IT WILL NEVER GET BETTER.

A busy stretch of Interstate 95 in Florida's Palm Beach County is due for interchange repairs.  An Orlando Sun-Sentinel article warns, "Construction is going to make it a mess for the next 10 years, but planners believe your drive will get better after that. Really."

I doubt it.  Read the article, and you'll have all the reasons to doubt it.

Among the goals of the projects are to reduce congestion on I-95, lessen traffic spillback from the exits and accommodate future traffic demand. However, the biggest goal for Nick Uhren, executive director for the Palm Beach Transportation Planning Agency, is to improve safety conditions for pedestrians and bicyclists at these busy interchanges.

The very building of capacity to accommodate future traffic guarantees that the expressway will be congested, whether or not they provide extra space or redesigned interchanges to reduce that merging turbulence, particularly if there's no provision for tolling and congestion pricing.  In addition, several of those redesigned interchanges are of the "diverging diamond" variety, which provide additional opportunities for the expressway traffic to make right turns and keep moving, but at the expense of the pedestrian and bicycle safety the planner seems to think come with.  "The diverging diamond interchange flips the direction of traffic, so that cars are running on the left hand side of the roadway, creating deadly confusion for pedestrians used to seeing traffic on the right."  In any event, as Strong Towns contributor Joe Cortright notes, it is difficult to conceive of the crossings of major roads with expressways as being conducive to much pedestrian traffic.  Particularly (read the article for all sorts of documentation) with all those extra opportunities to make right turns, which is to say, all sorts of opportunities for the motorists to floor it and the pedestrians or bicycle riders to watch out.