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Originally Posted by Ironhorse
Sure, the city has made some design mistakes (concrete road surface experiment on Deerfoot, Calf Robe bridge anyone?), but to call them totally incompetent is carrying things a bit too far IMHO.
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I don't know why everyone is calling out the city planners on this anyways. Most interchanges in the city are built by Consultants for the city. City engineers oversee the project as a whole but when it comes to individual designs it is the Consultant that crunches the numbers.
Basically this is how it works; (Based on a project I worked on a few months ago) We won a job through the city working on an underpass at 4th Street and 10th Ave S.E. (Think King Eddy to Coyotes under the tracks) The city asks for the Consultant to come up with a few concepts for the underpass. We submitted eight options originally with varying grades, accesses, sidewalk configurations and project limits. After meeting with the city planner and finalizing all options subject to his approval we touched up the drawings and had an open house. The open house just showcases the project to the citizens and looks for feed back. Then we narrow down the concepts to three detailed designs based on city planner feedback and opinions from the open house. Then submit final designs to the city planner for review. Now this process can loop between design review and open houses for months on end depending on how the public perceives the project and of course if funding is readily available for the project.
The city does set speed guidelines and has their own set of design criteria but for the most part consultants have a good hand in the way these things are designed. Maybe this is why you see such a wide variety of interchange and intersection designs in the city is because of all the different consulting firms working with the city.