Quote:
Originally Posted by curves2000
As for the safety, I do think signage could be drastically improved. For a new, modern, busy and expensive built road, it would not be out of the question to have location markers all along the road for emergencies and breakdowns. Having markings every 100 or 200 meters indicating where someone is in the event of a breakdown/emergency. A 1, A 2, A 3 etc.
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To me and to most people, including the people who build roads, what makes a road safe is things like sightlines, gradients, loop radii, surface, proximity of obstructions if a vehicle were to leave the roadway, etc. Everyone is welcome to write their own definition, but I'd fundamentally disagree with the statement that Stoney Trail is "not safe" because it lacks little parking lot signs every few hundred meters that are not codified in our Highway Geometric Guide. "I'm northbound a couple hundred meters past Costco" should be enough for my tow truck driver to track me down.
Quote:
Originally Posted by curves2000
The road 100% could benefit from the safety wiring that is common on Highway 2 and on Deerfoot.
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It's called
HTCB, high-tension cable barrier. Stoney has a TON of this... like the entire freeway where it's required. I'm guessing you only drive a small portion of Stoney SW/TTN Trail, i.e. a portion where it's not required because the median is 3 miles wide.
The purpose of HTCB on QEII is to minimize head-on collisions where there are narrower grass medians.
Quote:
Originally Posted by curves2000
Is it any wonder why accidents happen all the time or near misses and people ending up in the ditch either injured, killed or with significant damage to their car?
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On SW Stoney, how much higher is the rate of serious accidents than that which was expected?
Quote:
Originally Posted by curves2000
My argument to this is that this project is strangely overbuilt in some key sections such as the size of the land it occupies. It lacks considerable safety features, signage and more and it appears to have dropped the ball in very key, high growth areas.
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Signage sucks, yes. I fundamentally disagree with every other part of this statement. The "overbuilt" i.e. wide median of the SW was from the original design that left room for an outer ring road that has since been scrubbed, we've talked about that already... they claim to have felt time constrained because of the TTN deal if they had tried to do a new design for the whole leg.
Aside from that, what else specifically is overbuilt? What safety features are lacking besides the parking lot markers not required by any road code? Where else was the ball dropped?