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A freeway (also motorway or expressway) is a type of highway that is designed for safer high-speed operation of motor vehicles through the elimination of at-grade intersections. This is accomplished by imposing full control of access from adjacent properties and eliminating all cross traffic with grade separations and interchanges, and no railroad crossings. Such highways are usually divided with at least two lanes in each direction. Because traffic never crosses at-grade, there are generally no traffic lights or stop signs. The word freeway is also used to describe a highway without tolls. Note: Expressway has other meanings, and motorway typically applies only to those roads designated as motorways by the national highway agency. Thus this article will primarily use the term freeway for clarity and conciseness. The terms controlled access and limited access are also used, but both terms can also apply to arterial roads with partial control of access or even city streets to which the city restricts curb cuts. Despite the name, a freeway can be a toll road. General characteristics
Access restrictions
Special classification In many countries, a national network of freeways has special status with respect to funding, signage, construction standards or access. For instance, motorways in the United Kingdom are the only roads from which slow vehicles can be banned, and are assigned labels beginning with M and special blue signs. Normal highways (A roads) built to freeway standards are open to all traffic and use green signs. Effects and controversy Freeways have been constructed both between urban centres and within them, making common the style of sprawling suburban development found near most modern cities. As well as reducing travel times, the ease of driving on them reduces accident rates, though the speeds involved also tend to increase the severity and death rate of the collisions that do still happen. Freeways have been heavily criticized by environmentalists and preservationists for the noise, pollution, and economic shifts they bring. Additionally, they have also been criticized by the driving public for the inefficiency with which they handle peak hour traffic. Often, rural freeways open up vast areas to economic development, generally raising property values. But mature freeways in urban areas are quite often a source of lowered property values, contributing to the deleterious effects of urban blight. One major problem is that even with overpasses and underpasses, freeways tend to divide neighborhoods — especially impoverished ones where residents are less likely to own a car that could easily take them around the freeway. For these reasons, almost no new urban freeways have been built in the U.S. since 1970. Some have even been demolished and reclaimed as boulevards, notably in Portland (Harbor Drive), San Francisco (Embarcadero Freeway) and Milwaukee (Park East Freeway). Growing anti-urban freeway sentiment has resulted in some significant policy changes; the most noteworthy was an FHWA case study involving the West Side Highway in Manhattan, a quintessential urban freeway in need of expansion and reconstruction. The outcome of the study basically concluded that the current elevated highway should be replaced with a new, at-grade boulevard with integrated pedestrian facilities. This case study may be a precedent for areas where a typical, elevated urban freeway is not desirable and/or may not be effective at handling impacted traffic. In Boston, Massachusetts, the elevated Central Artery, originally built in the 1950s, was demolished in 2005 when new tunnels were built for an expanded Central Artery directly beneath the pre-existing elevated highway. Completion of the project, referred to as the Big Dig allowed Boston to reunite its business district with the waterfront, severed by the original elevated Central Artery, while maintaining the expressway through downtown, now located underground. Freeway opponents argue that freeway expansion is self-defeating, in that expansion will just generate more traffic. That is, even if traffic congestion is initially shifted from local streets to a new or widened freeway, people will begin to run errands and commutes to more remote locations which took too long to reach in the past. Over time, the freeway and its environs will become congested again as both the average number and distance of trips increase. This controversial idea is known as the induced demand hypothesis. Freeway advocates argue that properly designed and maintained freeways are aesthetically pleasing, convenient, and safe, at least in comparison to the uncontrolled roads they replace or supplement, and that they expand recreation, employment and education opportunities for individuals and open new markets to small businesses. And for many, uncongested freeways are fun to drive. At present, freeway expansion has largely stalled in the United States, due to a multitude of factors that converged in the 1970s: higher due process requirements prior to taking of private property, increasing land values, increasing costs for construction materials, local opposition to new freeways in urban cores, the passage of the National Environmental Policy Act (which imposed the requirement that each new project must have an environmental impact statement or report), and falling gas tax revenues as a result of the nature of the flat-cent tax (it is not automatically adjusted for inflation) and the tax revolt movement. History The concept of limited-access automobile highways dates back to the New York City area Parkway system, whose construction began in 1907–1908; but parkways are traditionally distinguished from freeways by lower design speeds and a ban on commercial traffic. Designers elsewhere also researched similar ideas, especially in Germany, where the Autobahn would become the first national freeway system. However, in 1925, Italy was technically the first country to build a freeway, which linked Milan to Lake Como. It is known in Italy as the Autostrada dei Laghi. Meanwhile, in England, the related concept of the motorway was first proposed by Sidney Webb in a 1910 book, The King's Highway, but was not formally embraced by the government until the passage of the Special Roads Act 1949. In 1926, the English intellectual Hilaire Belloc recognized the necessity of grade-separated roads for "rapid and heavy traffic", but thought they would be the exception rather than the rule: The creation of a great network of local highways suitable for rapid and heavy traffic is impossible. Even if the wealth of the community increases, the thing would be impossible, because it would mean the destruction of such a proportion of buildings as would dislocate all social life. The word "freeway" first surfaced in the mid-1930s in proposals for the improvement of the New York City parkway network. The first long-distance rural freeway in the United States is generally considered to be the Pennsylvania Turnpike, which opened on October 1, 1940. The Turnpike was so advanced for its time that tourists even had picnics in the median (that is, after it was already open to traffic) and local entrepreneurs did a brisk business in souvenirs. It was designed so that straightaways could handle maximum speeds of 102 miles per hour, and curves could be taken as fast as 90. Shortly thereafter, on December 30, 1940, California opened its first freeway, the Arroyo Seco Parkway (now called the Pasadena Freeway) which connected Pasadena with Los Angeles. And in 1942, Detroit, Michigan opened the world's first urban depressed freeway, the Davison Freeway. Meanwhile, traffic in Los Angeles continued to deteriorate and local officials began planning the huge freeway network for which the city is now famous. Today, many freeways in the United States belong to the extensive Interstate highway system (most of which was completed between 1960 and 1990). Nearly all Interstate highways are freeways. The earlier United States highway system and the highway systems of U.S. states also have many sections that are built to controlled-access standards (though these systems are mostly composed of uncontrolled roads). Only a handful of sections of the Interstate system are not freeways, such as I-81 as it crosses the American span of the 2-lane Thousand Islands Bridge and a segment of Interstate 93 through Franconia Notch, New Hampshire that is a 2-lane road with partial access control. Recent developments Outside the U.S., many countries continue to rapidly expand their freeway networks. Examples include: Australia, Canada, Chile, the People's Republic of China, Croatia, France, India, Israel, Mexico, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippines, Spain and Taiwan. Australia and France in particular have been innovative in using the newest tunneling technologies to bring freeways into high-density downtowns (Sydney and Melbourne) and historic rural areas (Versailles). China already has the world's second largest freeway network in terms of total kilometers and will probably overtake the U.S. well before 2025. In Australia, the city of Adelaide pioneered the concept of a dedicated reversible freeway. The M2 expressway runs toward the city in the morning and out of the city in the evening. Its ramps are designed so that they can double as on- or off-ramps, depending upon the time of day. Gates and electronic signage prevent motorists from driving in the wrong direction. Meanwhile, major progress has been made in making existing U.S. freeways and expressways more efficient. Experiments include the addition of high-occupancy vehicle lanes (HOV lanes) to discourage driving solo, and building new roads with train tracks down the median (or overhead). California's Caltrans has been very innovative in squeezing HOVs into limited right-of-way (by elevating them), and in building special HOV-only ramps so that HOVs can switch freeways or exit the freeway without having to merge across regular traffic. Many states have added truck-only ramps or lanes on heavily congested routes, so that cars need not weave around slow-moving big rigs. Intelligent transportation systems (ITS) are also increasingly used, with cameras to monitor and direct traffic, so that police, fire, ambulance, tow, or other assistance vehicles can be dispatched as soon as there is a problem, and to warn drivers via variable message signs, radio, television, and the web to avoid problem areas. Research has been underway for many years on how to partly automate cars by making smart roads with such things as buried magnets to guide sensor-equipped vehicles, with on-board GPS to determine location, direction, and destination. While these systems may eventually be used on surface streets as well, they are most practical in a freeway setting. Public-private partnerships in the United States Until the late 1990s, funding of construction and maintenance of the Interstate Highway System was by the national gasoline tax. Additionally, the original Highway Act of 1956 prohibited states from collecting tolls on Interstate-funded expressways. As more miles of expressways were completed, the cost of maintaining the infrastructure increased dramatically. A major issue that has slowed new expressway constructing in America has been the application of highway funds to maintaining and repairing existing infrastructure. Most of the expressways in America are near or have exceeded their deisgned life span, which necessitates replacing of bridges and overpasses and reconstruction of the driving surfaces on many expressways nationwide. To address the issue of lack of funding for new expressways and maintenance of existing roads, legislation enacted in 1998 gives states greater flexibility in funding major highway projects. Specifically the legislation, known as TEA-21 in official documents, authorizes states to add tolls to Interstate-funded expressways. Additionally, it gave states the latitude to enter into public-private partnership P3 arrangements to facilitate expansion and maintenance of the expressway network. Texas, Florida, and California quickly took advantage of the TEA-21 legislation and began on massive projects to expand their respective states' expressway networks, complementing existing interstate expressways with privately funded and operated toll expressways. In 2004 and 2005, Illinois and Indiana joined the club of states looking to private sector investment for expanding and maintaining expressways. Meanwhile in New York and Massachusetts, the respective state public authorities that operate the New York State Thruway and Massachusetts Turnpike have generated enough revenue to assume maintenance of other expressways beyond the roads on which tolls are collected. The Massachusetts Turnpike Authority provided more than 50 percent of the funding to complete the Big Dig project in Boston, and later assumed responsibility for operating the Central Artery, the Sumner Tunnel, and the Callahan Tunnel following the project's completion in 2005. As federal funding dries up for expanding and maintaing America's expressway network, states are looking to innovative solutions using a combination of state and federal funding, toll collection through public authorities, and private sector investment. In the United States, a few short privatized tolled freeways have also been built by private companies with mixed success. See also Gallery of freeways around the world Image:TullamarineFwy.jpg|The "Sound Tube", CityLink Tollway, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Image:Autopista-Central-2.jpg|Autopista Central, Santiago, Chile. Image:AutopistaLibertadores.JPG|Autopista Los Libertadores, (International Freeway) Santiago, Chile Image:Queensway east of Riverside Drive Ottawa.jpg|Highway 417 (The Queensway) in Ottawa, Ontario Image:376 east.jpg|Interstate 376 eastbound in downtown Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Image:Motorvag - bild.jpg|Europeway E6 E20 in southwest Sweden in Varberg Image:Old_Autobahn_DE.jpg|An older German Autobahn without an emergency lane Image:Lowry_Hill_Tunnel.jpg|Interstate 94 entering the Lowry Hill Tunnel in Minneapolis, Minnesota Image:Near Kamshet 2 tunnel on Mumbai Pune Expressway.JPG|Near Kamshet 2 tunnel on the 6-lane Mumbai-Pune Expressway Image:Highway1-cassiar-southbound.jpg|The British Columbia portion of the Trans Canada Highway in Vancouver, British Columbia. Image:Alessandria-L'autostrada_A-26-tratto_appenninico.jpg|The Italian Autostrada A26 while it enters a tunnel crossing northern Apennines | |||||||||||
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