>>28561234
Sprawl works for going in either direction until you have to exit or enter the freeway. People have to slow down or speed up to enter or exit, and the length of the lane to merge makes a difference how fast this change in speed occurs, affecting the speed of traffic in either case. The best case is to reduce as little of the speed as necessary, but many factors such as location of the intersecting thoroughfare or length of ramps, congestion at any given time of day play a huge part. You can't really widen entrances and exits, especially in already heavily developed areas.
A case in point, there is a main avenue off the interstate in my county that is super busy because the town was designed to house all commercial shopping off the main parkway as it is also intersecting the interstate. It used to be a major congestion point to get on and off at the freeway as the entrance and exit ramps were too short. They revised part of the entrance ramp to the freeway and exit ramp for the same direction. While this improved the flow getting off the highway, they made the entrance ramp a half clover or U-bend that goes under the overpass as you merge into the freeway. This did little to help relieve congestion as it backed up one lane down the entire parkway. Now while there is a second lane to around the clover leaf, and thus merge back into that clover leaf/U-bend lane, it simply moves congestion to the main parkway, and to a lesser degree, in heavy traffic, the merging lanes in the entrance to the highway, while merging into the highway. In theory it should work, but only does so marginally. It also doesn't help that the entrance is right before a major bend in the interstate that people generally slow down for. Adding a third lane to the interstate will help here, but only so much as relocating your entrance would vastly help as well. Again, people don't know how to merge and have done so on this ramp at 30 mph while the other lane was doing 60.
