Quote:
Originally Posted by Table 5
The solution is not to keep expanding the city, but instead strengthen the one that's within the boundaries. The more you expand out, the less money you have for roads/intersections, and therefore you have to built them like crap (which in the future comes back to bite you in the ass anyway).
Time to in-fill and built up. The current way is simply not sustainable.
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There is a balance between a hippie idealist and a hummer driving, acreage living waste monger. You've really done your best to come off as the former here, suggesting we can all hold hands with strangers and walk everywhere, or take public transit when absolutely necessary.
The person you are attacking clarified and even mentioned the transition from Crowchild North to Crowchild South. A freaking mess. From the stadium to Bow Trail it's still completely stuck in the 70's and perfectly awesome for a city of 400k people. Fixing this up is not going to be a mass contributor to sprawl, as this is as inner city as you get (thankfully we were smart enough to keep freeways out of our downtown). I think this is a valid point no matter how much you love public transit. You could take a lot of cars off the road, and this stretch would still be a mess.
I also believe things like ring roads aren't big sprawl contributors. I'm sure a certain percentage of the population will find them useful for getting to work, but largely you still have people moving towards the centre. A ring road takes traffic off of arteries running through the centre of your city so your intercity traffic doesn't have to share with your intracity traffic. This means less pollution in your city, better fuel economy for intercity traffic, really we can all hold hands in support of that.
I'm a huge transit supporter. Even if you are the Hummer driving acreage dweller you should be. If you get enough people on transit, Crowchild at 3 lanes could be a viable piece of infrastructure for a very long time. It's neglegent to suggest that we should stop improving road infrastructure as well. Maybe pumping a super highway out to Cochranne is a bad idea, but as you said, working within our city limits is still something necessary.