Calgary Roads

[speedog]

Originally Posted by milomilo

Well there's already a lot of green space in those areas, but it's mostly useless right now as it's trapped within roads. If some of those loops were eliminated it would at least free up some of this which could potentially be put to better use, exactly what I don't know. The University Drive section definitely seems needlessly complicated for such a low volume road. If you changed 16th/University to a simple signalised intersection, straightened it out and removed the roundabouts, there's probably potential for developable land in there. At least to my untrained eye.

To my untrained eye, there is land there that is bordered by three multillane roads, two of which are quite high volume roads. Any residences developed on available land would have to accommodate ackwardly shaped land parcels and relatively difficult access never mind the noise levels from neighbouring roadways. It really isn't that large of a space unless University Drive was eliminated south of 16th - if that were done, then there would be some space that might be more desireable.

[milomilo]

It might be true that the land isn't extremely valuable, but I think when we are making changes to infrastructure that are likely to last decades, we shouldn't make decisions that will lock up land for all that time. Green space separating ramps and roadways is about as useless as it gets - it may look superficially nice from a car, but that is it. In the case of University Drive we are spending money to perpetuate this, and it's not clear what the benefits of the design are. Your point of removing U. Drive south of 16th is a good one - maybe that is an option that should be/has been looked at. It's always struck me as an odd road.

[Mazrim]

Originally Posted by Acey

The whole anti-freeway stance of Calgary and Edmonton, and now they're going to do it anyway and it'll cost 10x more. It's not even a case of "I told you so" because nobody wins.

The freeway was the 2012 version of the Crowchild project. This is pretty much the opposite of it. It'll cost 10x more than what? An above ground interchange that wipes out a neighborhood in the process?

[MasterG]

Originally Posted by Acey

Than doing it properly back in the day when everybody else did it so you wouldn't be wiping out neighbourhoods and trying to cram now. Not saying that either is a perfect solution by any means - sprawl, gentrification, etc... not looking to open that can of worms.

A depressed inner city freeway was the anti-Christ, and now they're doing it anyway and portraying it as a brilliant and innovative solution. Just funny the sequence of events, is all.

As we are building depressed inner-city freeways, Montreal is covering theirs and removing elevated stretches:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montre...park-1.3344127

I don't think the final design of the Crowhole is a particularly poor one, but every road project in this city has taught me how little the City tends to pay attention to the details which are crucial if road projects are to function for anyone else other than demand-inducing car traffic generators. Scepticism in warranted.

• Nearly every roads project gets put in with wider lanes (designed unnecessarily to highway standard width even in urban areas) increasing car speed and reducing pedestrian crossing safety and quality of space.
  
  
• Nearly every roads project includes new turn movements to make it a little easier to drive while harder to cross the road on foot or bike through increasingly long signal cycles.
  
  
• Nearly every roads project misses big opportunities to fundamentally change some areas to pedestrian-focused or more liveable scales. Projects only go in one direction - to increase car speed/capacity and mitigate the worst pedestrian, bike or transit impacts. It's never the other way around.

For this example, University Drive will remain hilariously over-built, the interchange at Memorial will continue to occupy prime river-front land with an inefficiently large and high-speed interchange on what could be a prime neighbourhood boulevard with great access between the riverfront and surrounding neighbourhoods.

Again, the Crowhole it's not all bad. It's a light-years more sensitive design than something the City would have proposed a decade ago. But it also is not a compromise. This is firmly a road capacity project that will inevitably bring more cars into the city centre, which will inevitably create new bottlenecks elsewhere.

[milomilo]

Originally Posted by MasterG

As we are building depressed inner-city freeways, Montreal is covering theirs and removing elevated stretches:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montre...park-1.3344127

I don't think the final design of the Crowhole is a particularly poor one, but every road project in this city has taught me how little the City tends to pay attention to the details which are crucial if road projects are to function for anyone else other than demand-inducing car traffic generators. Scepticism in warranted.

• Nearly every roads project gets put in with wider lanes (designed unnecessarily to highway standard width even in urban areas) increasing car speed and reducing pedestrian crossing safety and quality of space.
  
  
• Nearly every roads project includes new turn movements to make it a little easier to drive while harder to cross the road on foot or bike through increasingly long signal cycles.
  
  
• Nearly every roads project misses big opportunities to fundamentally change some areas to pedestrian-focused or more liveable scales. Projects only go in one direction - to increase car speed/capacity and mitigate the worst pedestrian, bike or transit impacts. It's never the other way around.

For this example, University Drive will remain hilariously over-built, the interchange at Memorial will continue to occupy prime river-front land with an inefficiently large and high-speed interchange on what could be a prime neighbourhood boulevard with great access between the riverfront and surrounding neighbourhoods.

Again, the Crowhole it's not all bad. It's a light-years more sensitive design than something the City would have proposed a decade ago. But it also is not a compromise. This is firmly a road capacity project that will inevitably bring more cars into the city centre, which will inevitably create new bottlenecks elsewhere.

I agree with much of this (as in my earlier post), but I do think the Crowchild proposal will actually make the West Hillhurst area much better for all users. Some seem to think this must be impossible as you are now putting a freeway through there, but what exists now is so horrific that short of removing the Bow River crossing, the only way to fix it is by grade separating the mainline.

Currently we have freeway levels of traffic going through grade intersections. This means the light timings are so long that crossing the road on foot/bike and left turning takes an eternity, and you have a wide, ugly ROW there. After the proposal, the roadway will be hidden and there will be three wide overpasses (one more crossing than now). Plus access to the communities by vehicles will be much improved. So I think the plan does function for far more than car users.

p.s. While Montreal is covering some roads and removing some elevated structures, they are also spending $3.7B on rebuilding the Turcot. Different roads have different needs. One of the Crowchild options was also to cover it up, but it was too expensive.

[craner]

^^Well said milomilo - I agree. I would much rather cross Crow on one of the new overpasses than the current at grade signalized intersections.
14 Street SW is in a similar predicament but anytime adding interchanges is brought up the neighbourhoods go ballistic and somehow defend that the existing condition of the road is preferred.

[Mazrim]

Originally Posted by Acey

A depressed inner city freeway was the anti-Christ, and now they're doing it anyway and portraying it as a brilliant and innovative solution. Just funny the sequence of events, is all.

AFAIK it wasn't depressed in 2012, so how it was the anti-Christ initially? I'm not remembering that part of public response.

Originally Posted by MasterG

I don't think the final design of the Crowhole is a particularly poor one, but every road project in this city has taught me how little the City tends to pay attention to the details which are crucial if road projects are to function for anyone else other than demand-inducing car traffic generators. Scepticism in warranted.

I agree your scepticism is warranted, but I disagree that they did not look at anyone else other than vehicle traffic with this particular project. Are cars still considered quite important? Yes. Even the surrounding communities such as West Hillhurst still care a ton about how they can drive around. One of the knocks on making Crowchild a tunnel was that it was not good for community connectivity, among others. If you look through the different phases of Crowchild you can see how many times, the road is reduced in scale or changed to accomodate other modes of travel. There have also been many things which have been tried and rejected for all modes that aren't showing on the recommended plan, but I imagine that kind of stuff could have been answered at the open houses if you really wanted to know more.

Originally Posted by MasterG

• Nearly every roads project gets put in with wider lanes (designed unnecessarily to highway standard width even in urban areas) increasing car speed and reducing pedestrian crossing safety and quality of space.
  
  
• Nearly every roads project includes new turn movements to make it a little easier to drive while harder to cross the road on foot or bike through increasingly long signal cycles.
  
  
• Nearly every roads project misses big opportunities to fundamentally change some areas to pedestrian-focused or more liveable scales. Projects only go in one direction - to increase car speed/capacity and mitigate the worst pedestrian, bike or transit impacts. It's never the other way around.

• The only road with wide lanes in the Crowchild project are Crowchild itself, and even then, they accounted for the possibility of narrowing them as well in their presentation.
• Grade separating Crowchild reduces intersection phase times significantly, and a number of underpasses and overpasses are added in this project as well for pedestrians and cyclists. These new interchanges aren't exactly huge like something you'd see out in the 'burbs, either.
• I feel like because of the timing of the Calgary main streets program, it's tough to ensure they all line up with the study being done here, but I imagine that those will play a bigger role on 17th Avenue and Kensington Road then what was shown. Otherwise, I think the focus on adding lots of wide pathways and new crossings goes a long way on this one. No road in this project has more lanes except for the current bottlenecks on Crowchild and the already planned widening of 16th Avenue.

Originally Posted by MasterG

For this example, University Drive will remain hilariously over-built, the interchange at Memorial will continue to occupy prime river-front land with an inefficiently large and high-speed interchange on what could be a prime neighbourhood boulevard with great access between the riverfront and surrounding neighbourhoods.

They have a slide showing the future planned growth of the University area being quite significant, so I can imagine that would be a reason University Drive is kept there. The changes they've suggested slightly reduce the capacity of the road, however. I also imagine that the St. Andrews Heights residents would have an issue with removing or drastically reducing University's connectivity.

For Memorial, I know they showed a bunch of intersection options to revise Memorial at Crowchild earlier in the project, but they all failed traffic wise. I don't see the point of an expensive reconstruction to make traffic worse, all to add a pretty small parcel of riverfront land that is already home to a good chunk of park space and not terribly develop-able if you ask me. Who would want to live below the Bow River Bridge and the noise it generates?

Originally Posted by MasterG

Again, the Crowhole it's not all bad. It's a light-years more sensitive design than something the City would have proposed a decade ago. But it also is not a compromise. This is firmly a road capacity project that will inevitably bring more cars into the city centre, which will inevitably create new bottlenecks elsewhere.

If it was a road capacity project, wouldn't they have been closer to the 2012 project than they are now? I think the extra interaction with the communities along Crowchild made a pretty good difference in adding extra features that make it much more than a road capacity project. I also get that not everyone has time to go over everything they've shown, but I can't help but feel that you're going to get people who say what you have no matter what they do, simply because they're improving the roads as well as everything else.

In a perfect world, could the City simply stop improving roads and focus on everything else? Maybe. Based on the present day negativity many drivers have towards cyclists, we're not there yet. The other side of the coin is the people who came to the Crowchild open houses and griped that their roads were being taken over by cyclists. Whether you like it or not, they are still a large sample size of the population, and they feel the City is ignoring them and pushing these in despite their protests. Until then, there will be push and pull and I think this project has done a decent job of accommodating everyone.

[UofC.engineer]

Originally Posted by MasterG

As we are building depressed inner-city freeways, Montreal is covering theirs and removing elevated stretches:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montre...park-1.3344127

I don't think the final design of the Crowhole is a particularly poor one, but every road project in this city has taught me how little the City tends to pay attention to the details which are crucial if road projects are to function for anyone else other than demand-inducing car traffic generators. Scepticism in warranted.

• Nearly every roads project gets put in with wider lanes (designed unnecessarily to highway standard width even in urban areas) increasing car speed and reducing pedestrian crossing safety and quality of space.
  
  
• Nearly every roads project includes new turn movements to make it a little easier to drive while harder to cross the road on foot or bike through increasingly long signal cycles.
  
  
• Nearly every roads project misses big opportunities to fundamentally change some areas to pedestrian-focused or more liveable scales. Projects only go in one direction - to increase car speed/capacity and mitigate the worst pedestrian, bike or transit impacts. It's never the other way around.

For this example, University Drive will remain hilariously over-built, the interchange at Memorial will continue to occupy prime river-front land with an inefficiently large and high-speed interchange on what could be a prime neighbourhood boulevard with great access between the riverfront and surrounding neighbourhoods.

Again, the Crowhole it's not all bad. It's a light-years more sensitive design than something the City would have proposed a decade ago. But it also is not a compromise. This is firmly a road capacity project that will inevitably bring more cars into the city centre, which will inevitably create new bottlenecks elsewhere.

Well said!

The weird:
I'm really scratching my head at the three traffic circles being proposed at university drive.

The good:
I am very impressed with the wide pedestrian bridge being built on 2nd ave.

The bad:
I despise the existing pedestrian bridge between St.Andrews Heights and 9th ave NW. It is in a tough spot geographically, but the entire design of it just seems like such an after thought.

[Fuzz]

Originally Posted by UofC.engineer

Well said!
The bad:
I despise the existing pedestrian bridge between St.Andrews Heights and 9th ave NW. It is in a tough spot geographically, but the entire design of it just seems like such an after thought.

No way that is an afterthought. Someone forced them to put in a pedestrian bridge, and out of massive spite between departments or something, that monstrosity was built. My future wife used to live on the other side, and I was at Banff Trail. I'd walk, or days with poor judgment try to bring my bike over it(don't attempt). What an unusable hunk of trash.

[craner]

Hey ... Edmonton just received funding to turn Yellowhead Tr. into a freeway - maybe there is hope for Crowchild.

[s211]

Originally Posted by craner

Hey ... Edmonton just received funding to turn Yellowhead Tr. into a freeway - maybe there is hope for Crowchild.

Well, looking back at history, the province originally helped with Deerfoot (full freeway for decades) and Edmonton got the Yellowhead (a goat path in comparison to the Deerfoot), so in a fashion one could suggest that Edmonton is finally getting its due for overdue work to bring the Yellowhead up to a respectable standard.

[Joborule]

Anyone else feel that the city should seriously consider buring 16th avenue in Montgomery? The road currently functions as a expressway and commercial strip, serving neither well. It's best function right now is dividing Montgomery into two communities.

If the expressway function was buried underneath from 43 Street to Home Road, it would give the above ground level the ability to finally transport the road into the high activity community street it can be. With university district and the progression of the NW Hub in the vicinity, as well as Bowness, Edworthy Park, COP and other attractions, the potential is significant.

[suburbia]

Originally Posted by Joborule

Anyone else feel that the city should seriously consider buring 16th avenue in Montgomery? The road currently functions as a expressway and commercial strip, serving neither well. It's best function right now is dividing Montgomery into two communities.

If the expressway function was buried underneath from 43 Street to Home Road, it would give the above ground level the ability to finally transport the road into the high activity community street it can be. With university district and the progression of the NW Hub in the vicinity, as well as Bowness, Edworthy Park, COP and other attractions, the potential is significant.

There are many other places where roads could be buried that would make more sense, but very few if any would be feasible. Additionally, that area of the floodplain is particularly risky. Lastly, it is not like Montgomery has a large N-S commercial / retail area. The area it has actually runs along 16th for the most part,

[craner]

Originally Posted by Joborule

Anyone else feel that the city should seriously consider buring 16th avenue in Montgomery? The road currently functions as a expressway and commercial strip, serving neither well. It's best function right now is dividing Montgomery into two communities.

If the expressway function was buried underneath from 43 Street to Home Road, it would give the above ground level the ability to finally transport the road into the high activity community street it can be. With university district and the progression of the NW Hub in the vicinity, as well as Bowness, Edworthy Park, COP and other attractions, the potential is significant.

Yes, I've considered this - would sure be nice.

[technomad]

Originally Posted by Joborule

Anyone else feel that the city should seriously consider buring 16th avenue in Montgomery?
...
With university district and the progression of the NW Hub in the vicinity, as well as Bowness, Edworthy Park, COP and other attractions, the potential is significant.

Have pondered something similar for a while.. but have a different route in mind. this assumes that west Stoney is complete, and CP track expansion for passenger service to Banff underway or complete



Rather than going underground, HWY1 can be extended across the Bow west of Edworthy park, and run in a stacked viaduct over the CP line up to the current Sarcee/HWY1 interchange. Something like: (from GIS)



This, along with a 29 st separation, would extend freeway grade HWY1 from Stoney to Crowchild, and free up the current 16 Av route through Montgomery for LRT use (purple line above)

Sarcee, with the west ring/bypass role now being performed by Stoney, could be removed going up the hill, and the portion south of Bow trail renamed and rerouted through the ravine to connect to Shaganappi across the river, and could include a transit link as well

Definitely a longer term project to get all the right pieces in place.. but in the meantime incorporating grade separation at 29 st into the Crowchild plans instead of the overbuilt university drive portion would be a good first step

[MalcolmTucker]

CP requires much greater clearance these days, but still intriguing. Not that traffic seems to be holding back redevelopment along the strip much.

[Joborule]

Originally Posted by suburbia

There are many other places where roads could be buried that would make more sense, but very few if any would be feasible. Additionally, that area of the floodplain is particularly risky. Lastly, it is not like Montgomery has a large N-S commercial / retail area. The area it has actually runs along 16th for the most part,

Which areas would suggest? I advocate for the Montgomery stretch based on it's proximity to areas where people work and live, as well it's a shorter stretch of roadway to be buried which would make the costs a bit easier to swallow.

Originally Posted by technomad

Have pondered something similar for a while.. but have a different route in mind. this assumes that west Stoney is complete, and CP track expansion for passenger service to Banff underway or complete



Rather than going underground, HWY1 can be extended across the Bow west of Edworthy park, and run in a stacked viaduct over the CP line up to the current Sarcee/HWY1 interchange. Something like: (from GIS)



This, along with a 29 st separation, would extend freeway grade HWY1 from Stoney to Crowchild, and free up the current 16 Av route through Montgomery for LRT use (purple line above)

Sarcee, with the west ring/bypass role now being performed by Stoney, could be removed going up the hill, and the portion south of Bow trail renamed and rerouted through the ravine to connect to Shaganappi across the river, and could include a transit link as well

Definitely a longer term project to get all the right pieces in place.. but in the meantime incorporating grade separation at 29 st into the Crowchild plans instead of the overbuilt university drive portion would be a good first step

Interesting idea, however based on recent developments from the city, a river crossing connecting Sarcee to Shaganappi is never gonna happen. It seems Edworthy is going to be protected from here on out; meaning road development impact it is a non-starter.

[suburbia]

Originally Posted by Acey

A stacked viaduct for 40,000 vehicles per day? What fantasy world are y'all living in?! Honestly not sure if this is a joke.

I thought it was a joke on first read. I tried to shut it down, but then others came back saying they've thought the same thing and then the stacked viaduct idea was shared. Boggles the mind. LOL!

[technomad]

Originally Posted by Acey

A stacked viaduct for 40,000 vehicles per day? What fantasy world are y'all living in?! Honestly not sure if this is a joke.

nah, my fantasy world is filled with ideas for an actual road network in Edmonton..

no joke, merely an idea on how to bridge a gap in the freeway network, and move those 40k+ vehicles past a community rather than through it

I think this would be better than a tunnel, but open to any alternate ideas you have?

Originally Posted by Joborule

Interesting idea, however based on recent developments from the city, a river crossing connecting Sarcee to Shaganappi is never gonna happen. It seems Edworthy is going to be protected from here on out; meaning road development impact it is a non-starter.

Plans for a road through there have been on the books for decades, and any recent changes could be changed back just as easily. Biggest impact to the park would be from the double or triple tracking of the CP line, and I don't think Edworthy park should present an obstacle to improving access to Banff national park. Proposed bridge/viaduct locations would have very little impact to the park itself.

The project could even improve the city park system by incorporating a high line style park as a top deck on the viaduct ..

[Fuzz]

LOL. First, Sarcee to Shaganppi through Edworthy is not gong to happen. Have you seen the grade? And you cut a park in half. I couldn't imagine the embarrassment for the guy presenting this idea to the city and getting laughed out of the room. This would be below paying 100% of the Calgary Next project as far as priorities go. It's not like 16th ave is that busy, or that that section ever takes long to get through. What problem is this trying to solve?