The traffic in the square of roads in front of the border station is running anti-clockwise, following right-side driving principles. Traffic moving within the station (within car parks etc.) will follow right-side rules. If it’s not clearly 100% right-side from the moment you enter, you’re asking for all sorts of dangerous situations to arise.
This image has always struck me; there’s something pleasantly jarring about viewing 4,500-year-old manmade structures via satellite imagery.
Hmm. I assumed that the traffic on those roads would be one way. I’ll have to take a closer look and see if I can figure out the traffic pattern.
It would if one carriageway ascended first on a straight section, then the other one tucked under it and then ascended.
There’s just more road when you do a loopy junction as opposed to a fairly straight one; that at least has to cost something.
I looked for the Cerne Abbas Giant, but it’s obscured by an inconvenient cloud.
I’m not sure…but even if it is, it certainly then enters parking-lot areas where a definite rule needs to be in action. And in any case, the staining on the roads suggest that most traffic proceeds straight through, so they have a single run from the bridge through to the main road, joining the right-side traffic as they leave the building area.
An ascent followed by a descent would take up even more carriageway length. My whole point is that if you straightened out the loopy junction, you’d probably find you’ve got the minimum lenth of road needed for a suitable descent. The loopy design means that the point at which the road passes under itself well into the descent, whereas the sketched alternative has it far too soon.
…Except the road already has length - essentially straight ramps wouldn’t add to the length at all; typing a great big knot does add length.
The straight ramp on the East passes through wetlands that are being drained, so it was probably cheaper to simply run the ramp out on a straight section of fill, there.
On the West end, running the ramp out straight would have brought it to nearly the far end of the (substantially larger) customs buildings, meaning that they would have had to have been moved back almost 300 feet*, making shorter access roads (along with requiring its own set of labyrinthine roadways into and out of the truck/lorry parking areas).
(And the land is currently unused aside from a single hotel a bit North. Currently, they have plenty of room to expand back toward the main road if they choose to make the parking area much larger.)
(Besides, the local transportation minister’s brother-in-law probably needed a good contract to stay afloat that year.)
- Actually quite a bit farther since whichever roadway passed over the other would have to extend that much farther before it began its descent in order to maintain the same slope.
I’m presuming that the bridge height had to be maintained throughout the crossing, either for shipping requirements, or because its construction would have been more complicated with changing heights.
They probably are. That occurred to me later.
Check out this image of some of the Nazca Lines. Unfortunately, you can’t zoom in any more, but it’s still pretty damned cool.
A hurricane perspective of the Florida Keys.
Site of the North Korea nuclear test.
I don’t guess I was aware Russia and the US each have an island out in the middle of the Bering.
It’s hard to top the Magic Roundabout. . Coolest traffic design ever.
Hey lieu, if you’ve just discovered this you might like to take a look at Google Earth . It’s free to download and uses the same base data as Google Maps, but with a whole boatload of 3D (and other) stuff added. Want to fly down the Grand Canyon? Through the streets of Manhattan? I’m sure and your daughter will love it!
Google Earth is cool, but it tends to keep shifting the compass on me and I have to keep resetting north to point up. Is there a way to lock it in?
I don’t know of one. I’m hardly a power-user though, it’s used mostly to indulge my “I Am Superman!” fantasies 
I’m sorry, but is that a golf course right next to the pyramids of Giza?
From that picture, it looks as if the pyramids are about to be swallowed up by American-style suburban sprawl.
I love how you get a little popup pointy-label saying “Bering Strait. Get directions To Here/From Here”.
Just found this: http://education.guardian.co.uk/schools/story/0,,2002927,00.html
This site is a mashup that lets you send smoke signal messages with Google Maps.