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Roads, Highways & Infrastructure

Mountain Man said:
I don't think 16th would be great for a cycle track, lots of better options north or south. What they need to do is widen the sidewalks and allow street parking in the evenings. 16th should become Calgary's version of the Broadway corridor in Vancouver.
Click to expand...
The part that's really frustrating about 16th Ave, as is almost every road I have complained about in Calgary:
  • 16th Ave - Curb-to-Curb is about 29-30m wide with 6 lanes, plus two left-turn lanes. The widest I could find is around 19th Street NW, where it's about 36m wide curb-to-curb, including absolutely unneeded right-turn lanes in addition to the ubiquitous left-turn lanes.
  • Broadway varies a bit, but at it's widest: 21 - 22m with 6 lanes, plus two left-turn lanes. More typically, it's around 18 - 20m
So the curb-to-curb, 16 Ave is 7 - 15m (33 - 66%!) wider curb-to-curb throughout the corridor in Calgary than Broadway in Vancouver, and this is before we even consider sidewalks, in which Broadway is far more consistent and generous, despite Calgary requiring an additional 5m (!) setback on top of the 30m curb-to-curb distance.

But the roads are largely the same (cross-town route with typically 6 lanes, plus the occasional turning lane). So it's not thru-lanes that are using up all the extra space, what are we getting for being so space-inefficient?
  • Wider lanes everywhere
  • Many, redundant and high-capacity turning lanes everywhere. It's an engineering traffic model output classic - giant queue lanes everywhere, assuming turns everywhere. Only a model could produce the inordinate "need" for the length of some of these queues, while ignoring even providing the minimum sidewalk width for stretches of the rebuilt corridor.
    • Turn lanes for everyone, everywhere (except, of course, the publicly financed sound-walled, gated community of Rosedale)
  • Useless median planters and extra wide curb features (e.g. poles, slip lanes, random unusable concrete stretches)
What don't we get:
  • Street parking
  • Bus infrastructure - even for the MAX Orange route built in the late 2010s they *still* added a few bus bays, which are antithetical to bus rapid transit infrastructure. Of course, this didn't come out of the 30m right-of-way, nope - bus bays added from the sidewalk space. I am also sure that the bus bay was paid for by Calgary Transit's MAX construction program, not the roads one despite all the benefit going to drivers, not transit users.
  • Development along the corridor - the amount of land acquired during the widening, plus the insanely large setbacks stagnated most development potential for years.
  • More trips on the corridor - the 99-B Line (MAX Orange's far superior, mature cousin) remains one of the busiest bus routes in North America and moves more people daily than 16th Avenue ever did.
In conclusion - it's the same story I have ranted about for years about our streets - we could fit all the street parking, bus lanes, wide sidewalks we want in the existing right-of-way, Vancouver literally does this. We have chosen not to, instead burdening new development (the thing we want) with a giant setback so we can fit in bus bays (the thing that makes transit slower), so that we can have cushy wide and expensive lanes for trucks (the thing we don't want cutting through the city).

Just don't fall for the transportation engineer hysteria - the road is so overly wide you can absolutely have your cake and eat it too. We don't need the giant setbacks, we just need to tighten up the lanes by 0.3 - 0.5m each, remove a bunch of redundant turn lanes, remove the median and you'll have a whole 7 - 15 more metres to fill with bike lanes, parking, street trees, wide sidewalks, all while keeping 6 lanes of thru-traffic.
 
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Not much for development next week at CPC, but there is an information package on the pedestrian bridge that will cross 16th Avenue at 29th Street NW, between the new Cancer Centre and the Uxborough development by Western Securities.
Report, Supplementary Information, Connectivity Info, UDRP Comments, Access Design Committee comments

Images are from the Supplementary Information package.

1679064385165.png

1679064445952.png

1679064485372.png

1679064521399.png

1679064556378.png

1679064577453.png
 
Looks like no ramp on the Cancer Centre side? You'd need the facility to be open hours to use the elevator?
 
CBBarnett said:
The part that's really frustrating about 16th Ave, as is almost every road I have complained about in Calgary:
  • 16th Ave - Curb-to-Curb is about 29-30m wide with 6 lanes, plus two left-turn lanes. The widest I could find is around 19th Street NW, where it's about 36m wide curb-to-curb, including absolutely unneeded right-turn lanes in addition to the ubiquitous left-turn lanes.
  • Broadway varies a bit, but at it's widest: 21 - 22m with 6 lanes, plus two left-turn lanes. More typically, it's around 18 - 20m
So the curb-to-curb, 16 Ave is 7 - 15m (33 - 66%!) wider curb-to-curb throughout the corridor in Calgary than Broadway in Vancouver, and this is before we even consider sidewalks, in which Broadway is far more consistent and generous, despite Calgary requiring an additional 5m (!) setback on top of the 30m curb-to-curb distance.

But the roads are largely the same (cross-town route with typically 6 lanes, plus the occasional turning lane). So it's not thru-lanes that are using up all the extra space, what are we getting for being so space-inefficient?
  • Wider lanes everywhere
  • Many, redundant and high-capacity turning lanes everywhere. It's an engineering traffic model output classic - giant queue lanes everywhere, assuming turns everywhere. Only a model could produce the inordinate "need" for the length of some of these queues, while ignoring even providing the minimum sidewalk width for stretches of the rebuilt corridor.
    • Turn lanes for everyone, everywhere (except, of course, the publicly financed sound-walled, gated community of Rosedale)
  • Useless median planters and extra wide curb features (e.g. poles, slip lanes, random unusable concrete stretches)
What don't we get:
  • Street parking
  • Bus infrastructure - even for the MAX Orange route built in the late 2010s they *still* added a few bus bays, which are antithetical to bus rapid transit infrastructure. Of course, this didn't come out of the 30m right-of-way, nope - bus bays added from the sidewalk space. I am also sure that the bus bay was paid for by Calgary Transit's MAX construction program, not the roads one despite all the benefit going to drivers, not transit users.
  • Development along the corridor - the amount of land acquired during the widening, plus the insanely large setbacks stagnated most development potential for years.
  • More trips on the corridor - the 99-B Line (MAX Orange's far superior, mature cousin) remains one of the busiest bus routes in North America and moves more people daily than 16th Avenue ever did.
In conclusion - it's the same story I have ranted about for years about our streets - we could fit all the street parking, bus lanes, wide sidewalks we want in the existing right-of-way, Vancouver literally does this. We have chosen not to, instead burdening new development (the thing we want) with a giant setback so we can fit in bus bays (the thing that makes transit slower), so that we can have cushy wide and expensive lanes for trucks (the thing we don't want cutting through the city).

Just don't fall for the transportation engineer hysteria - the road is so overly wide you can absolutely have your cake and eat it too. We don't need the giant setbacks, we just need to tighten up the lanes by 0.3 - 0.5m each, remove a bunch of redundant turn lanes, remove the median and you'll have a whole 7 - 15 more metres to fill with bike lanes, parking, street trees, wide sidewalks, all while keeping 6 lanes of thru-traffic.
Click to expand...
I sure hope we don’t start mimicking Vancouver’s road strategies.
 
FCC1982 said:
I sure hope we don’t start mimicking Vancouver’s road strategies.
Click to expand...
Certainly there is a compromise to be made. 16th is important both as a transportation corridor and as the core of an urban area with high potential, whose growth and revitalization are critical towards a prosperous future for the city. Those strategies could be adopted to varying degrees to maintain the majority of 16th's ability to move people efficiently, all while significantly improving the urban environment (which the current design completely neglects).
 
I read the comments. So many people want to eliminate street parking... I like street parking, though. It's better than parking lots, better than driveways that cut across the sidewalk, and it provides a buffer from traffic. Part of what makes walking along roads like 16th and MacLeod so awful is that traffic is zipping by 2 feet away.

And then there the people who think we can just plant a tree canopy in this climate...
 
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