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.

 

[whatchyyc]

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:
View attachment 603129

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.

Me and @CBBarnett are gonna have a field day when the Street Manual drops. I've been waiting for that thing for a year now

 

[CBBarnett]

Me and @CBBarnett are gonna have a field day when the Street Manual drops. I've been waiting for that thing for a year now

It's always the inexplainable part of street design that gets me going ... I disagree but understand when a road is over-built and has way to many lanes for the traffic. There is logic to what they thought at the time, even if it's not a good idea or ignores the negative impact that wide streets can cause.

For example, 4 lane one-ways are often overbuilt in downtown and opposite to what a thriving urban place should have as the negatives are huge to pedestrian mobility and the living environment. But it's a logical conclusion given traffic assumptions people have used over the years, as big of fallacies as they are. What never makes sense is why streets are not 4 lanes but vary randomly between 4.5 and 6.5 lanes with strange lay-bys and nonsense that varies block-by-block to no apparent benefit to anyone: doesn't fit more cars, more parking, more fire trucks etc.

 

[MichaelS]

Calgary water main break causes closure of Bowness Road

A water main break has closed a section of Bowness Road.

calgary.ctvnews.ca

Let's hope this isn't a preview of bigger things to come.

 

[lemongrab]

Me and @CBBarnett are gonna have a field day when the Street Manual drops. I've been waiting for that thing for a year now

Any idea if it might become required to have a curb ramp at pathway connections? I encountered one that was built in the last calendar year without one. Very annoying when towing a bike trailer.

And don't even get me started on bollards! My favourite is when they don't even do anything to preclude vehicle access:

 

[HudsonA08]

Interesting if true. Urban sprawl come back to haunt us once again.

 

[trtcttc]

Interesting if true. Urban sprawl come back to haunt us once again.

View attachment 604519

I think it's a bit unproductive to see any funding for roads as taking funding away from cycling. Many people cycle on... paved roads. Many protected bike lanes are on paved roads. In the grand scheme of things this isn't a lot of money, and no matter your support of cycling, we can't really remove roads if there's still people living there.

 

[Red Star]

I think it's a bit unproductive to see any funding for roads as taking funding away from cycling. Many people cycle on... paved roads. Many protected bike lanes are on paved roads. In the grand scheme of things this isn't a lot of money, and no matter your support of cycling, we can't really remove roads if there's still people living there.

When a road gets re-paved, that's usually the best time to add cycling improvements such as bike lanes and cycle tracks.

 

[Mountain Man]

Calgary water main break causes closure of Bowness Road

A water main break has closed a section of Bowness Road.

calgary.ctvnews.ca

Let's hope this isn't a preview of bigger things to come.

The City says this is unrelated to the feeder main issue, but I'd bet the pipes are from the same era, therefore any area that has pipes from the 70's is in for some disruption over the next few years.

 

[trtcttc]

The City says this is unrelated to the feeder main issue, but I'd bet the pipes are from the same era, therefore any area that has pipes from the 70's is in for some disruption over the next few years.

Also I'm not sure how they can definitively say if it's related. I'd assume the repeated pressurization/de-pressurization in the area would have some effect on the pipes in the surrounding areas

 

[lemongrab]

Also I'm not sure how they can definitively say if it's related. I'd assume the repeated pressurization/de-pressurization in the area would have some effect on the pipes in the surrounding areas

I could definitely be wrong, but my impression is that there are essentially two different systems - feeder mains go from treatment plants to reservoirs; then the distribution network comes from those reservoirs

 

[Mountain Man]

Also I'm not sure how they can definitively say if it's related. I'd assume the repeated pressurization/de-pressurization in the area would have some effect on the pipes in the surrounding areas

I think they just mean that it's not the feeder main itself that broke, but a local main under a street. Not sure how the systems works, what lemongrab said makes sense though.

 

[CalgaryTiger]

I'm sure you saw the news about the Deerfoot improvement work at Beddington being done and holy these people opening this section up must be looking to get paid for this section being done. I cannot think of a logical reason to open the median lanes to then have them immediately merge back into the existing lanes.

To this point, those six lanes southbound immediately turn into four at the pink line and until 64th and McKnight are done, this will be the case. This has created a bottle neck of merging traffic from Beddington and the median lane ending at the same point. Essentially, millions spent for a worse road. Just hold off on opening the median lane until it can all open.