FUEGO
Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
- Joined
- Nov 13, 2007
- Messages
- 7,746
We have an upcoming meeting with the Texas Dept of Transportation regional office to discuss the problems with the quarry access point to the state highway. The quarry 'driveway' is just below a hill on a two lane state road - a recipe for disaster. Traffic zipping along at 60 mph can top the hill to find an extended-trailer gravel truck blocking both lanes as it slowly turns onto the highway.
We've done some preliminary research and seen similar situations where access to the state hwy is denied until an acceleration lane can be added. That will take an extended period of time to approve, engineer, fund, contract and construct.
As I said, administrative guerrilla warfare.
State DOT's vary a lot. In my home state, they can be real sticks in the mud and fairly arbitrarily require left turn lanes and right turn lanes into the site. So the developer is stuck w/ the tab to build those. However an unnamed state to the south of my home state is the exact opposite. You can build a major shopping mall in the middle of a congested area and they don't even ask for turn lanes (let alone widening of roads, traffic signals, ramp improvements on freeways, etc).
Let's hope Texas DOT is on the ball. When discussing the situation with them, tell them you think there is inadequate sight distance for the driveway where they have proposed it. If you can get a copy of the quarry plans, take a look and propose they move their driveway to a location that would make their site work as poorly as possible. Claim that the newly proposed location of the driveway is the only possible way to ensure that the motoring public (namely your neighbors) can be safe on the road in front of the quarry site. Try to find a new location for the driveway that would make them cross a bunch of streams on their internal access road. Bridges to cross streams are expensive and getting approval to build bridge piers/supports inside a stream buffer can be expensive and time consuming. Hope this helps.
I think there's a texas traffic engineer on here - Htown?? - that may know more about local TDOT practice.