I hate feeder roads. This is a subject my wife and I debate occasionally. She claims that feeder roads are almost universally praised. They provide additional lanes to relieve highway congestion during peak usage, and they reduce traffic on city streets away from the highway.
A feeder road, also known as a frontage road, access road, service road, etc., is a smaller road that runs parallel to a highway and allows access to and from the highway. They are rare in most parts of the US, but they are common in Texas and usually lined with store fronts in urban areas. Some feeders are equipped with Texas U-Turns, a curious invention allowing travelers in one direction on a feeder to switch over to the feeder in the other direction without having to wait for the stop light.
Nevermind that feeders cost an additional $1.5 million per mile to construct or that feeders and the mini-mall developments that line them are ugly. I argue that feeders are dangerous, particularly in urban areas where freeway exits are closely spaced. In some areas around Houston, feeder roads can be three or four lanes wide. If you’re exiting the freeway and have to turn right at the next signal, you’ll find yourself having to cut across multiple lanes of high speed traffic in a very short distance. Moreover, when entering the freeway, you often find yourself jockeying for the same lane with cars trying to exit at the next ramp. As for Texas U-Turns, these seem to provide only a minor benefit that is not worth the cost.
TxDOT appears to agree with me, but the rest of the state doesn’t. In 2001, TxDOT approved a change in policy that would limit construction of new feeder roads, but that policy was withdrawn in 2002 after protest.
I don’t get it. Can somebody explain to me why feeders are worth saving?
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
As a native Texan, I’m completely comfortable with access roads and I think they make sense in towns. You keep traffic that’s turning off the highway, and thus you keep traffic lights off the highway. In part, of course, the applicability of this solution is due only to the vast amounts of space we have in Texas.
The U-turn lane is then a fairly natural consequence of having one-way access roads, allowing drivers to reverse direction without having to interfere with cross traffic.
I don’t have any data to support this. But I think they are a logical way to separate cross traffic from highway traffic. Having grown up with them, they feel completely natural.
There are other ways of getting on and off a freeway besides allowing cross traffic and traffic signals. Plain old ramps and cloverleafs, for instance, are in widespread use across the country.
The Southbound West Loop exit at Woodway is prime example (and what prompted this post). If you get off there, it’s practically impossible to head westbound on Woodway at certain times of the day. The traffic backs up from the intersection to past the exit ramp, so you can’t get over to make the turn. You’re forced to cross Woodway and either circle around at Post Oak, or head west on San Felipe. Either way, it’s a pretty good distance out of your way. It drives me nuts!
Ramps and cloverleafs work well for major streets but for access roads but don’t allow for exits for as many streets. And they can make it difficult for one exit to serve multiple streets. None of which is inherently bad, of course.
Certainly traffic backing up onto ramps is bad. Multiple turn lanes help somewhat, but you still have people from the exit ramp trying to change lanes and interfere with traffic on the access road. All of this is less likely to interfere with the highway, however.
The access road system works wonderfully in smaller towns, although at that point you can argue that the expenditure isn’t necessary.
The biggest advantage to the access road system that I’ve noticed is consistency, vs. cloverleafs and ramps, where, if there are multiple streets served by that exit, it’s not always clear how you get to the one you’re interested in. Perhaps this is just a function of my familiarity with the access road system, though.