As part of the interstate expansion, main lanes will narrow from 12 feet wide to 11 feet wide, raising questions about the tradeoffs between safety and highway capacity.
I-35 lanes have been 12-feet-wide through Travis County. After the I-35 Capital Express project is done, most of the lanes — including these south of Woodward Street — will be reduced to 11-feet so TxDOT can cram in more lanes.
"When you’re driving an eighteen-wheeler, man, you gotta be more aware, more careful of your surroundings,” Johnson said, clad in a pristine white tank top."So I don’t know why — why would they do that?" "We tried our best on this project to minimize displacements; that was a top priority," said Heather Ashley-Nguyen, an engineer overseeing the interstate expansion.and federal guidelines generally require freeway lanes to be 12 feet wide, as they are on almost all highways in Austin.
Narrowing lanes maximizes available space, but makes driving more difficult at similar speeds, which could have safety implications for a highway used by some 200,000 drivers per day.I-35's upper decks, shown here at Manor Road, will be torn down and the highway widened out. TxDOT says narrowing lanes to 11-feet-wide reduces the amount of land the state agency has to expropriate.
"A big part of that is the proportion of the vehicle fleet that is made up by SUVs and pickups has grown substantially, especially over the last 10 to 15 years," he said.As lanes narrow across the nation, vehicles are getting larger. The average weight of pickup trucks alone increased by more than 62% in the last 30 years, IIHS reports. More drivers have shifted from smaller sedans to larger SUVs.
"TxDOT’s playbook has hundreds of design guidelines for their single-minded roads and highways," Sinclair Black, a famed local architect and longtime critic of I-35, wrote to the state agency when it was taking public feedback on the highway expansion."A few pretend to make their overall design safer, which clearly isn’t working."
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