I-81 Traffic Fix for Southwest Virginia from AskInventor

Interstate 81 in Southwest Virginia
Hard Questions .|. Fast Solutions

Interstate 81 looked mighty wide when we children rode our bikes on it. It was built to move freight & troops fast in case of national emergency. Well, so far we never had one so it filled up with cars. When the interstate highway system was built the thought was they were really wide... so businesses & homes built alongside, needing side access roads, pipes, wires, & signs. Now in most places the interstates can only be widened if the state kicks all of that about 100 feet to either side. Very expensive.

Is there a better path? Sure there is! Let's see. We have double decker washer-dryers, double decker bridges. Why not double deck Interstate 81? Advantages? Plenty! No side land (except for ramps) needs purchasing, no businesses, homes need moving, no 20 years to build. Minimal environmental impacts from grading (dust), noise (dump trucks) not to mention tons of extra airborne diesel exhaust. TWENTY (20) years of road construction pollution & a $500 Million price overrun can be <link> easily avoided. Don't forget rain runoff pollution takes a heavy toll...

My solution is to build an "upper deck roadway" over the length of I-81. Built specifically to handle new small light weight vehicles at high speeds. Computer-regulated for safety. It would not be just a smart road. It would be smart cars direct-linked with the smart road and other smart traffic on a smart shared network. In other words, if a car was to break down at high speeds in an instant of time all the cars behind it would take immediate action electronically to slow down. Sort of like an electronic domino being sent backwards to all the cars behind keeping them real-time informed of any traffic aberrations.

Construction of a pre-fab toll roadway above I-81 would do away with any need (okay, 94%) for buying and grading adjacent land, effectively eliminating any need to widen the highway... eliminating the need to buy out home owners & nearby businesses. It would separate the small cars coming out of Detroit from the monster sized trucks below. Building such a double decker highway completely does away with the need for buying land because such a double deck is building its own land.

My solution would enable a doubling of the highway's capacity with minimal impact to everyone involved. A system could be developed at Virginia Tech to slide the new roadbed sections into place while traffic below could keep rolling, because the new roadway would be useing much lighter alloys, new plastics. Such a toll roadway could be designed and put in place in 8-12 years with Minimal % Impact. Well, except to lobbyists I guess...

About the only negative worth mention is the prospect of a truck smacking one of the support columns. However, one way to lessen that is to use MORE% COLUMNS where each supports LESS% of the upper deck. An accident on the ground level might take out a few of the columns and yet the upper deck would be un-affected... IF it was designed properly to give levered continuity. You see, the support columns would be less support column-more traffic barrier in such a design, so that anyone striking one might live instead of hitting a concrete death.

I do not understand why such has not already been done. This idea is merely what should have been a natural outgrowth of multi-deck bridge construction, combined with multi-level thinking and multi-tasking. It is not really a new path, just the next twist to an old step: the assembly line. The Evolution from the Factory floor to the Public domain.

As a former truck driver I can tell you that truckers are used to driving in tunnels and would not object to many cars getting their own road. Siteseers, travelers and tourists would get their own highway! All would be right with the traffic separated world. However, I think you should know something else. An inventor named Robert D. Hunt (www.fuellessflight.com) has come up with a new kind of flight that uses very little fuel. Those flying cars in "The Fifth Element" and "Back to the Future" movies are now possible. Our need for roads just got lowered. Our need to put further generations in debt up to their eyeballs just does not have to happen. Interstate 81 will never become obsolete but the growth rate is going to slow. Investing mega millions in a 20 year road space improvement project that will be laughed at 10 years down the road is not Southwest Virginia's future. That would be "real-time" laughter investing in a future that forgets to come...

The Romans pioneered
an upper deck water supply
duct system. Why can't we
apply that to traffic flow?
What is stopping us?
Has our mental environment
tolled out?
Sometimes the wall
can get really tall, but never
ever let the wall win.

Woodrow Riley
Roanoke, VA
www.newpath4.com/

Still asking questions why when where, how much.