fairly new, it would have really sucked to have to do that over the old Beaumont Highway.

 

I was living in Baytown and working near Fondren and Westpark, so I had to take this commute daily.

Before the collapse my drive time was something like 45 min.  With the freeway closed, and US90 overloaded, my commutes reached 1.5 to 2 hours sometimes.

 

An alternative would have been 225 to 146, but the Fred Hartman bridge wasn't open yet, and the extra load on the Baytown tunnel made it the worse choice.

 

[samagon]

Freeway closures over a weekend are normal everywhere, and are in no way commensurate with what is going on in Atlanta now.

 

Imagine if 59 were severed completely right at Shepherd. That would probably be equivalent to what they have to deal with in Atlanta. That would suck.