Roads, Highways & Infrastructure

[CBBarnett]

It's not just seton, passed by the new developments north of Sage Hill and those roads are massive, some even have medians on a supposedly "residential" street. On a slightly different note, why do so many people like to park on the street when they all clearly have a garage? I can't imagine parallel parking in front is really saving you that much time compared to the garage.

There's lots of weirdness out there - and not surprisingly - its incredibly wasteful and always pro-car, even when it makes no sense and offers no actual benefit to driving or parking. Would be curious to know more about the push-pull of different players and policies that result in these suboptimal designs.

Take this street with all front drives in Sage Hill. It's not an overly wide road, but also it has no function for street parking at all - there's too many driveways so there's no legal parking available regardless. Not that you need street parking - every house has 2 car garage + 2 car driveway, so 4 stalls.

So we don't need street parking, what's the width that can fit a fire truck with 2 travel lanes? Should be about 3 - 3.5m per lane x 2 lanes so about 6 - 7m, right? Nope it's 9m wide - because....?

That extra 2 - 3m could have been a street tree and grass boulevard. It's not that this street needs to be some sort of radical, European-style walkable paradise - perhaps a bridge too far from our current practices - it's that we seem to have paved an extra 2 - 3m for no apparently reason, at great cost and to no benefit for anyone:

 

[lemongrab]

The one positive there in Seton is the grass strip between road and sidewalk with some trees.

A somewhat related observation I've made in the past is that stretches of Signal Hill feel like a bit of a barren wasteland to me when I cycle through, even though it's got lots of 30 year old trees (mostly coniferous). This road is 12 meters wide. It actually looks better on streetview than it feels in person

Part of it might be geography as this is on the leeward slope and the top of the hill feels slightly less barren, but here's an example with the same conditions 2 km to the north - you can see the stark difference with a grass strip and more deciduous trees (road seems to be about the same width measured on google)

 

[MichaelS]

The answer to many of these questions comes from the City of Calgary's Design Guidelines for Subdivision Servicing. The current version (and previous versions) can be found here:

Planning & Development resource library

www.calgary.ca

(just have to go to technical design specifications, scroll (and scroll... and scroll) down to the section that contains these documents:

One of the challenges, is the current iteration is based upon the 2014 complete streets policy, which included painted bicycle lanes on collector roads. However, for some reason, the City doesn't actually paint them in. So the result is the appearance (and function) of extra wide driving lanes. The City is looking to update the DGSS, as part of the City Building Program, by creating a new Streets Manual that hopes to tackle some of these issues:

City Building Program

www.calgary.ca

I think both Sage Hill and Seton pre-date the complete streets policy, so not sure entirely what happend with them, but I can offer pretty good speculation for Seton's main street. I bet the transportation impact assessment at the time of their outline plan (way back in the mid-2000s I think) would have shown enough volume of traffic on the road at full buildout that it would require something like a primary collector roadway or something (meaning, 2 driving lanes, 2 parking lanes, but a central median to allow left turn lanes at intersections to increase capacity at intersections). Maybe one of the things that came up was the median made the right-of-way even wider, or else the fie department did not like the fact the asphalt width between the median and the outside curb is not wide enough for their liking (especially with parked cars along it), so they decided to just remove the median and create a 4 lane road. With the lane widths at the time being 3.5m, well, 4x3.5 = 14m.