| 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-...> |