Regina Bypass Thread

[djforsberg]

Originally Posted by Corndogger

How can it be overbuilt when there's at grade intersections and the road is only four lanes? I hope they replace the at grade intersections with interchanges sooner than later.

Not sure how the presence of at-grade intersections means the overall project is not vastly overbuilt and unnecessary to the average person. Though some areas were necessary for safety, such as the interchanges east of Regina, overall, this was mostly a massive gift to the trucking and construction industries from the Saskatchewan taxpayers.

[jigglysquishy]

Agree completely.

The three east side interchanges should have been paid 33%/33%/33% municipal, provincial, federal. Those eastern exurbs made off like bandits. Hundreds of millions of dollars for communities that total 10,000.

The Bypass going south will still look unnessecary in 30 years.

The west bypass is simply to support the corrupt GTH.

[Dengler Avenue]

At grade? Where?

[djforsberg]

The people making the decisions in this province and many who support them (including some on this board) are living in the past and for whatever reason are incapable of thinking creatively and critically about the future. They hold pipe-dreams of a return of high oil and potash prices and think there's still a chance to lure elusive manufacturing jobs here, all while ignoring that the rest of Canada is moving to a service-based, high-tech economy as globalization and automation continues to replace those once-sought-after jobs. Instead of accepting that the world doesn't need our oil since the shale-boom allowed oil supplies to outtake demand, the leaders of this province (and its neighbours to the west) continue to blame the carbon tax, environmentalists and Justin Trudeau for the downturn of the oil industry. I am very concerned that these supposed leaders are making it harder and harder for us to adapt to the realities of the ever-changing world and that the only economic progress we are going to have in the short term is from higher-than-average immigration, massive and unnecessary construction projects (such as the Regina bypass and future Saskatoon bypass), and the selling off of provincial assets including Crowns like SaskTel. This is not a good time to be in this province.

[Corndogger]

Originally Posted by Dengler Avenue

At grade? Where?

Looking at the video that was posted the other day it looks to me like there are a couple of "weird" at grade intersections. Has anyone recorded a complete drive of the road yet?

[Stormer]

Originally Posted by Dengler Avenue

At grade? Where?

If you don't count a few right-hand-turn-only accesses, yes unfortunately there are 2 at grade intersections to accommodate local landowners who complained about having to drive their tractors and combines great distances. One is a Courtney Street in the far SW corner of the Bypass and the other is at Armour Rd. in the NW sector. Both are in remote rural areas.

There are no traffic lights or speed zones. Very little cross traffic is expected.

[Stormer]

Originally Posted by jigglysquishy

Agree completely.

The three east side interchanges should have been paid 33%/33%/33% municipal, provincial, federal. Those eastern exurbs made off like bandits. Hundreds of millions of dollars for communities that total 10,000.

The Bypass going south will still look unnessecary in 30 years.

The west bypass is simply to support the corrupt GTH.

Agree about the eastern exurbs getting a free ride.

[city rep]

Originally Posted by djforsberg

The people making the decisions in this province and many who support them (including some on this board) are living in the past and for whatever reason are incapable of thinking creatively and critically about the future. They hold pipe-dreams of a return of high oil and potash prices and think there's still a chance to lure elusive manufacturing jobs here, all while ignoring that the rest of Canada is moving to a service-based, high-tech economy as globalization and automation continues to replace those once-sought-after jobs. Instead of accepting that the world doesn't need our oil since the shale-boom allowed oil supplies to outtake demand, the leaders of this province (and its neighbours to the west) continue to blame the carbon tax, environmentalists and Justin Trudeau for the downturn of the oil industry. I am very concerned that these supposed leaders are making it harder and harder for us to adapt to the realities of the ever-changing world and that the only economic progress we are going to have in the short term is from higher-than-average immigration, massive and unnecessary construction projects (such as the Regina bypass and future Saskatoon bypass), and the selling off of provincial assets including Crowns like SaskTel. This is not a good time to be in this province.

We need to have a saskatchewan politics/conspiracy/rant thread for those on here that arent interesting in talking about the construction side of projects.
I have no idea how any of the recent messages on here suggest anything about oil, shale, potash, trudeau, environmentalists or any of the other things mentioned there.
I am very much a futurist and agree with a number of your thoughts, however nowhere in the scope of this thread do you need to rant about your political view.
If you are that worried about the direction some of our leaders are going I suggest you to do something more proactive about that.

I think the bypass was done right making our cities primary gateways interchanges, and for making it all 2 lane. Lots of the bypass project was tied to other initiatives, like the GTH scandal.
The reality is if certain trade offs were made now, some people would still find a reason to complain when 10 years from now we have to start upgrades on portions we were too cheap to do right initially.
Bottom line is I am not a traffic expert, nor did I conduct the surveys to decide if this project was needed. Whether the project should have fully gone to contruction, I don't know. We all will benefit in some way, and by different degrees due to this project. Years from now we can talk about whether it was a smart decision or not and how our superior views are better than other internet strangers.

[djforsberg]

Originally Posted by city rep

We need to have a saskatchewan politics/conspiracy/rant thread for those on here that arent interesting in talking about the construction side of projects.
I have no idea how any of the recent messages on here suggest anything about oil, shale, potash, trudeau, environmentalists or any of the other things mentioned there.
I am very much a futurist and agree with a number of your thoughts, however nowhere in the scope of this thread do you need to rant about your political view.
If you are that worried about the direction some of our leaders are going I suggest you to do something more proactive about that.

I think the bypass was done right making our cities primary gateways interchanges, and for making it all 2 lane. Lots of the bypass project was tied to other initiatives, like the GTH scandal.
The reality is if certain trade offs were made now, some people would still find a reason to complain when 10 years from now we have to start upgrades on portions we were too cheap to do right initially.
Bottom line is I am not a traffic expert, nor did I conduct the surveys to decide if this project was needed. Whether the project should have fully gone to contruction, I don't know. We all will benefit in some way, and by different degrees due to this project. Years from now we can talk about whether it was a smart decision or not and how our superior views are better than other internet strangers.

You know you could just not read my posts instead of requesting a safe space away from them? This project cost us at least $1.8B. Politics will never not be part of the discussion of the bypass. "If we don't deal with politics, politics will deal with us."

[PhotoJim]

I'm with city_rep. No place for anything more than incidental politics here.

I believe the Fleet Street intersection is at grade, too, but would have to drive the bypass again to be sure. I drove it at 8:00 last night so it was pretty dark.

I took it to work this morning (NW Regina to Albert/Gordon). It was about as fast as my existing Lewvan Drive commute but felt faster because of few stops and low traffic, and it's faster than Ring Road. It will be even faster when the tent is taken off the southbound lanes at the existing TCH.

[Stormer]

Originally Posted by PhotoJim

I'm with city_rep. No place for anything more than incidental politics here.

I believe the Fleet Street intersection is at grade, too, but would have to drive the bypass again to be sure. I drove it at 8:00 last night so it was pretty dark.

I took it to work this morning (NW Regina to Albert/Gordon). It was about as fast as my existing Lewvan Drive commute but felt faster because of few stops and low traffic, and it's faster than Ring Road. It will be even faster when the tent is taken off the southbound lanes at the existing TCH.

Fleet is right turns only.

What is with the tent still up in the middle of the freeway?

[Draftsman]

[QUOTE=Stormer;8734244]Fleet is right turns only.

What is with the tent still up in the middle of the freeway?[/QUOTE]

Maybe it's the world's first high-speed drive through car wash (complimentary with a purchase of $1.8 billion

[Draftsman]

No one knows what the future may bring. We could all be dead in 30 years time. I think our city fathers of 40+ years ago had the balls to plan to build the Ring Road. I am sure many at the time thought it was overkill and unnecessary and way too expensive. Too bad they couldn't foresee just how right they were, and if anything, they should have made it six lanes and included overpasses or underpasses at all railway crossings.

[jigglysquishy]

Or if they had real foresight we would have built a medium to high density community built around public transit.

[jigglysquishy]

We are now officially the smallest city in Canada with two ring roads.

[PhotoJim]

Originally Posted by jigglysquishy

We are now officially the smallest city in Canada with two ring roads.

True, but unless you built over the sea and mountains, Vancouver will never have one, let alone two, and Ontario has a similar problem with Lake Ontario.

Winnipeg still doesn't even have a single freeway, although they do have a complete ring. Tons of at-grade intersections and traffic lights.

Edmonton has a full freeway ring, and a good one. Calgary still hasn't finished Stoney Trail and will need to negotiate with a First Nations band to finish it.

St. John's is marginal as far as being bigger is concerned (if you count the whole metropolitan area, it might be) but has lots of water in the way of a ring.

Kitchener-Waterloo-Cambridge doesn't have a ring per se but does have a freeway network that gets you around pretty well.

London doesn't even have a single ring, despite being much larger than Regina.

Victoria? Mountains and water in the way.

Ottawa has rocky topography and a huge river in the way, plus would require the cooperation of another province and city to make it happen.

Montreal is, well, Montreal.

Quebec City has a pretty good freeway network, but again, a ring is difficult with how wide the St. Lawrence is. Soon there will be a QC-Levis tunnel and that will complete the first ring.

What bigger cities am I forgetting?

[djforsberg]

Originally Posted by PhotoJim

True, but unless you built over the sea and mountains, Vancouver will never have one, let alone two, and Ontario has a similar problem with Lake Ontario.

Winnipeg still doesn't even have a single freeway, although they do have a complete ring. Tons of at-grade intersections and traffic lights.

Edmonton has a full freeway ring, and a good one. Calgary still hasn't finished Stoney Trail and will need to negotiate with a First Nations band to finish it.

St. John's is marginal as far as being bigger is concerned (if you count the whole metropolitan area, it might be) but has lots of water in the way of a ring.

Kitchener-Waterloo-Cambridge doesn't have a ring per se but does have a freeway network that gets you around pretty well.

London doesn't even have a single ring, despite being much larger than Regina.

Victoria? Mountains and water in the way.

Ottawa has rocky topography and a huge river in the way, plus would require the cooperation of another province and city to make it happen.

Montreal is, well, Montreal.

Quebec City has a pretty good freeway network, but again, a ring is difficult with how wide the St. Lawrence is. Soon there will be a QC-Levis tunnel and that will complete the first ring.

What bigger cities am I forgetting?

Woosh

[UPP]

Originally Posted by Stormer

If you don't count a few right-hand-turn-only accesses, yes unfortunately there are 2 at grade intersections to accommodate local landowners who complained about having to drive their tractors and combines great distances. One is a Courtney Street in the far SW corner of the Bypass and the other is at Armour Rd. in the NW sector. Both are in remote rural areas.

There are no traffic lights or speed zones. Very little cross traffic is expected.

Yep, they reconfigured the bypass at TCH West so that trucks wouldn't have to slow down at a price tag of probably $400 million or more, yet a mere couple of km's away, they have an at grade intersection for slow moving farm equipment instead of a simple overpass.

Talk about stupidity. The intersection at the Bypass and TCH West is so over engineered it is laughable. The whole project is reminiscent of 60's-70's Montreal infrastructure projects.

[GreaterMontréal]

It would be complicated in Montréal. Laval is also an island. They would have to build a new highway north of the A-640 just to get people through the North Shore suburbs. They would have to build 2 bridges, one near Rigaud and one in Varennes. The new highway would join the A-50 about 40 km north of downtown Montreal. A-640 is not wide enough to accommodate a significant increase in traffic.

[Robag]

Just an observation yesterday. I was driving on Vic east and then onto Ring Road south yesterday around noon. Very little semi's compared to before. I know it will not eliminate semi's completely, but I thought the traffic was flowing smoothly at lunch time compared to other days I've been in that area at that time of day.

A big factor that would go a long way in eliminating even more truck traffic will be to move the Husky House outside of the city limits. The Flying J in Balgonie will help, but there are still brand loyal drivers out there that will continue to use the Husky House.