Highways

Fun with Highways: CT 34, New Haven, Connecticut

This has been a pretty lousy day. I haven't even felt up to posting here at CatSynth. So when all else fails, a “fun with highways” post is usually in order. Tonight, in a collision of nostalgia and highway enthusiasm, we visit New Haven, home of my alma mater Yale University. In order to get there, one generally uses highway 34, either from the north where it's the surface street Derby Ave. that goes by the Yale Bowl, or from the south as the Richard C. Lee Connector, a short freeway connecting I-95 and I-91 to downtown New Haven.

From I-95 (lower left to center right), 34 is the freeway in the upper left heading towards the downtown. However, the highway ends pretty abruptly after three exits at a parking garage, known as the “Air Rights Garage” (hey, we don't make this stuff up), near Yale-New Haven Hospital.

This aerial shot is from Greg Amy's Connecticut Highways page, where he remarks:

Seems rather odd that four-lane Route 34 ends under a parking garage in downtown New Haven. Did that building get dropped there by a UFO or something?

More detail on the non-extra-terrestrial history of the CT 34 Expressway, which was originally supposed to extend west to the town of Derby, but like many ambitious projects in the 1970s never got built. The following 1979 diagram of the proposed extension can be found on Kurumi's highway site:

There is a section of empty land past the garage that marks the right of way for the never-built extension. One often ended up there after getting lost driving to or from Yale. In a 1999 article, The New Haven Chronicle (quoted via Kurumi and NYCRoads) reminded readers of the emptiness along the unbuilt CT 34 Expressway corridor through New Haven:

The (Oak Street) Connector is by far the greatest scar on the face of New Haven. Between Frontage Road and Legion Avenue, north of the official highway, you can still imagine ghosts of neighborhoods that were demolished to make way for the Connector. The older trees that used to line the long-gone streets are still there, now marching solemnly across the median, indicating the old streets' paths. The old roads, interrupted by the violent swath of the connector, remind us of this urban mistake.

Aesthetic issues aside, this is probably the least of New Haven's problems. When I arrived in 1991, the town had a rather nasty reputation for areas of poverty (particularly in the south and west) and violent crime. I always thought it got a worse rap than it deserved, and things did improve somewhat in the 1990s.

Overall, very little has changed about the town and its geography, demographics and infrastructure, and a lot of things at least looked the same when I returned for a visit in 2005. The notable exceptions included the commercial area on Broadway and York Street near Stiles College, where I lived while at Yale, and the campus itself (which finally seemed to have brought the insides of its buildings up to modern standards).

As for the highway, it doesn't seem like much will happen. A piece of the right-of-way has been sold to Pfizer, makers of Viagra and other popular drugs (I wonder how long it will take before the jokes show up in the comment section), and of course the general trend is remove rather than expand such truncated highways, such as previously discussed Central Freeway in San Francisco. So for now, this one-mile expressway remains as is:


[Greg Amy]

You know, I never did find out what that cool-looking building was…

More information:
nycroads: CT 34 Expressway
Kurumi: Connecticut Route 34
Connecticut: Highways to Nowhere

Minneapolis bridge update

From MarketWatch:

It is not yet known why or how the bridge collapsed, but Minnesota and Minneapolis officials have said the likely cause was “structural failure.”

No, you think?

I have more comments and recommended reading over at my DailyKos page. I am particularly going to watch if any of the Katrina comparisons play out. I'm also wondering if Alaska's “projects” are going to get another strong look?

I-35W bridge collapse in Minneapolis

Once again, the news intersects with our interests here at CatSynth, this time in a disastrous and tragic way. From AP:

MINNEAPOLIS – An interstate bridge jammed with rush-hour traffic suddenly broke into huge sections and collapsed into the Mississippi River Wednesday, pitching dozens of cars 60 feet into the water and killing at least seven people.

The eight-lane Interstate 35W bridge, a major Minneapolis artery, was in the midst of being repaired and two lanes in each direction were closed when the bridge buckled.


[AP Photo/The Star Tribune, Brian Peterson]

Here is what the bridge looked like for the 40 years it spanned the river:


[Todd Murray]

And here's a piece of what's left after the collapse:


[AP Photo: Adam Wolf]

Between this last photo and the first, one can see that there was a total and complete structural failure, and tragically one that happened during a busy rush hour, killing several people and injuring more. It must have been incredibly frightening to watch the bridge collapse, or be on it as the road buckeled and cracked and suddenly one ends up 50 feet down on the river. We at CatSynth extend our sympathies to those who lost friends or family is this tragedy.

Of course, people are already beginning to ask what could cause a bridge like this to completely fall apart like this? The construction on the bridge comes to mind, but apparently that was just on the roadway and “None of it would be related to the structure” [AP]. As for the structure:

Gov. Tim Pawlenty said Wednesday night that no structural deficiencies were found during bridge inspections in 2005 and 2006. The bridge deck was scheduled to be replaced in 2020 at the earliest, Pawlenty said, and legislators offered a similar assessment.

But public reports on the bridge raised questions about its safety.

In 2005, inspectors from the Minnesota Department of Transportation deemed the bridge “structurally deficient,” in data submitted to the Federal Highway Administration's National Bridge Inventory.[Pioneer Press]

I did not know there was a National Bridge Inventory. Some more detailed structural engineering (from the same Pioneer Press article):

The I-35W bridge apparently is what state transportation officials consider a “fracture critical” bridge, meaning it has at least one critical tension member whose failure would be expected to result in a collapse of the bridge…
…engineers said the fatigue cracking was a serious issue due to the lack of redundancy in the main truss system. Only two planes supported eight lanes of traffic, they wrote.

“The truss is determinate and the joints are theoretically pinned,” the report states. “Therefore, if one member were severed by a fatigue crack, the plane of the main truss would, theoretically, collapse.”

At first, the description sounded to me like the classic resonance or self-excitation collapses, as described on this site. But it sounds like all that was needed was one well-placed beam to give, and the whole thing would fall apart. We'll see what info continues to come out in the following days…

Fun with highways: San Jose

Because I am too tired to write about tonight's performance, I'll simply leave you with the impressive interchange between highway 87 and I-280 near downtown San Jose:

The Works/San Jose Gallery, this evening's venue, is on S 1st Street, in the upper right corner of the image. It's a funky neighborhood south of downtown, filled with galleries and performances spaces, many of which were still going at night – real city nightlife is one of those things you miss living someplace like Santa Cruz, which shuts down pretty early and tends to drive its live-music venues out of town.

Although close to the interchange, S 1st Street is not easily accessible from either I-280 or highway 87. The easiest way to get there from the south is to take 87 and immediately get off downtown. San Jose's streets are generally slow-moving and confusing, and even more so because of the San Jose Grand Prix, which sounds more like a live-action video game than a civic event. Needless to see, I did eventually get there, with the 280 elevated tantalizingly visible.

The performance went well and will be discussed in another article.

Attempting to exit was just as difficult. I ended up on a series of detours taking me onto highway 87 south of the interchange with no way back to 280. Instead of attempting to backtrack, I just kept going on 87, but eventually made my way home and probably lost very little in time or distance. Plus, it was different. That can be good now and then.

Fun with Highways: New Jersey's Finest

This one is pretty good, even for highway-saturated New Jersey:

Where is it? Maybe this overlay will help:

Pretty much at the border of northern and central New Jersey. The Garden State Parkway, with US 9 in parallel, crosses highway 440. To the east, 440 enters Staten Island on the Outerbridge Crossing, and eventually meets up with our friend I-278 near the Goethal's Bridge Crossing. To the west, it crosses I-95 (New Jersey Turnpike) and becomes I-287. It's really not as complicated as it sounds. Really.

Fun with Highways: Drive Twenty-Five

So this is a drive I have had on my list for a while. Why, you ask? I don't know really. I guess it's just that it seemed to go nowhere. Actually, it's a country highway that runs approximately along the San Andreas fault in San Benito County, in between mountain ranges. And a quiet fun drive into uncharted territory is exactly what I was looking for.

This scenic yet off-the-beaten-path route runs by Pinnacles National Monument in Northern California. It includes a wide variety of corners, from slow hairpins to fast sweepers, a smooth road surface and scarce traffic. [Forbes]

Highway 25 splits off from 101 just south of Gilroy. Gilroy is famous as the “garlic capital of the world”, but it has also become an exurb of San Jose overrun with subdivisions. Our friend Burbed did Gilroy Week back in March.

Upon landing on highway 25, I was greeted by the “scarce traffic”:

Oh yeah, I forgot. This coming weekend is that big motorcycle thing in Hollister, or more formally the Hollister Motorcycle Rally. The other sleepy farm-town-turned-commuter-town fills up with motorcycles, as well as the people who sit upon them, which of course explained the heavy traffic and the detours around the main party in downtown Hollister:

But it's worth a stop, how often do I find myself surrounded by handsome machines such as these?

Not to mention an interesting breed of people I don't usually encounter. It seems one needs a minimum body-mass index (BMI) to ride Harleys or other large bikes. I even picked up motorcycle-rally T-shirt for $5, figuring it would be very ironic at my next avant-guard electronic music show.

South of Hollister, highway 25 becomes a more bucolic two-lane highway, with only the occasional vehicle (or motorcycle).

Most the land along the highway is scrub ranch land, and rather dry. Really dry, actually. Hopefully no one lights a match. Here are some winter photos of the same area from Wandering Lizard, when things are a lot greener. There is barely any green left in summer, just hills covered in brown grass. One passes the occasional herd of cows and delapidated farm equipment. I can't imagine living out here, far away from any sort of town but without the “abstract emptiness” that makes the desert so attractive.

One industry that does seem to be growing in rural San Benito county is wine growing. Indeed, it is now listed as an official winegrowing region. Certainly, the character and prestige is nothing like the Napa Wine Country, but one does see a lot vines in neat rows amongst the brown hills:

A little further south, one comes to the turnoff for highway 146 and the eastern entrance to Pinnacles National Monument. I had never been to “East Pinncales”, so I took the opportunity to visit and even do a little hiking despite the 105F heat. Actually, it was a good opportunity to see the park without a lot of other people around, and to walk off some that “biker cuisine.” I will be writing about Pinnacles in a separate article.

Highway 25 continues south towards, well, towards nowhere in particular. The farming towns of King City and Coalinga are the main places to note, even though the highway never intersects either of them:

Looks like some has been taking target practice on the distance marker?

Actually, this stretch of the road provided some amazing moments of nothingness, such as these images all from one spot:



Not only is it visually stark and minimal, there was almost no sound. Silence like this is a rare occurence for those of us in more developed metropolitan areas, and when one does find silence, it is always worth stopping to listen. The silence and the landscape together were an amazing experience. I stayed for maybe ten minutes until it was interrupted by…of course, a Harley roaring by.

Highway 25 eventually ends at a very modest junction with Highway 198 somewhere in rural Monterey County.

It seems appropriate to end on such a minimal note. Heading west (right), one eventually reaches highway 101 for the return trip home.

Live from Berkeley, Part 1

Tonight's posts are coming to you from Berkeley, my home for six years while I was a grad student at the university. I was invited up for a two-day mini conference by my former colleagues at the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies and the recently created research group for parallel computing (aka “the View from Berkeley”). The interesting technical topics will have to wait for some other time – though I can't imagine the EECS faculty would enjoy seeing their research reviewed by a blog about cats…

For now it's simply worth noting that I'm sitting out with my laptop and a hot cider at an outdoor on a summer night. It's one of many things to miss from this much larger town, even as conference participants told me how lucky I was to now be living in Santa Cruz. I of course enjoy the ocean and the interesting cast of characters in my current home, but regular readers also know that I often miss being in a more urban environment…

It is interesting to compare Berkeley and Santa Cruz. Berkeley is much larger, more urban and culturally vibrant, better food, and spectacular streets to wander in the hills – stay tuned for more on that in part 2. Santa Cruz has the ocean, it's calm laid-back character, and an interesting community of creative and artistic people. Interestingly, Berkeley had little to no “night-life” in terms of live music and clubs during the time I was there. The nightlife in Santa Cruz is nothing to brag about, either, but it does have several live music venues that have managed to stay open despite the best efforts of residents to close them down – I never understand why people who hate nightlife live in downtown areas. In any case, almost every place in Santa Cruz closes by 10pm except a few clubs/bars, while in Berkeley things at least stayed open until 2am or later. I'm not sure one can conclude much from this comparison, except that either town would be a better place to live than most…

Not too much interesting to describe from a travel point of view, unless you count the Bay Bridge, which I don't think I have drivin in quite a while. There is a lot of contruction on the San Francisco approach, it looks like they might be trying to fix the remaining “errors” left over from the earthquake and subsequent demolition of the Embarcadero Freeway. With the changes to the 101 freeway described in a previous post, the 80/101 corridor might start to look civilized.

Then there is of course the new eastern section of the Bay Bridge (to replace the current seismicly dubious eastern span), which remains under construction. I wonder when they're planning to finish that…

Fun with Highways: Austin, Texas

Some of you might have noticed that this site went dark for several days. During this time I was in the bucolic Texas “Hill Country,” away from any sort of computer and internet technology (not to mention cell phone service).

Like many out-of-state visitors, my first introduction to the area was the Austin airport. And you cannot leave the airport to either the city of Austin or the countryside without vist passing through this interchange:

This interchange connects I-35, the area's only interstate highway, with state highway 71, still called Ben White Boulevard even though a large portion has been converted to a freeway. However, significant portions are still not freeway, and as I discovered there is no way to connect to or from I-35 south of the interchange without going through at least one traffic light and/or stop sign. Indeed, this interchange between Austin's oldest and newest freeways is still very much under construction:

From the impressive site TexasFreeway.com:

This intersection is the worst traffic disaster in Austin. The 290/71 freeway ends about 0.5 mile to the west of the interchange, dumping all the traffic into this substandard intersection with a traffic light. But relief is on the way. The 5 level stack is under construction. Texas 71 will be depressed below grade, and the feeders will be at grade.

Austin seems to be a city awash in freeway construction projects. Several were plainly visible from the air. Again, the TexasFreeway site is an excellent source for more detailed information.

Another freeway of note in Austin is the MoPac expressway (aka “MoPac Boulevard”), or Loop 1. Texas has several so-called “Loop” highways that must use a different definition of the word “loop” than most of us. Loop 1 is mostly a north-south highway that fails to loop around much of anything. But hey, it's Texas, it's different, what can I say? Many readers might know Texas by its reputation, which has most certainly been harmed by George W Bush and his cronies. Austin, the state capital, has a separate reputation as a liberal oasis and thriving music/cultural scene at odds with the rest of the state. And within Austin, the MoPac is known for being quite scenic, at the interface between Austin and the Hill Country, and not having the usual frontage roads that track most Texas freeways. The frontage roads mostly attract ugly strip malls and other commercial developments that were almost as tacky as the televangelist I heard while driving on I-35 south – he seemed obessively concerned with identity theft (maybe he was bitter after sending his checking-account number to someone in Nigeria?), and decrying the assumption of power-of-attorney for elderly parents as a sin. If he has any grown children, I might advise them to do just that.

As my trip to the area was for family reasons, I will not go into details, although I probably will have some photos and other items of interest to share in a later post.



San Francisco May 13 Part 1: Highways, Mothers Day, Music and Art

I definitely needed to get out of town today. A change of scenery and activity was in order, plus Santa Cruz becomes a complete tourist trap on sunny weekends like this. So north to the city we rode…Of course, before leaving, I called my mom in New York, and got the change to wish both her and my grandmother a Happy Mothers Day. I hope you all had an opportunity to do the same.

Our main routes into San Francisco are highways 1 and 280, which together form the Junipero Serra Freeway upon entry into the city. This is an amazingly scenic freeway, traversing the largely undeveloped valleys along the San Andreas fault south of San Francisco. 280 splits off to the right to become the Southern Freeway, as illustrated in the map below (pay no attention to the “official” names that no one actually uses).

Usually we take the 280/Southern Freeway route, which crosses highway 101 and empties out in downtown. This time, we stuck with highway 1, which continues north as the Junipero Serra for a few meters before becoming 19th Avenue in the Sunset distrcit. Big mistake. We got stuck in traffic all the way to Golden Gate park. Interestingly, the highway 1 freeway was originally supposed to continue all the way to the Golden Gate Bridge. The stub of the highway 1 freeway and US 101 / Golden Gate Freeway (Doyle Drive) does in fact exist, but is disconnected from the highways in the south of the city:

But they have nothing to do with today’s story. Instead we left highway 1 at Golden Gate Park and headed to the Haight district, home of the Haight/Ashbury neighborhood of 1960s fame, and more recently of Amoeba Music, San Francisco. Amoeba is one of the best brick-and-mortar music retailers left, at least here in California, and they do carry and extensive experimental-music selection. I was there to make sure that my CD Aquatic was part of it. Such is the life of the independent recording musician, I have to physically bring my CD to the stores and get them to take a copy or two. Amboeba did accept it, though there terms are, well, the are what they are.

We also paid a visit to Streetlight Records in the Castro district. I have sold a few CDs at Streetlight Records in Santa Cruz, so why not in San Francisco as well? They took a couple of CDs on the same consignment terms as the Santa Cruz store, which unfortunately reminds me I need to check in with the local shop and see how things are going. While in general these things work out OK, it is the sort of chore that makes me think about signing up with a small indie a label (or a small indie label bigger than my own). Of course, that has its drawbacks as well, not the least of which is being able to do things like the current CD benefit for TeaCup’s family.

In addition to trying to peddle my own music, I always take the opportunity in SF to see other people’s art. Galleries are mostly closed on Sunday, but I did have a few exhibitions I wanted to see at the SFMOMA (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art[/url]. The two main exhibitions were a juxtaposition of works by Pablo Picasso with those of American artists inspired by his work – I had actually seen this exhibition in New York last year – and a retrospective of American artist Brice Marden (who is still very much alive). My critiques the exhibitions there deserve a separate article, which I will probably post tomorrow. The other galleries will probably have to wait until June for another visit…


Again, we usually exit the city at the Sixth Street terminus of 280, but because we were coming from Streetlight in the Castro, we ended up using the 101 / Central Freeway ramp at Market Street and Octavia Blvd. This stub of a freeway used to continue north of Market as the Central Freeway until Oak and Fell Streets heading towards Golden Gate Park. Indeed, all the freeways, except for I-80 to the Bay Bridge all seem to empty out onto city streets.

The tiny bit that remains of the Central Freeway (the section north of Market was recently demolished and converted into Octavia Blvd, see this article at SFGate) was originally designed to connect up to the Golden Gate Freeway (also highway 101) shown in a previous illustration. This, along with the highway 1 freeway (Juniperro Serra extension / Park Presidio Freeway) and the now defunct highway 480 (Embarcadero Freeway) were all supposed to connect to the Golden Gate bridge, but all were cancelled in the 1950s/1960s due to opposition. You can see some of the early plans for San Francisco’s freeway system at California Highways and kurumi. At least one connection between the south, the Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate would have been good, but there really isn’t any way to do that without a nasty tearing apart of neighborhoods along the lines of the Cross Bronx Expressway in New York (one of the freeways in the previously blogged Bruckner Interchange, it just keeps coming back). To bring things back to Mothers Day, my mother grew up in one of the neighborhoods in the central Bronx that was rent asunder by the construction of the Cross Bronx.

Seriousness with Highways: MacArthur Maze

I had planned to do a “fun with highways post” on the MacArthur maze, which connects highways I-80, I-580 and I-880 to the Bay Bridge in Oakland:

Well, it turns out not to be so “fun” at this time. A major tanker truck crash and explosion in the southest corner of the maze. The resulting conflagration on the elevated southbound I-880 melted the steel of the even more elevated eastboard connector from I-80 to I-580, which eventually collapsed onto the lower highway.

Please visit this article to view images. You can see a video taken by an eyewitness at the time of the fire. Watch it here instead of at the YouTube site in order to avoid the boorish and in some cases quite inappropriate comments.

This looks like it was rather intense, and scary. Indeed it was rather freaky to see the charred freeway photos last night when first logged on last night. I know that section of freeway quite well from my time in Berkeley and frequent trips to San Francisco and the East Bay since then. That section of southbound 880 had only re-opened a few years ago, having been closed and then rebuild after the infamous collapse of the 880 double-decker freeway in the 1989 earthquake.

Fortunately, the driver of the truck escaped with only moderate burns, and nobody else was hurt in either the fire or the collapse of the freeway. Presumably when you see something like that ahead of you, you opt not to keep heading into it. The area is also fairly spare industrial land, so no homes in West Oakland were threatened. Could have been a lot worse, I suppose…