Quote:
Originally Posted by Doug
Radial light rail line from Seton to Westhills to Foothills.
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Apologies, I exagerated a little bit. If the ROW is anything like the similar section of Highway 2 leading into Edmonton, then the wasted median is about 100m:
Still, you use 10m of that on a railway or something, hard to think of much use for the other 90m of wasted land we have for effective perpetuity.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Acey
The reason, obviously, is that AB Trans had previously run analysis that showed a regular divided freeway would have been unable to properly perform that duty.
It confirms what you thought all along because AB Trans has now changed their position such that they deem an upgraded Highway 22 to be a sufficient component of an upgraded outer road network. Given the aforementioned plans for twinning of outer highways, and Highways 60/21/19 around YEG where significant twinning is already done and continues in the case of Highway 19, it's clear that AB Trans is not moving away from the automobile by any stretch of the imagination. It seems unlikely that they will tomorrow release a presser saying they are abandoning the vision for a ultimately divided highway between Saskatoon and Calgary, or that they are no longer are interested in Highway 22... unlikely given that they're upgrading it as we speak. By upgrading these facilities to controlled-access divided highways, you begin to form what is objectively an outer ring roadbut is not classed as such.
Prior to this, there was clearly a long-term vision for high capacity greenfield outer ring roads, so wisely it was decided to construct SWRR with contingency such that incorporating such a vision into the existing road would not be prohibitively expensive. The ministry has now decided that the possibility is zero, so they are considering removing the contingency. All I ever argued was that if they considered the possibility to be something greater than zero, then the contingency should be included. From my perspective, Mason has made a distinction here to state that plans for the grander concept of a high capacity outer ring are those that have been determined to be overkill, which in turn allows SWRR's contingency to be scaled back. The implication is that they still believe the collector-distributor system would have had valid function in a high capacity outer system.
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AB Trans don't have a universe simulator, there is no way they could build an accurate model/simulation to justify the collector/distributor road they had 'planned'. There simply isn't the data, considering there is no road there now and the Province and City are the ones deciding where future growth goes. Also, a non zero chance of something happening is a terrible business case for spending tens or hundreds of millions to future proof for a plan that we have no proof ever existed, especially when the negative effects of not future proofing are completely benign.
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But anyway, we are where we are now (due to decades of incompetence and bad decisions). I imagine it's too late now to build a normal freeway without oversized useless overpasses and unnecessarily gigantic, so are we forever lumbered with all that wasted land?
How could they not have come to realise that "future network planning will not include outer ring roads" a couple of years ago, when they were designing this road? Perhaps we would be closer to building the whole thing, with a proper bridge over the Elbow if they had?
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