Upgrading of Federal Road B288 to Federal Highway A524 between Krefeld and Duisburg

CLIENT Straßen NRW, RNL Niederrhein, PG Autobahn.
OBJECT 4-lane Federal Highway.
COSTS OF CONSTRUCTION 207,000,000 EUR incl. Rhine Bridge.
CONSULTING FEES 205,000 EUR.
THE SERVICES
    •        Alternative Study.
    •        Review of existing design.
    •        Preliminary Design.
    •        Noise Emmission Investigation.

In the course of upgrading Federal Road B288 to Federal Highway A524 a new mesh had been added to the network of federal highways in the southern Rhine-Ruhr megalopolis, connecting Federal Highway A57 to the West and Federal Highway A3 to the East of the river Rhine. Main objective of this project was to improve the distribution of traffic crossing the river through highways. At the same time the quality of the location of Greater Krefeld area was enhanced.
KOCKS ENGINEERS have been assigned by the Federal Roads Authority "Landesbetrieb Straßenbau Northrhine-Westfalia, Regional Office Niederrhein, to elaborate the preliminary design for the 9.3 km long section between Federal Highway A57 (junction Krefeld-City Center) and the future interchange Duisburg-South.
the services
Upgrading a Federal Road to highway status requires the design of new, nowadays traffic light controlled crossing points. For the design section Krefeld - Uerdingen to the West of the river Rhine the following alternatives have been investigated:
    •        Upgrading of junction Krefeld-City Centre to an highway intersection,
    •        Design of a completely new highway junction "Krefeld-Lange Straße", and
    •        Integrating the existing junction "Krefeld-Häfen" into the upgrading project.
       
Due to the compulsory points resulting from the surrounding residential and industrial areas and the short distances between the several crossing points causing interdependencies between the different alignment alternatives for the new Federal Highway A524 and the crossing point alternatives. In addition, it had to be taken into consideration that crossing points and their several alternatives mutually influence each other.
In regard to the crossing of the river Rhine, several alternatives have been investigated, including and excluding the existing bridge. Due to the fact that the existing Urdinger bridge is beeing used by slow agricultural vehicles for many decades, economic interdependencies have established between the both sides of the river Rhine. Therefore, a number of possible solutions has been drawn up, to keep up this agricultural traffic alongside the highway traffic.
To the East of the river in Duisburg-Mündelheim residential areas are situated to both sides of the designed alignment. In order to ensure pollution and noise control and to retrieve and maintain urban road connections, solutions through tunnels and trusses have been investigated.
Between the two settlements of Duisburg-Mündelheim and Duisburg-Serm the construction of a new highway junction was planned. For the main route a number of alternatives has been investigated in order to find the optimum alignment in the area of ecologically valuable Goldackergraben.
All alignment studies were executed under consideration of constant traffic flow during the construction period.