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| Dallas’ High Five Interchange |
As the world’s people continue to acquire automobiles at a precipitous
rate, we must build increasingly complex intersections to deal with the
resulting traffic. Few places epitomise this trend more than the
intersection of the Interstate 635 and US 75 freeways in Dallas, Texas,
where the massive, five-level High Five Interchange was completed in December 2005 at a cost of US$261 million
The High Five sees up to 500,000 vehicles pass through it each day,
and while traffic flow may be smooth, the interchange is one of the most
impossibly complex highway junctions you will ever see. Just try and
make sense of the jumbled spaghetti from above!
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| Dallas’ High Five Interchange |
Switching to map view
doesn’t clear things up very much; one can easily get lost in the maze
of on-ramps, off-ramps, bridges, frontage roads, and U-turn routes
 |
| Dallas’ High Five Interchange |
The High Five sees up to 500,000 vehicles pass through it each day,
and while traffic flow may be smooth, the interchange is one of the most
impossibly complex highway junctions you will ever see. Just try and
make sense of the jumbled spaghetti from above!
Switching to map view
doesn’t clear things up very much; one can easily get lost in the maze
of on-ramps, off-ramps, bridges, frontage roads, and U-turn routes.
The reason the interchange is called the “High Five” is that at its densest, it is literally
five layers of road
stacked on top of each other. It’s hard to capture something like this
in Street View (usually because the view is blocked by another level of
road), but we do manage to catch glimpses of the top four layers while viewing them from the fifth
In total, the interchange contains 37 different bridges, the highest of which is 120 feet (37 metres) above ground.
The Dallas High Five may be the largest and most spectacular five-level
interchange, but there are plenty of such stack interchanges around the
world. The rival Texan city of Houston alone has five interchanges with
five levels. The most ragged-looking five-level, though, must certainly
be the Gravelly Hill Interchange on the M6 in Birmingham, England.
1 Not only are there five levels of roadways, but there are two railways, two canals, and three rivers tangled up within. No wonder then that it’s known as “Spaghetti Junction”…
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| Dallas’ High Five Interchange |
Disclaimer : All the information is collected from different websites and sources.
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