City Traffic Flow - January 20th 2007

OR NOT!

I find it absurd that a city the size of Calgary doesn’t have a proper road system with a ring road and cross town routes free of stop signs and traffic lights. I find it even more absurd that the lack of planning for these essentials means that a sensible road system isn’t even planned for at least twenty five years! And of course with such far away horizons, there’s probably little chance of anything significant actually happening even within that timescale.

On the back of a poor public transport system, is it any wonder that drivers’ tempers are flaring and that to try and reduce the time it takes to get across town that bad driving habits are becoming the norm?

There is a small, unfortunately vocal group in the city, who blame transport problems on urban sprawl and the solution we should adopt is to live more closely together. Well get real. Firstly and most obviously, whilst it may make a small difference to the problem, it’s simply not going to happen. Can you imagine the law changes that would be required? I can just imagine the reaction from the populace when compulsory purchase orders are served in Mount Royal so all the 5,000 sq ft houses can be ploughed down to build tenement style condos. Good grief!

There are of course much better solutions, the most cost effective of which is to build overpasses (or flyovers) that are not on the same scale as the massive structures currently going in at the western end of Crowchild Trail. The Crowchild Trail work is both horrendously expensive and quite simply unnecessary. A more cost effective approach is to install simple overpasses over existing junctions, leaving the old junction underneath virtually unchanged for turning traffic and for traffic on the minor of the two roads. Such a system works particularly well in Le Havre in France and London in England for example. Using such systems, building unobstructed cross town routes in Calgary would be reasonably priced and quick. The benefits on reduced cross town travel times would significantly improve commerce and reduce pollution.

The next thing to do is to get rid of as many traffic lights and stop signs as sensible and replace them with roundabouts. These are much more efficient at keeping traffic moving as well as being safer. I was heartened to find a new roundabout in Canmore recently and I hear the Highway 8/Highway 22 junction north of Bragg Creek is slated to be replaced by one too. Only about 10,000 more junctions to sort out around the city and it might actually be feasible to get around again. Many, perhaps all, Stop signs should be replaced with Give Way signs and four way stops are well overdue to be consigned to the history books forever.

So, will the city actually do anything significant about our road problems whilst reining in the costs of development? I seriously doubt it, because the political will is not there yet. Maybe I should run for public office.