Wednesday, October 16, 2019

Puzzled

What does this look like to you?


Look at the left side of the ramp, that's a set of tire tracks. That ramp looks like it could hold four lanes of vehicle traffic. What you can see in the background is the new ring road under construction not far from home. So, what do you think? Some kind of on or off ramp? A new access road into our neighbourhood?

Nope. It's a pedestrian bridge. I checked the plans yesterday, and this shows as a pedestrian bridge. I get that it could be wide enough for a vehicle. That makes it easy to plow and get maintenance vehicles back and forth. There's lots of bridges in Fish Creek that could accommodate a pickup truck, if carefully driven. But four lanes? I'm baffled. I just checked, the major pathways and bridges downtown are about 6 m wide, or room for 2 lanes of traffic. This is twice as wide. I'll have to keep an eye on this.

Much else about the new ring road baffles me. There is a bridge leaving our neighbourhood that will be the new 130th Ave, you can just see it in the background above. It is long enough for 16 lanes of traffic to go underneath it. The same is true for other bridges. It seems hugely overbuilt.

Now, I get that a bit of overbuilding is a good thing. It's well proven for roads that if you build it, the cars will come. The new Stoney Trail that parallels Deerfoot used to be empty of traffic. Not anymore, and there do not appear to be any fewer cars on Deerfoot.

On Deerfoot there is something called the Glenmore squeeze. This major highway is usually 3 lanes, sometimes 4, and I think 5 in a few places, squeezes down to two going over Glenmore. Underneath the bridge there is room for only 4 lanes, and Glenmore needs to be at least 3 and maybe 4 lanes. What's more, the way they built the whole interchange means that it's nearly impossible to easily upgrade it. Don't even get me started on the Deerfoot/Anderson/Bow Bottom/Southland rhythms with firetruck.

The clouds last night were spectacular. I have no idea what they're called.



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1 comment:

Looking forward to reading your comment!