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Re:The Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, Maryland Has C... by hiddencost on Tuesday March 26, 2024 @06:26AM (#39826109)
I don't think that's quite right. People in Dundalk will suffer a fair bit, as will folks in Glen Burnie and Annapolis, but most people are going from DC to Delaware, and go north rather than over the Key bridge.

I think this is most harmful for commuters.

Blocking the Baltimore harbor is brutal although I suspect the passage will be cleared as quickly as possible.

Re:The Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, Maryland Has C... by dgfitz on Tuesday March 26, 2024 @08:24AM (#39826969)
I think 30-35k cars a day cross that bridge. Being local to the area, is is going to make traffic in the entire metro area much worse, and it is already awful.
Re:The Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, Maryland Has C... by desro on Tuesday March 26, 2024 @10:48AM (#39828616)
Report from CBS News mentions the bridge handled "11.5 million" vehicles a day.

EDIT: That number seemed fishy; I think the reporter is referring to the traffic along the entire I-95 corridor.

https://x.com/CBSNews/status/1772556368106450953?s=20

Re:The Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, Maryland Has C... by dgfitz on Tuesday March 26, 2024 @11:00AM (#39828783)
It is between 30-35k/day, about 12.5 million/yr.
Re:The Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, Maryland Has C... by CydeWeys on Tuesday March 26, 2024 @02:33PM (#39831218)
LOL, that figure is clearly off. That's double the population of the entire state!

Per another comment it's much closer to correct for the annual number of vehicle crossings.

Re:The Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, Maryland Has C... by dredmorbius on Wednesday March 27, 2024 @06:00AM (#39837200)
One way to assess these numbers is to conduct a quick sanity check. How many cars per minute or second would this be?

11.5 million cars/day is equivalent to :

  ~48,000 cars/hour
   ~8,000 cars/minute
     ~130 cars/second
Clearly, somethings ... a tad off.

11.5 million cars per year however works out to:

  31,000 cars/day
   1,300 cars/hour
      21 cars/minute
Or roughly a 3 second headway per vehicle. Given four traffic lanes (two in each direction), that would be a vehicle every twelve seconds per lane, which seems far more reasonable. That's spread out over the day, so peak-hour traffic would be much higher.

Peak capacity for a highway lane is just shy 2,000 vehicles/hour:

<https://www.mikeontraffic.com/numbers-every-traffic-engineer...>

Which would put the Key Bridge's maximum capacity at about 192,000 vehicles/day.

For comparison, the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge saw about 42.7 million paid toll crossings. As these are metered only in the westbound direction, actual crossings are likely double that, or 85.4 million/year, or about 230,000/day.

(The bridge sees 1/3 the total traffic of all California state-owned bridges.)

<https://mtc.ca.gov/operations/programs-projects/bridges/san-...>