[Acey]

Originally Posted by bob-loblaw

I'm assuming they're going to partially open the interchanges at Sheriff King and Spruce Meadows.

They might. They're not due till Oct 1, 2021 so I wouldn't be able to say when.

Originally Posted by bob-loblaw

I think that with the SE section they had to open it all at the same time because of the contract.

This ring road leg was split into two projects, which was not done with any Stoney/Henday leg prior to this one which makes it confusing. Only the portion within the Tsuut'ina Nation was extremely time sensitive, so all of that is the first deadline (this Oct 1) and then all the deep south stuff (+ 69 St/Discovery Ridge interchange) is the second deadline (Oct 1, 2021).

Since it worked so swimmingly this time around, the west leg from COP down to Highway 8 is also split in 2 with the south part of it now delayed to 2024 due to Enmax being dumb.

Originally Posted by timun

I noticed they have some of the signage up at Glenmore/Sarcee/Hwy 8; maybe I wasn't paying close enough attention but I could have sworn the signage from westbound Glenmore to southbound ring road said Stoney Trail, not Tsuut'ina Trail. I thought the ring road was supposed to be Tsuut'ina Trail from Glenmore/Sarcee to at least Fish Creek?

It's pretty dumb how they did it, wanting to name only the section of the ring road with in Tsuut'ina as Tsuut'ina. So there's a little bit of it behind Grey Eagle where the name goes back to Stoney Trail before it hits Glenmore, and Glenmore west of Sarcee is now Stoney.

Extremely dumb and confusing on the part of Alberta Transportation; the whole section from Glenmore down to 22X should have been named Tsuut'ina. Interestingly, I bet a whole heap of people have no idea how to pronounce Tsuut'ina, or that it cost Alberta over a quarter billion dollars for the rights to build through their land and we were getting pretty close to bulldozing houses if a deal had not been reached.

Originally Posted by you&me

Speaking of racket... I know that these things are supposed to be built with future demands in mind, but man, some of these interchanges seem way larger and more complex than need be.

You are 100% correct. It's not that the interchanges are unnecessarily complex, it's that the median is unnecessarily wide because the original plan was to build this thing out like the 401 in Toronto with a full second freeway running down the median. That plan has since been scrapped, but they did not redo the plans from scratch... so now we have an absurdly wide median creating absurdly long bridges and adding several hundred million extra dollars to the project.

If you look at Stoney in the NW, (and Henday SW) we already have had to rebuild and build out interchanges that were not done the first time, barely 10 years later, and widen the road to 6 lanes not even 10 years after finishing.

Because we can't ever build out past the southwest ring road into Tsuut'ina, it will likely not ever need a rebuild or widening from 8 lanes. It just looks like too much because Stoney NW/NE and Henday SW were not built properly the first time.

The interchange designs here look almost like their swan song, the things that don't work perfectly at other spots (Stoney NE/Deerfoot) they just cloned and fixed by adding extra bridges. In my opinion only one interchange is overbuilt, and that's Macleod/22X which I feel has a sprawling flyover that relatively little traffic will use - northbound Macleod to westbound 22X.