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Roads, Highways & Infrastructure

lemongrab said:
IMO elevated is a slightly lessor evil than a canyon
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I'm starting to think this might be the way to go for the Kensington/5th portion. Being so close to the river, seems a sunken interchange could be flood prone, and while it's not necessarily the urban ideal, space under a raised freeway can be activated much better and easier than sinking and capping a freeway.

I've been to a number of places that have done excellent jobs of putting that space to use, playgrounds, skate parks, sports courts, neighborhood markets and even structured retail.

The project then becomes a way of reuniting the neighborhoods on either side, not further cementing the divide.
 
lemongrab said:
There's a lot more orange than purple as you go further north. Either way there is a big opportunity cost. You convert fairly valuable land from an asset to a liability in perpetuity, while displacing residents and businesses. All for an ultimate result of shuffling the congestion around to other places so you can build more road expansion projects to shuffle congestion around to other places.

IMO elevated is a slightly lessor evil than a canyon, but there are better + cheaper options. Limit movements at those intersections and slap some lights on Memorial/19th and maybe 16th too (which also means another level crossing for active modes) - do we really need that brief stretch of 70 kph? That lets you kill all 4 left turn movements at Kensington/Crow, and really helps the busses that use Kensington Rd.

5 Ave is a bit tougher, but I wonder if you could do traffic circles at 25th and 23rd, and again kill all left turn movements at Crowchild. Converting the lefts off of crowchild into through lanes would also let you give right turns onto crowchild their own lane instead of a yield (not that we need to add any more slip lanes)

Or we could spend hundreds of millions to give the illusion of improved flow while working against pretty much every other city goal.
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I agree there are consequences to increase the flow on this stretch, but to suggest there is no benefit and it only shuffles the congestion is not accurate. There’s significantly more lanes at Crowchild North. If they improved flow here, the north part of Crowchild would be better utilized. There will be a bottleneck effect still, because it’s less lanes, but not as severe as putting traffic to a standstill.
 
trtcttc said:
I agree there are consequences to increase the flow on this stretch, but to suggest there is no benefit and it only shuffles the congestion is not accurate. There’s significantly more lanes at Crowchild North. If they improved flow here, the north part of Crowchild would be better utilized. There will be a bottleneck effect still, because it’s less lanes, but not as severe as putting traffic to a standstill.
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There's even more lanes and fewer lights on Deerfoot and Glenmore, yet they see the most congestion of all. Weird. Surely this latest half billion will solve it, though.

FCC1982 said:
Why is it an illusion ?
Do you remember what Glenmore was like before it was made free flow ?
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Yes. The Elbow intersection was kinda similar to Kensington Rd of today. Now we get to sail through Elbow! ...after significant congestion across the bridge most hours of the day...almost like it was just an illusion and congestion increased and was shuffled around.
 
FCC1982 said:
I don’t find Glenmore congested “most of the day” …. but it certainly was before the expansion.
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Really?

Take a gander through historical aerial photos at that spot...doesn't seem like any more than a single light cycle could handle until 2005 when it was fully under construction (the 5 St intersection not existing at all at the time of the photo). Various dates and times over the years; you can use shadows to guess time of day.

Then go look at Crowchild/Kensington Rd; recent years generally shows fewer cars than Elbow/Glenmore pre-2005.
 
Looking at aerial photos might not be the best method, but to your point I think more traffic passed through the Glenmore/Elbow/5 St (known as 'GE5' when the interchanges were constructed) than Crowchild & Kensington. It's harder get traffic counts from 20+ years ago, but according to this document there were 85,000 vehicles per day in 2003 along Glenmore Trail with a city population ~922,000; while in 2023 (most recent traffic count map on the City of Calgary website), Crowchild Trail had 79,000 vehicles per day through Kensington Road with a city population ~1.6 million.

The interesting thing is Glenmore Trail was the 'Plan B' for the southern east-west freeway. The original proposal was to follow the 50 Ave S alignment from the existing Glenmore Trail alignment to Deerfoot Trail, then continuing on present-day Peigan Trail. Existing landmarks like the MRU and Britannia Plaza would look very different and would probably be more impactful to inner(ish) city neighbourhoods than the existing canyon. The Central Library has the old plans for the 50 Avenue freeway in its archives.
 
MuzikMachine said:
Looking at aerial photos might not be the best method, but to your point I think more traffic passed through the Glenmore/Elbow/5 St (known as 'GE5' when the interchanges were constructed) than Crowchild & Kensington. It's harder get traffic counts from 20+ years ago, but according to this document there were 85,000 vehicles per day in 2003 along Glenmore Trail with a city population ~922,000; while in 2023 (most recent traffic count map on the City of Calgary website), Crowchild Trail had 79,000 vehicles per day through Kensington Road with a city population ~1.6 million.
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I was just countering the notion that Glenmore used to be congested most of the day; it wasn't even though Elbow has/had more traffic then K&5

The CK5 stretch shows 86k and 88k in 2017 and 2018. Glenmore causeway over 160000 those years (down to 133-138k in 2022 & 2023). It's worth noting the most recent years maps are a lot less detailed than the ones pre-Covid, so there may be a bit of a methodology change (though 2019 showed the start of a decrease in all of the spots we are discussing, even though SWRR was not open yet).

Annoying how behind the city is on publishing this kind of data; the latest map from 2023 does not have the WRR open.
 
Anyone else noticing a massive increase in people running red lights lately? I swear I see 3 or 4 cars go through the intersection with a full red, even when cross traffic is fully green...
 
Mountain Man said:
Anyone else noticing a massive increase in people running red lights lately? I swear I see 3 or 4 cars go through the intersection with a full red, even when cross traffic is fully green...
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Haven't noticed too many red lights, but I also don't drive during regular commute hours so people are not in as much of a rush. I do find more general rule breaking drivers, blocking the box, following really closely, driving slow in the left lane. In the last month also saw two different cars going the wrong way on Memorial between Edm Trail and Barlow (intentional), and Edm trail and Centre street bridge (this one I think was a mistake probably due to lane reversals)
 
On the issue of road safety. I'm completely against the removal of speed radars. Imagine if transit riders got the province to remove fare inspectors because it's a "money maker". Imagine having a method to reduce speeding and all the cost of the enforcement is paid for the by the people committing the offence! I don't think it should go into CPS general revenues and probably should tie directly to roadway safety improvements (speed bumps, flashing beacon, bump outs, etc.), but removing them was a terrible mistake.

livewirecalgary.com

Calgary police investigate the death of NE toddler, residents say it could be speed - LiveWire Calgary

Calgary police are investigating the death of a two-year-old girl who was struck by a vehicle Monday night. At around 7 p.m. on Aug. 4, the girl was hit by a white truck in an alley near the 600 block of Taradale Drive NE. Calgary Police Services (CPS) said that the girl had life-threatening...
livewirecalgary.com livewirecalgary.com
 
I haven't seen people running red lights but I have seen about half a dozen people treating a red light as a stop sign in off-peak hours over the last few months which has been a bizarre thing I've never seen before.
 
trtcttc said:
On the issue of road safety. I'm completely against the removal of speed radars. Imagine if transit riders got the province to remove fare inspectors because it's a "money maker". Imagine having a method to reduce speeding and all the cost of the enforcement is paid for the by the people committing the offence! I don't think it should go into CPS general revenues and probably should tie directly to roadway safety improvements (speed bumps, flashing beacon, bump outs, etc.), but removing them was a terrible mistake.

livewirecalgary.com

Calgary police investigate the death of NE toddler, residents say it could be speed - LiveWire Calgary

Calgary police are investigating the death of a two-year-old girl who was struck by a vehicle Monday night. At around 7 p.m. on Aug. 4, the girl was hit by a white truck in an alley near the 600 block of Taradale Drive NE. Calgary Police Services (CPS) said that the girl had life-threatening...
livewirecalgary.com livewirecalgary.com
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She was also hit by a truck, along with the 9 year old killed in Edmonton who was hit by a Dodge Ram. Part of the conversation with road safety is the number of extremely large vehicles with such a high impact zone on the front and blind spots. Sadly the survivability with these vehicles is lower than with the size of vehicles we used to drive (the youtuber 'Not Just Bikes' has an interesting video on this topic as well)
 
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With modern technology we could govern cars remotely to only be able to drive the speed limit wherever they are. We could get 100% compliance and speeding would be a thing of the past!

Of course, such a move would be seen as wild overreach and would never survive the first dose of politics. It’s our human right to be able to speed and drive recklessly occasionally in a vehicle, of course.

As a thought exercise it’s interesting though. If you physically cannot drive faster than the speed limit, it would make every painfully aware how our streets are over-engineered everywhere.

Put another way, driving the speed limit makes you aware our streets are usually designed to drive faster than the speed limit.
 
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