Quote:
Originally Posted by kw5150
What new radical ideas?? Many of the ideas that planners are talking about have restored many areas in Canadian and American cities. New ideas are what we need. There are reasons why we have very successful areas in our city now as opposed to how they were before. Calgary's Road system is actually really good for a city of a million. I dont understand where people are getting this "the roads aren't designed for a city of a million people" bullsh%$. We are better off that many other Canadian cities.
What we really need is new attitudes and new ways of getting to work and back. 1 person in every car simply does not work.
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By radical new ideas I'm referring to confusing the situation on Crowchild by discussing HOV. That's radical for Calgary on a road that has very obvious problems and solutions. (2 lane choke points & traffic lights are the obvious issue on the road, not lack of HOV)
I welcome radical ideas when they help. For example I suggested once making a dedicated bike road downtown and have bikers simply walk the final block or 2 to their destination. Personally when I was a heavy bike rider in my youth I wouldn't even consider driving on a main road. A dedicated road and walking the last leg of the journey is something I'd have done.
(I was almost tarred and feathered for that radical idea though).
I've thought about expanding +15 downtown and narrowing sidewalks where possible. Narrowing them to allow room for a bike lane. And allowing people to walk with their bikes in the +15 system. (Hey, what about a +15 system or lane for bikes indoors? Just brainstorming here)
Another radical idea I've had is change the trains to 2 car instead of 4 right now, but run them twice as often? My biggest issue with transit is the wait - so if you speed up service then more people are likely to want to take it.
Another radical idea I've read in the USA is to try to eliminate as many stop signs as possible. Turn them into yields when it's safe. It saves fuel and time when things aren't busy.
At one time I thought turning circles were just confusing and dangerous on roads. And then I used one. The single lane ones are actually great and could eliminate lights on many of the Stoney Trail overpasses (in Scenic Acres for example). The lights there aren't timed and are a silly bottleneck. But we should resist the urgent to build big dual or triple lane roundabouts since I think they are too confusing to many people.
Another radical idea is to build more bus turn outs on main roads so when they stop to pick up passengers on main routes they don't block traffic. That did wonders on 2 lane Bow Trail, and actually helped speed up bus traffic because they were also trapped by buses stopping when the lights turned green.
Another idea is to always build 2 lane off ramps (or just paint singles as duals) and to examine every merge lane in the city to see if they can be easily lengthened.
Another suggestion is to always build new LRT lines so they don't cross paths with traffic, people, or bikes. (it's silly but the new line on Bow still has a pedestrian crosswalk that will stop traffic and trains). Yes, cost is an issue, but I'd sooner build LRT correctly even if the length comes up short. It's a lot cheaper to do it right and lengthen it later than to try to fix a problem after the fact.
It's like with Glenmore when the city asked if they should spend the extra money to do it right. Or when they asked people if they should spend a bit more money when building the NW LRT line so they could avoid crossing Memorial drive at grade. (Imagine adding another stop light for the LRT and road on Memorial just to save $100k).
My radical idea is to have a policy to try to do it right the first time. I live near Nose Hill drive. I've watched that road change 20x in 20 years. Lanes moved and added, turn lanes moved, turn lanes added or lengthened, the entire road rerouted. A simple plan to build it thinking 20 years into the future would have saved money and time in the long run. Even the province finally came on board with this type of thinking when they decided to make Stoney free flowing (that wasn't always the plan).
Another idea that would attract people to LRT (and I've ridden LRT since the day it opened on the original line) is to design the stations for our weather. As a kid going to high school it always baffled me that there was a relatively huge heated area in most of the first stations in Calgary. But you couldn't stand or see the trains from this area. You had to stand out in -30 rather than in the heated interior.
Ideas are a good thing. And quite often the cheap ones can buy you time while you save up to do the right thing. There is no need to suddenly decide that cars are bad and we should artificially force people to use a transportation system that doesn't work for them. We aren't at that stage.