Project Feedback

Having been in the Highway Design based industry for over 40 years, I have generally had little feedback on a project once it was completed. Most of my project work has been with DOT Projects and even the non-DOT ones were usually road projects.

What is even more rare, is unsolicited feedback from a project that had been opened to traffic for a decade or more. Early in my career, after being promoted to a Project Engineer at MD State Highway Administration, I was assigned a project to retrofit the interchange at I-95 at I-495 to make one of its legs a more direct and higher speed movement. The original design had been developed when it was thought that I-95 would continue through its intersection with I-495 and eventually link up with what is now I-395 in DC. When that plan was stopped, the interchange became one with three ways to get to the two directions of I-495. The South to West movement was a direct outside ramp and function well, as it carried lesser volumes. The South to East movement could be traversed by one of two routes: a loop ramp or by a movement that could best be described as a U-Turn. This movement experienced heavier volumes, and the loop ramp was not designed to handle those volumes, so the U-Turn option was added at the no longer needed south stub of the interchange to help with the overflow.

This resulted in potentially confusing signage. My future feedback would come with the post-construction configuration and its signage, however.

The design was straight forward, the situation, not so much. The new south to east movement would be a two-lane fly-over ramp that exited in the median of I-95 and merged into the median of I-495. And at that odd U-turn, a park-n-ride lot would be built. The one complicating issue with the design, was the close proximity to the next exit on southbound I-495 for US Rte. 1. It would be unsafe to expect or even allow vehicles to make the move from the new ramp, across four lanes of I-495 to make the next exit. The design was enhanced to extend the existing collector-distributor road at that exit so as to preclude those traffic movements. This portion of the design required the original loop ramp be retained to accommodate the southbound traffic that needed to use the US Rte. 1 exit. And, to complicate issues further, a truck weigh station was added to the area where the park-n-ride was planned. Needless to say, once construction was completed, the new signage would not be much less complicated than the original signage.

It was this new signage that resulted in my unsolicited feedback years later from an equally unlikely source. I had recently started dating a woman who lived north of Baltimore, and I was living in Beltsville MD just off of the aforementioned US Rte. 1 exit. After many trips, up I-95 for our dates, it was now her turn to make the trip south on I-95 to my neck of the woods. This meant she would be taking the reconstructed interchange and be required to follow the signage to exit at US Rte.1. The interchange includes some advance signage to assist vehicles to navigate into the proper lanes depending upon their destination. As she encountered these, I received a phone call requesting guidance. (This was before she had a cell phone with GPS capabilities.) As I tried to explain which lane she needed to be in to easily arrive at the proper ramp, her frustration got the best of her, and she exclaimed "What idiot designed this project!" From this point on, all she heard from me was a loud, laughing fit, which only added to her frustration. She knew what I did for a living but had no idea that she was on the phone with the "idiot"!

She did make the proper exit, we had our date, and this August we will celebrate our 16th wedding anniversary.