Innovation 101

This simple idea was developed back in 1996.  At time, the design was stipulated when seeing the grannies (with or without wheelchairs) trying to cross a road to a hospital.  They already took a taxi to the nearest point to a hospital or clinic.  However, they still needed to cross the road to reach there.  They either had to walk through the pedestrian tunnels or flyovers with so many steps up and down or to take the risk to cross somewhere without fence along the road.  This comes to a question: is that a must for pedestrian to walk up stairs or should let the vehicles do the up-slope?  So a concept begins ……

The purpose of the design is trying to solve the problem stated below:

1.  In the cross way, vehicles and pedestrians are always competing for the use of the road.  This is dangerous for all of the crossway users.

2.  In general, the solution for the crossway to maintain the order (without considering the convenience of the users) is like that:

• Installation of Traffic Lights.  But this did not solve the problem completely.  If the control for the traffic lights are not adaptive, the efficiency of the traffic flow will be reduced substantially.  And reckless drivers or pedestrian still may cause accident without somebody hurt.
• Installation of pedestrian flyover or tunnels.  This solution causes pedestrian to walk up and down of long stairways.  In British influence countries, double deck buses are on the road.  That means, the pedestrian flyovers have to be at least 2 stories high.  And because of the service buried under the road, that also means, the pedestrian tunnels have to be 2 to 3 stories deep.  And this is not very welcomed by pedestrian although sometimes it is the only solution if space is not allowed.

3.   With this design, just elevating the road for vehicles for two to three meters from the ground.  This achieves the complete separation of vehicles and pedestrian.  And the pedestrian will have less incentive of crossing the road with vehicle traffic as that of pedestrian tunnels and flyovers.

The design:

• Utilizing metal structure to pre-fabricate the components.  The Junction Flyover should stand more than 80 to 100 tons static load per lane (which is more than the load of 3 double deck buses). 
• The time for the installation of this flyover should be around 8 to 10 hours and with a few more hours for testing and commissioning.
• The cost of the whole project should be less than US$ 2 million.

Possible advantages of this system:

• No need to build high rising flyover for vehicles.
• Pedestrian just walk on flat level, no need to walk up or down stair way.  More convenient for pedestrian. 
• Pedestrian and Vehicles are separate completely.  The traffic light will only cater for controlling vehicles traffic.  The efficiency of traffic flow should be increased significantly.
• Other space under the flyover could be utilized for facilities repair spots such as telephone switch boxes, main water pipe valves, gas main valves, etc.
• For long straight main road, with this junction flyover, this may discourage speeding because it will be bumpy when passing through the junction at high speed.

Possible disadvantages of this system:

• The vehicles may use more energy because there are small up-hill slopes.
• Straight road become bumpy.  This may be an advantage as state earlier.
• Pedestrian may need to walk a bit farther to cross the road because the elevated road for vehicles may block some part of the road.

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