Quote:
Alberta’s transportation minister says the southwest portion of Calgary’s ring road has an overly lavish design his government would not have approved.
But Brian Mason said his government has no choice but to honour the plan crafted by the previous PC government that he said is considerably overbuilt, with the potential to contain 16 traffic lanes due to the inclusion of a 100-metre-wide median.
“My preference would be not to build it the way it is, and it’s correct to say it’s added to the cost,” Mason told Postmedia. “Is it overbuilt? There’s no question, no question.”
The minister overseeing construction of the 31-kilometre, $1.42-billion roadway said he’s sought to correct some of the freeway’s alignment “a number of times,” particularly in a bid to move it further from southwest communities.
But he said consultations with government engineers and the agreement with the Tsuut’ina First Nation allowing for the construction across their land have convinced him that’s not feasible.
“We are hamstrung in the effort to change the alignment of the roadway, the design is locked in,” he said. “It would have to be all renegotiated.”
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The renegotiation he speaks of is the 2013 agreement with Tsuu T'ina to acquire the land, which was predicated on a conceptual design that could not be drastically changed without a return to the table... and there was concern up about running into the 2022 deadline by redesigning, which indeed would have cost the province far more than the ~$400 million extra we are paying for the median.
https://calgaryherald.com/news/polit...-fulfilling-it