Frankfurt Cross

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Template: Infobox Autobahnkreuz / Maintenance / DE-A
Frankfurt Cross
A3 A5 B43 E42E451
map
Overview map of the Frankfurter Kreuz
location
Country: Germany
State : Hesse
Coordinates: 50 ° 3 '11 "  N , 8 ° 36' 15"  E Coordinates: 50 ° 3 '11 "  N , 8 ° 36' 15"  E
Height: 110  m above sea level NN
Basic data
Design type: Shamrock
Bridges: 8 (motorway)
Construction year: 1956
Last modification: 2000
Airport with A5 (horizontal) and A3 (vertical)
Airport with A5 (horizontal) and A3 (vertical)

The Frankfurter Kreuz is a clover-shaped motorway junction and one of the busiest road junctions in Europe with an average of 335,000 vehicles per day. It is an intersection between the A 5 , the ten-lane A 5 , the A 3 and the B 43 , located southwest of Frankfurt am Main in the immediate vicinity of the airport .

The Frankfurter-Kreuz-Tunnel of the high-speed railway line Cologne – Rhein / Main runs under the motorway junction .

history

prehistory

The plans for a car hub in Frankfurt go back to the 1920s, when the HaFraBa association , headed by Frankfurt's Lord Mayor Ludwig Landmann , was planning a road that was only to be reserved for motor traffic. In 1926, the first plans for the cross on the motorway between Frankfurt and Basel were made as part of a junction towards Wiesbaden . According to these plans, the new National Socialist government had the Frankfurt Cross designed as early as 1933 and provisionally laid out in the years 1939–1941.

The link with the airport, which was built in 1934, was also taken into account. At that point in time one could not have guessed what advantage this connection between air and road traffic would bring with it from today's point of view, but even then one hoped for a positive effect of the nearby motorway. For example, a meteorological report commissioned by the city of Frankfurt in 1935 came to the conclusion that the fast vehicles on the autobahn would loosen up the fog and thus improve visibility for the aircraft taking off and landing.

From 1934 to 1944

Work on the section between Frankfurt and Mannheim, where the cross should be, began on September 23, 1933. In December 1934, the first implementation plans for the motorway junction were presented. In this variant, the two motorways should be connected by a short motorway-like road, which should be connected to this at both ends with a trumpet , so that two motorway triangles would have been created. The junction for the airport would have been at this connection . At the same time, however, work began on the Frankfurt-Süd junction.

In March 1935, an article by Eduard Schönleben was published in the magazine Die Straße , in which he made the statement that the Reichsautobahn directorate took the view that the ideal solution for a motorway junction was the clover leaf shape. This led to the creation of a further variant for the motorway junction, which, together with the old variant, should be presented to the management by the Supreme Construction Management Reichsautobahn in Frankfurt. The decision to build the cloverleaf was made when the city of Frankfurt decided on this variant and the connection of the airport to the Frankfurt-Cologne motorway. Since in the course of the discussion about the final form the route of the Frankfurt – Cologne motorway was shifting more and more northwards, difficulties arose with the already completed Frankfurt Süd junction on the Frankfurt-Mannheim motorway, as it then had to be rebuilt. On January 29, 1936, the decision in favor of the cloverleaf shape was made by the Supreme Construction Management of the Reichsautobahn . The plans of the Supreme Building Management Reichsautobahn were based on the plans for the Schkeuditzer Kreuz ( A 9 / A 14 ), which was put into operation on November 21, 1936 as the first cross in Germany, even before the Frankfurter Kreuz. The decision by the Oberbaurat Köster from the Reichsautobahn Directorate did not follow until February 22, 1938. At that time, the connection of the airport to the autobahn was still a matter of dispute. In the end, the city of Frankfurt and the airport operator were able to prevail with their request to place the junction between the airport and today's B 43 , Kapitän-Lehmann-Straße.

On November 22, 1939, the execution planning for the cross was approved by the management in Berlin. Since difficulties arose in the construction of the motorway in the run-up to the war , it was only a matter of time when the work would be stopped after the war began. More and more workers were withdrawn to build the west and east wall, which led to numerous stoppages on the construction sites. Finally, on April 20, 1940, construction work on the cross had to be temporarily suspended. The top construction management ordered the shutdown of all routes under construction. Due to its special importance, the work on the piece belonging to the Frankfurt-Cologne motorway could be continued until October 20, 1941.

The Supreme Construction Management Reichsautobahn Frankfurt was finally dissolved on May 1, 1942. By this time, almost all the dams for the motorway in the area of ​​the city of Frankfurt had been completed. Even the abutments and supports of the actual cross already existed.

From 1945 until the opening

From December 6, 1945, the Supreme Construction Management Reichsautobahn worked again, but initially only operated under the Supreme Construction Management Authority until it was renamed the Autostraßenamt Frankfurt / Main. The first step was to repair the war damage to the existing roads. From 1950 onwards, funds were again available for new buildings. The reason for this was certainly that a census carried out in 1953 determined the enormous number of 5,000 motor vehicles per day on the West German autobahns, which was a quadrupling since 1936, and it was decided to eliminate these traffic conditions, which were almost unreasonable for the time. In addition, from January 1, 1951, the Frankfurt airport was again usable for civil use, so that by 1952 416,768 passengers could be counted.

On February 16, 1953, work on the cross and the airport junction was resumed. On July 10, 1956, after more than three years of construction, the Frankfurter Kreuz was opened to traffic by the then Transport Minister, Hans-Christoph Seebohm , more than 20 years after the first planning considerations. Together with the sections to Rüsselsheim and the “Mörfelder Landstrasse” junction, the largest road construction project in post-war history was completed. The total costs amounted to around 33.6 million German marks , of which 10.2 million alone went to the cross. The Frankfurter Allgemeine reported on July 11, 1956:

"The largest and most modern means of transport in Germany has been completed."
Detail with A5 (vertical) and A3 (horizontal)

In the first few years, however, the cross came under criticism because the car drivers were overwhelmed by the modern construction. The entry and exit strips were too short, and some road users simply turned around on the motorway after missing their exit. Even turning to the right , which was unfamiliar until then , when one actually wanted to turn left , overwhelmed some road users. Two fatal traffic accidents occurred within the first five weeks after opening. Additional signposts, information boards in the nearby parking lots, an ordered speed limit of 100 km / h and a clearer presence of the police initially defused the situation. In addition, there were numerous renovation measures, which led to a decrease in the number of accidents by the end of the 1950s. With the increase in traffic, however, the absolute number of accidents, which is also characterized by a high proportion of traffic jams, continued to rise.

In the early 1970s, the Frankfurt Cross was rebuilt for the first time. The planning approval for this was completed on January 8, 1971. Parallel lanes were introduced for turning traffic and other accompanying expansion measures were carried out, such as the creation of the corner connection A 67 Mönchhofdreieck – Darmstädter Kreuz and the expansion of the B 43 Kelsterbach – Frankfurt-Süd.

Reconstruction from 1995

The early deliberations about expanding the cross stopped again and again with the question of how to completely convert a traffic junction that is used by more than a quarter of a million vehicles every day. The accompanying measures had all already been implemented, such as an additional connection from the B 43 in the direction of Kassel, a new junction with Flughafen / Kelsterbach and additional transport connections in the Frankfurt-Süd junction on the A 3, but the actual expansion of the intersection was still missing and was inevitable.

View of the Frankfurter Kreuz between the A3 and A5 autobahns from a Lufthansa B737

This was followed by regular traffic collapse in the turning lanes due to the insufficient capacity on the interconnected routes, which was also becoming more and more evident in the number of accidents. In the period from October 1994 to September 1995 there were 401 accidents with one fatality as well as eleven seriously and 68 slightly injured in the intersection area. An expansion of the traffic was inevitable. A massive redesign took place between 1995 and 2000 in order to increase performance accordingly.

The construction of the new high-speed railway line Cologne – Rhine / Main , which crosses under the motorway junction in the Frankfurter Kreuz tunnel, began on December 13, 1995, the construction of the road construction began on March 18, 1996. The redesign is characterized by the height-free route in the four quadrants of the shamrock; the new central structure spans the main and parallel carriageways of the A5 with four fields with a total length of over 100 meters. The four individual bridges now reach a total width of almost 80 meters. The Frankfurter Kreuz is also crossed by the two eastern access tunnels of the airport long-distance train station . It was also a particular challenge that no lanes could be blocked during the entire renovation. As a result, for example, the A 3 railway underpass was carried out using mining techniques and not using the more cost-effective open construction method .

At the end of the construction work on December 19, 2000, a quarter of a year earlier than originally planned - the work of Deutsche Bahn had already been completed 19 months earlier - a memorial stone was erected and the entire structure was ceremonially opened to traffic by Federal Minister of Finance Hans Eichel . A total of 173 million euros were used in the renovation , 45 million euros of which went to the actual cross.

description

Average daily traffic volume (DTV) in 2005

Due to the immediate vicinity of the motorway junction, intercontinental airport and high-speed rail line, the Frankfurter Kreuz can be seen as a symbol of the traffic centrality of the Frankfurt am Main hub in Europe.

Critical areas of the intersection have always been the connection areas, as roughly half of the drivers at the intersection switch from one motorway to the other. This bottleneck was eliminated during the renovation work from 1995 to 2000. The traffic has been unbundled by four additional bridges and all access and departure ramps can now be driven separately without crossing traffic.

However, the renovation has not changed anything about the connection ramps, which are sometimes too narrow . Building on more levels is not possible, as building upwards is not permitted due to the adjacent airport and the railway tunnel under the cross has made building downwards difficult. This meant that there was no longer any space left for the individual ramps to run them in further arches.

On the other hand, the particularly busy semi-direct connecting ramp from north to east (the direct ramps for turning from east to north and from south to east had already been expanded to two lanes before the conversion) was implemented in two lanes, with the corresponding increase in capacity.

Traffic load

Traffic development in the Frankfurter Kreuz

The history of the Frankfurter Kreuz is shaped by the constantly growing traffic. In 1955, one year before the cross was opened, on an average day 6,662 vehicles used the section between the Wiesbaden cross and the airport junction on the A3. In the 1950s, traffic averaged 47,000 vehicles per day, increasing to an average of 130,000 vehicles per day by 1967. In the mid-1970s there were already 156,000 vehicles per day. In 1987 traffic had grown to 245,000 vehicles per day and in the early 1990s it had risen to almost 300,000 vehicles per day. In 2004 the traffic volume was 311,250 vehicles per day. In 2006, the year of its 50th birthday, more than 310,000 vehicles passed the traffic hub every day. Experts, however, expect much more. With these values, it is the most frequented motorway junction in Germany. An increase of 20 percent in car traffic and even 60 percent in truck traffic is forecast by 2020. In addition, more than 50 percent of road users switched between the crossing highways.

The traffic figures result from the A 3 and the A 5. But the B 43 must also be included in the calculations, since all vehicles changing to and from the A 5 use one of the ramps of the cross.

In 2005, 2010 and 2015 the following traffic volumes were recorded:

From To Average
daily traffic volume
Share of
heavy goods traffic
2005 2010 2015 2005 2010 2015
AS Frankfurt Airport (A 3) Frankfurt Cross 123,800 118,100 128,900 12.4% 12.6% 13.9%
Frankfurt Cross AS Frankfurt-Süd (A 3) 127,000 135,000 141,500 10.1% 11.8% 12.8%
AS Frankfurt-Niederrad (A 5) Frankfurt Cross 144,900 145,900 156,500 06.9% 09.1% 08.9%
Frankfurt Cross AS Zeppelinheim (A 5) 150,700 132,700 143,800 08.5% 10.1% 10.1%
AS Flughafen-Ost (B 43) AS Frankfurt Airport North 068,500 056,400 062,700 04.4% 05.4% 04.1%
AS Frankfurt Airport North AS Frankfurt-Süd (B 43) 032,200 027,800 031,500 05.3% 06.1% 04.5%

swell

Web links

Commons : Frankfurter Kreuz  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. Manual road traffic census 2005. (PDF) Results on federal motorways. BASt Statistics, 2005, accessed on November 30, 2017 .
  2. Manual road traffic census 2005. (PDF) Results on federal highways (free routes). BASt Statistics, 2005, accessed on November 30, 2017 .
  3. Manual road traffic census 2010. (PDF) Results on federal motorways. BASt Statistics, 2010, accessed on November 30, 2017 .
  4. Manual road traffic census 2010. (PDF) Results on federal highways. BASt Statistics, 2010, accessed on November 30, 2017 .
  5. Manual road traffic census 2015. (PDF) Results on federal motorways. BASt Statistics, 2015, accessed on November 30, 2017 .
  6. Manual road traffic census 2015. (PDF) Results on federal highways. BASt Statistics, 2015, accessed on November 30, 2017 .