# Frontage Roads, Service Roads, & Access Roads



## diablo234 (Aug 18, 2008)

Frontage Roads in Argentina (where they are known as colectoras and are usually found alongside the freeways/autopistas.)


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## RKC (Jun 16, 2007)

in one case in Budapest, the frontage road in actually wider than the separated road #4, which is in the middle with 1 lane per direction, while the frontage roads are 2 lanes per direction
http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&t=h&ll=47.45573,19.185036&spn=0.000831,0.002747&z=19


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## christos-greece (Feb 19, 2008)

That type of roads is very common in Athens, on the side of highways A1 and A7. Also can be found in many small towns in all Greece, especially when the mane road is a highway or a road with 2 lanes in each direction


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## DanielFigFoz (Mar 10, 2007)

diablo234 said:


> That would technicaly be a frontage road.


Service roads like that are very common on UK non-motorway but important roads.


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## Scba (Nov 20, 2004)

I can't think of any here in Maryland/Delaware.


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## Penn's Woods (Apr 8, 2010)

^^Along 50/301 on Kent Island. Maybe west of the bridge as well.


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## Scba (Nov 20, 2004)

Penn's Woods said:


> ^^Along 50/301 on Kent Island. Maybe west of the bridge as well.


Yeah, you're right. Looking closer, it's mostly on the west side.

Also 141 in Delaware is/was, I don't know what they're doing with it construction wise.


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## Haljackey (Feb 14, 2008)

Collector-Express system:










It's similar to one-way frontage roads, except they're limited access like the mainline.


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## Snowguy716 (Apr 10, 2009)

Some freeways in the Twin Cities have frontage roads.. most of the freeways within the Minneapolis/St. Paul grid systems have de-facto frontage roads. (I-94 between the two cities and I-35W in south Minneapolis).

The Crosstown freeway (MN-62) also has de-facto frontage roads at certain portions.

I-394 seems to have more purpose-built frontage roads... but they are not organized like in Texas. They are bi-directional on both sides of the freeway and don't provide access to the freeway. Instead, they share a traffic light with the freeway access ramps at cross-streets.


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## Tom 958 (Apr 24, 2007)

Frontage roads: I hate 'em for two reasons:

1. They're ugly.
2. If they're one way, they're impossible to provide with good bus service since the intervening motorway blocks direct access to the nearest bus stop in one direction.
3. If they're two way, the presence of the motorway blocks development on one side, lessening the potential density of development and making bus service more unviable.

There are a couple of variations that haven't been mentioned as yet. As usual, I'm too lazy to post pics:

Backage roads are roads that provide front access to properties that back up to the motorway. They're generally at least 100 meters or so from the motorway, though that distance can vary a lot-- from directly adjacent to over 1 km. AFAIK, my own community of Gwinnett County, GA, has the planet's most complete system of backage roads:

http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=33.938803,-84.158878&spn=0.014847,0.027423&z=15

This is their southern terminus-- Satellite Boulevard to the west of I-85, Shackelford Road to the east. Satellite extends about 15 miles/24 km from Beaver Ruin Road to GA 20 in Buford; except for the overlap with old Norcross Road near Gwinnett Place Mall, most of it was built new, often by private developers. Shackelford starts as a legacy local road, then incorporates various other roads-- new and legacy, publicly and privately built-- as it snakes northward for 8 miles/13 km or so. It changes its name, too, to Breckinridge Boulevard, then North Brown Road. If I were king of Gwinnett, I'd give the corridor one name. The county had planned to widen North Brown Road between GA 120 and Sugarloaf Parkway using from the 1992 sales tax, but ran out of money, which is just as well since the Mills Corporation ended up building that segment as part of the Discovery Mills shopping center project. Had the county done it, Mills would've demolished that segment a few years after completion and relocated it to make room for their mall site (that's not conjecture-- I talked to Gwinett DoT about it). Lack of funding isn't always a bad thing. 

The privately-built segments of these backage roads are noticeably more scenic than the publicly-built ones-- the alinement meanders through the landscape because the designers had a very large parcel of land to work with and were concerned about providing building sites for land-intensive light industrial facilities through comprehensive planning of the entire site rather than the most direct route for the spine roadway, and the result in Gwinnett's rolling terrain is quite pleasing. The landscaping is more elaborate, too.

At this point, 30-plus years after the first segments of Satellite Boulevard were opened, there's very diverse mix of used along its length: thousands of apartments, industry, offices, and almost every retailer you can think of. The result is a pretty decent corridor for transit/pedestrian-oriented development even in this auto-dominated community. I just wish that the clump of car dealerships near Gwinnett Place was somewhere else.

Oh: Alpharetta, GA, has done more or less the same thing along with North Point Parkway and Westside Boulevard along GA 400: http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=34.061904,-84.271832&spn=0.059301,0.109692&z=13 

In the unlikely event that anyone has read this far: Back during my activist days, I pointed out that the designation of our backage roads as major or principal arterials on our road classification map was inappropriate since the longer trips that are the rationale for a higher classification will likely take the nearby motorway. I suggested "corridor development arterials" or "principal collectors" as alternatives, with "backage roads" as a half-joking possibility. But now a Google search reveals that the term "backage roads" has gained quite a bit of traction. 

Oh: In Huntsville, AB, they've used a so-called X arrangement for the ramps between the motorway and the feeder roads: http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=34.709992,-86.589378&spn=0.003678,0.006856&t=k&z=17 . This arrangement greatly simplifies operations at the ramp terminals compared to the usual arrangement, though the distance that motorway traffic must travel via the frontage roads is much longer. The mainline of this motorway doesn't meet Interstate standards-- this concept would presumably be somewhat less viable if full Interstate standards were required.


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## Penn's Woods (Apr 8, 2010)

Tom 958 said:


> ....In the unlikely event that anyone has read this far....


Does _skimming_ that far count? :-D


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## DanielFigFoz (Mar 10, 2007)

Interesting post Tom!

It may also be worth noting that most service roads in the UK are for residential purposes and they mostly have 1930's semis along them.


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