MuzikMachine
New Member
I was curious if had the link to this available?
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- Thread starter Oddball
- Start date
Beltline_B
Senior Member
Interchange updates with # of lanes
Urban Outdoorsman
Active Member
Am I correct in seeing that they're not upgrading the northbound deerfoot to westbound Glenmore interchange? If so that's a little disappointing.
darwink
Senior Member
Most expensive part of the project with approximately 1200 users in morning peak out of 16,000 road users at the intersection. All to remove one interaction with a light, which could be removed with an intersection redesign at Heritage Meadows Way and Road. The juice isn't worth the squeeze.
FCC1982
Active Member
Yeah - it’s mind boggling to me why they don’t provide a proper NB to WB movement.
lemongrab
Active Member
Oh Good. One more lane oughta fix it.
For the first time in a long time, I drove in rush hour traffic, both morning and late afternoon on (11th street NE, Mcknight, Deerfoot, Barlow and 32nd) When you're not used to it, it's a shock 
I'd have to take valium twice a day to do that.
I'd have to take valium twice a day to do that.
CBBarnett
Senior Member
I think this is partially an outcome of Calgary's bizarre arterial road policy. In most other Canadian cities you have highways (provincial) and arterial streets (city). Calgary for decades has defined this arterial street more like a small highway, instead of other cities that really use arterials to mean "big street" and design them like that. City traffic engineers did the job of the province, improving regional circulation, but on the street network with their limited resources and ever shifting priorities.
This leads to weird quirky Deerfoot / Heritage Drive / Glenmore strangeness (among other weirdness in that we have few interchanges standardized because it's the city that built all of them rather than a provincial highway authority, such as Crowchild and Glenmore).
Had the city never got in the business of provincial highway circulations, it would have triggered the province to create a turn movement between NB Deerfoot and WB Glenmore in it's own jurisdiction instead of a strange diversion into the street network. Perhaps this would have led to better street network designs too where the city didn't feel obligated to have these monster right-of-ways and limited access corridors all over for arterials. City roads would be substantially cheaper too if the province uploaded all highways to their authority.
trtcttc
Active Member
For a government that loves to tout jurisdiction so much, we really should push harder to upload Glenmore and Crowchild to the province. That's exactly what happened in Toronto recently with the province taking over the DVP and Gardiner, with the latter being a huge maintenance expense.
YYCguy
Active Member
Under Premier Mini Trump…errr, I mean Smith, I highly doubt she will allow that to happen. Whilst she wants more control over municipalities, she also wants to download costs to them as well.
Mountain Man
Senior Member
Isn't the Province downloading Deerfoot to the City?
darwink
Senior Member
That has been a long term plan, but is unlikely.
CBBarnett
Senior Member
In most Canadian cities - with more modest budgets and more clear Provincial/Municipal boundaries - they didn't end up with a bunch of freeways or quasi-freeways arterials. The cities never could have afforded them. Further, most cities only have limited, indirect incentives to prioritize regional travel movements by building freeways themselves, most (rightly) prioritize maximizing local access and growing the local tax base in the jurisdictions.
In most regions with multiple cities, this misalignment in incentives usually forces the upper government to intervene - forcing through highways where locals didn't want them (and paying for them) or uploading key corridors to better maintain them for regional flows. While not always popular and mostly detrimental to the local communities they pass through, this does relieve the municipality from the cost burden of all the commuter-centric infrastructure.
Calgary's uni-city model failed us here IMO. Because the commuters who benefit and the neighbourhoods negatively impacted are in the same jurisdiction, the mobility policy led to more of a homogenizing, suburbanization effect everywhere - effectively we choose continually to use up valuable land in good locations for highway infrastructure and wide arterials instead of building more city there instead. This is a transfer of value from the lands in the best locations (by using this land for highways or future highways) to the edge communities now connected better thanks to the infrastructure. Had those suburbs been outside the tax boundary like in many other cities, we'd have far less incentive to ever expand our capacity to accommodate their commuters.
However, we still can't solve the other problem - money. Calgary like other cities still couldn't afford the proper highway infrastructure alone, so everything was phased and built over decades, leading to incremental freeway-ification of some arterials (e.g. Crowchild, Glenmore), weird designs that are "temporary" but don't go away because there's never a budget for it (i.e. Heritage/Glenmore/Deerfoot), and many more arterials future-proofed in case more money showed up magically - now mostly where land sits uselessly for an interchange we will never need or never afford (e.g. John Laurie).
The result is a plethora of expensive arterials compared to most cities, gynomous public land consumption for future-proofing of corridors, while also fewer "real" (and even more expensive) freeways like Stoney. This process also led to fewer urban main streets being created or preserved that try to maximize local value instead of commuter volumes.
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artvandelay
Active Member
I don't think most people who live here really appreciate how great the road system is. Sure there are a few issues but driving here is a dream compared to most other major north American cities.
CBBarnett
Senior Member
Totally - part of the reason it's so easy to drive is we have way more arterials that other cities, and as a result, way fewer main streets and non-commuter priority areas. That's the trade off - there's fewer interesting places, walkable corridors or economically productive streets in Calgary, but everyone can get around quickly (in a vehicle) on a regional scale.