Baltimore-Washington Maglev

Via infrastructurist: Proponents of a link between these two cities see it as the core of a much longer corridor eventually linking Boston with Charlotte, dramatically speeding up commutes between the major cities of the East Coast. This 40-mile project was estimated in 2002 to cost about $4 billion to construct and would allow people to get from Union Station in Washington to downtown Baltimore in just 20 minutes.

With 27,000 estimated daily passengers, Baltimore sees this project as a catalyst for the revival of its urban core. BWI Airport’s attractiveness to the region’s travelers would expand once it is just 10 minutes from each city’s downtown. Amtrak, which already runs the popular and profitable Acela train on the corridor, taking just 30 minutes to complete the journey, likely doesn’t find this project very appealing.

How We Get Around

Via Infrastructurist. Pictures of different highway interchanges.

The Cloverleaf - a classic, but it has fallen into some disfavor among traffic engineers because it causes weaving because cars are entering and exiting in the same lane. It also doesn’t handle large traffic volumes as well as some other configurations (for example, stacks).

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The Stack - A vertically layered arrangement of highways and connecting elevated ramps. The number of levels varies and go as high as six (though three and four are more common). Stacks are expensive to build but very efficient for high traffic volumes. This example is in Shanghai, but there are many stacked interchanges in the US:

The Braid - This Maryland interchange is a stack design, but what’s unique about it is that the north and southbound segments of I-95 and east- and westbound segments of I-695 are actually braided over each other briefly in the middle of the interchange. (See a diagram here.)

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