M60 Junction 18 Simister Island Interchange

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Truvelo
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Re: M60 Junction 18 Simister Island Interchange

Post by Truvelo »

Here it is. The only thing in the way is a golf course. Maybe not as the central reservation is wide at that point so the present carriageways are built on the C/D roads.
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jackal
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Re: M60 Junction 18 Simister Island Interchange

Post by jackal »

That's J19, not J17. Interesting though!
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Re: M60 Junction 18 Simister Island Interchange

Post by Truvelo »

My fault, when you mentioned weaving I thought of the A576 junction as that's the closest.

The housing around Brathay Close and Rothay Close tapers away from the M60 approaching Simister. I've overlaid the 1960's plans onto a modern map and even though the housing is recent it will still leave space for the clockwise freeflow. It's a though they built the houses as far as the protected land in case the freeflow links are ever resurrected which could be a possibility when the consultation opens.
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Re: M60 Junction 18 Simister Island Interchange

Post by ChrisH »

The consultation is open. It's... not exactly what we would have expected for £300m.
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Re: M60 Junction 18 Simister Island Interchange

Post by Truvelo »

The loop is definitely the better of the two although I'm not keen on the radii.
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Re: M60 Junction 18 Simister Island Interchange

Post by thomas417 »

It's all about the "northern loop" option which looks pretty decent to me. Not sure why they've even bothered with the "inner links" given it would be such a marginal improvement for the effort of two additional bridges.

The guiding principle here seems to be to not demolish any homes or encroach on the school to the south west of Simister Island which is a sensible approach if the scheme is to get support.
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Re: M60 Junction 18 Simister Island Interchange

Post by A320Driver »

Another pathetic attempt from HE. £300m for basically 1 bridge.
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Re: M60 Junction 18 Simister Island Interchange

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Quality reporting from the Manchester Evening News:
https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk ... p_AppShare

"It is the only motorway in England where drivers have to come off to carry on their journey on the same motorway."

The only one. Other than the M25 SE of London. And the M1 east of Leeds.

But except for those other two, the only one.
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Re: M60 Junction 18 Simister Island Interchange

Post by jackal »

The Northern Loop is basically well designed. The loop is bigger than the existing roundabout, so about 100m radius, which is plenty. In fact according to the brochure it was developed from 'Option A', which had a bigger radius and accordingly longer journey times. I would, though, suggest cutting the new left turn, and converting the hard shoulder and hatching of the existing one to a running lane.

Some have criticised costs above. The similar M25 J28 improvement is £50m-£100m. Here we have to add the left turn, five lane ALR, and reallocate M66 lanes within the interchange, which combined is maybe another £100m. The brochure lists the option at £80m-£338m, for a central estimate of £209m, which is a bit on the high side but not outrageous in UK roadbuilding terms. And I'm sure at such a prime location it would be money well spent.

The Inner Links option, by contrast, is probably the worst design I've ever seen at a consultation for a major UK interchange. There is a marginal improvement for M66>M60 anticlockwise as this is now a two light movement. But all the other right turns (including the ultra heavy M60 clockwise movement) remain three light. The other significant element of the improvement is two freeflow left turns... replicating existing freeflow left turns. This dross can be yours for only £154.5m (central estimate). Even weak efforts like M25 J10 (which at least provides new freeflow left turns) and M6 J19 (which at least does not make the new links cross each other at-grade!) are masterpieces by comparison.
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Re: M60 Junction 18 Simister Island Interchange

Post by Johnathan404 »

c2R wrote: Mon Jun 22, 2020 14:04 Quality reporting from the Manchester Evening News:
https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk ... p_AppShare

"It is the only motorway in England where drivers have to come off to carry on their journey on the same motorway."

The only one. Other than the M25 SE of London. And the M1 east of Leeds.

But except for those other two, the only one.
It's a copy-and-paste of a Highways England press release, which made the same mistake. "Come off" means "come to a stop" to Highways England*. Clearly you would still need to "turn off" even with their improvement.

That said I think the main scheme is better than expected and doesn't deserve the predictable moaning it will attract from some forum users. They've even remembered to disconnect the eastbound offslip from the roundabout, which is unusual for Highways England who usually love to leave redundant links in (M3 J9, M23 J9, M40 J15 etc).

* - other roundabouts excluded, yes
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Re: M60 Junction 18 Simister Island Interchange

Post by Chris5156 »

ChrisH wrote: Mon Jun 22, 2020 12:36The consultation is open. It's... not exactly what we would have expected for £300m.
I’ve decided to heap praise on Highways England for the free-flowing northern loop option, in the way you might heap praise on an underachieving pupil who has managed to spell their name correctly for the first time. It’s not brilliant, but it is at least showing a minimal level of ambition for improving a major system interchange, and that makes it far better than many of the other junction improvements HE are turning out at the moment.
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Re: M60 Junction 18 Simister Island Interchange

Post by MotorwayPlannerM21 »

c2R wrote: Mon Jun 22, 2020 14:04 Quality reporting from the Manchester Evening News:
https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk ... p_AppShare

"It is the only motorway in England where drivers have to come off to carry on their journey on the same motorway."

The only one. Other than the M25 SE of London. And the M1 east of Leeds.

But except for those other two, the only one.
And the A1(M) at Hook Moor, and the M56 near Manchester (albeit a very short section cut off from the mainline), and the M6 at both ends of the M6 Toll, and the M62 east of Manchester (in a way -- the M62 might pause here, but in order to continue to the other bit of M62, you'd turn off of the mainline, rather than continuing onto the M602/M60 into/around Manchester).

But apart from all those, the only one.

What's more, the current proposals won't do anything about the M60 TOTSOs, you'll just not have to negotiate the roundabout with the northern loop option, or, erm... the inner links option is interesting...


To be fair though, Simister Island is the only one that's not free-flow, but still.
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Re: M60 Junction 18 Simister Island Interchange

Post by Bryn666 »

Chris5156 wrote: Mon Jun 22, 2020 15:49
ChrisH wrote: Mon Jun 22, 2020 12:36The consultation is open. It's... not exactly what we would have expected for £300m.
I’ve decided to heap praise on Highways England for the free-flowing northern loop option, in the way you might heap praise on an underachieving pupil who has managed to spell their name correctly for the first time. It’s not brilliant, but it is at least showing a minimal level of ambition for improving a major system interchange, and that makes it far better than many of the other junction improvements HE are turning out at the moment.
The loop is clever in several ways - it moves a conflicting traffic movement adjacent to the village out of the equation completely which means more efficient signalling on the remaining roundabout is possible. The loop even if it had a tight radius would be many times an improvement over the conflicting flows today. Also bonus marks for removing the redundant connection.

The inner bridges are a dumb idea, and one I would fear they'll pick because it doesn't mean building a new slip road (there's ALREADY a campaign against that).

Still got major concerns about weaving from J17 however - this will become a lane gain (5 lanes ALR), but you'll still need to move to the right as traffic is moving to the left. The controversial (and ultimately correct answer) if HE want to make the M60 strategic priority, not commuter priority) is to just close J17... that won't ever happen of course.

Before it was widened in 1995, the then M66 down to J19 was the collector distributor roads. There were even stubs of carriageway.
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Re: M60 Junction 18 Simister Island Interchange

Post by jackal »

^ Yes, though as discussed above, there never seems to have been a plan for anything like that between J17 and J18. In fact the current proposal is better than the original plans as regards J17-18 as the direct connector would have significantly tightened the clockwise weaving space, which the loop doesn't. I like it :)
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Re: M60 Junction 18 Simister Island Interchange

Post by Bryn666 »

jackal wrote: Mon Jun 22, 2020 17:14 ^ Yes, though as discussed above, there never seems to have been a plan for anything like that between J17 and J18. In fact the current proposal is better than the original plans as regards J17-18 as the direct connector would have significantly tightened the clockwise weaving space, which the loop doesn't. I like it :)
I really like the loop proposal too, which is rare for me to like anything HE come up with. J17-18 was always going to be a squeeze, it's just not wide enough being a 1930s shoehorn job (see also M66...)

Also note how they've sandwiched four southbound M66 lanes by shifting the central reservation over - northbound M66 becomes 2 lanes ALR, southbound 4 ALR. I can see this being subject to a 50 limit but I'm not going to lose sleep over that. The northbound M66 at peak times starts to slow to a crawl because of the J2-1 hill bottleneck just north of Simister anyway...
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Re: M60 Junction 18 Simister Island Interchange

Post by jackal »

Yes, that looks well thought through. Quite lucky really that there are no supports in the central reservation so they can completely reallocate space like that. I'd be fairly confident they can maintain NSL with full/near full lane width via space conscious use of concrete barriers.
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Re: M60 Junction 18 Simister Island Interchange

Post by Jayck »

The Northern Loop scheme looks okay, the inner link one looks like a botch. However, despite this the thing that I find particularly irksome is that they just finished the M60 smart motorway along this section and didn't think to make the busy section between the M61 and Simister Island which was already D4M into D5ALR while they were at it. Now they're going to spend yet more money and waste yet more time ripping up whatever it is they just did between J17 and J18 to make it D5ALR. That's just bad planning.
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Re: M60 Junction 18 Simister Island Interchange

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Jayck wrote: Mon Jun 22, 2020 17:44 The Northern Loop scheme looks okay, the inner link one looks like a botch. However, despite this the thing that I find particularly irksome is that they just finished the M60 smart motorway along this section and didn't think to make the busy section between the M61 and Simister Island which was already D4M into D5ALR while they were at it. Now they're going to spend yet more money and waste yet more time ripping up whatever it is they just did between J17 and J18 to make it D5ALR. That's just bad planning.
Local opposition to adding extra lanes.

What was a mistake was leaving the eastbound narrow lanes from J12-14, these should have been remarked as full width and some ERAs built.
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Re: M60 Junction 18 Simister Island Interchange

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Jayck wrote: Mon Jun 22, 2020 17:44 The Northern Loop scheme looks okay, the inner link one looks like a botch. However, despite this the thing that I find particularly irksome is that they just finished the M60 smart motorway along this section and didn't think to make the busy section between the M61 and Simister Island which was already D4M into D5ALR while they were at it. Now they're going to spend yet more money and waste yet more time ripping up whatever it is they just did between J17 and J18 to make it D5ALR. That's just bad planning.
I might just be dumb here, however all the SM works they did J17-J18 was retrofit the existing gantries with new signage & signals, and slight adjustments to the road markings. So surely if they are now making it D5ALR it's not like they are ripping up previous work, just adding to it.
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Re: M60 Junction 18 Simister Island Interchange

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jervi wrote: Mon Jun 22, 2020 21:35
Jayck wrote: Mon Jun 22, 2020 17:44 The Northern Loop scheme looks okay, the inner link one looks like a botch. However, despite this the thing that I find particularly irksome is that they just finished the M60 smart motorway along this section and didn't think to make the busy section between the M61 and Simister Island which was already D4M into D5ALR while they were at it. Now they're going to spend yet more money and waste yet more time ripping up whatever it is they just did between J17 and J18 to make it D5ALR. That's just bad planning.
I might just be dumb here, however all the SM works they did J17-J18 was retrofit the existing gantries with new signage & signals, and slight adjustments to the road markings. So surely if they are now making it D5ALR it's not like they are ripping up previous work, just adding to it.
And most recently they replaced the street lighting between J17-18, which was promised as part of the SM works but not done. I'd expected a concrete barrier between J14-18 but nope. 12-14 was done.

But it seems concrete barriers are now not being installed in Area 10, the M53, M56, M65, and M67 have all been given new corrugated steel barriers. Wonder how they swung the departures for that given the traffic levels warrant concrete.
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