A few years ago, the Colorado Dept of Transportation widened about a mile of 2 lane highway to 4 lane to make room for passing.
Great, I travel this every day.
Except, the screwed it up royally. They made the normal flow of traffic from the 2 lane go into the left lane or passing lane on the four lane. And the passing or left lane is what continued on. The right lane ended when it turned back into a two lane.
So, some people would move to the right to let people pass, some people said ‘fuck it’ since the right lane ended. This basically produced a big cluster fuck.
After many complaints, accidents and 3 deaths, they fixed it. It’s much much better now. Traffic flow makes sense.
They are currently working on an intersection about 3 miles south of this infamous stretch of road. And they are also widening it. And. They. Did. The. Same. Damn. Thing. Again.
This particular one is between Frisco and Breckenridge.
It was particularly evil because it starts in the left lane and ends in the left lane. And all the tourist traffic on it.
At least with a lot of the others, traffic starts out in the right lane, giving people a proper chance to pass.
Yep, you never know if the right lane or left lane is gonna end on the mountain passing lanes. The ONLY difference is how they stripe it and what kind of sign they put up.
Hey, they’re finally redoing Highway 9, good on them! I hated that drive when I lived in Breck, to the point of considering taking Boreas Pass whenever I went to Denver.
Most of the ones I’m aware of have traffic naturaly flow into the right lane. Automatically opening up the ‘new’ left lane for passing. It really all depends on how they strip it.
They are not doing anything south of town at the moment. I do the drive through Blue River every day. They are putting in a round about north of town. My pitting of that particular stretch may be premature as they are not completely done with it.
But there plenty of other passing zones where you don’t know which lane is going to end.