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Originally Posted by Fuzz
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Originally Posted by curves2000
Sometimes you just need to get on with things and get them done and fast. It was like 40+ years of planning and consultation for Calgary's ring road for what is effectively moving dirt around, building a base/bridges/overpasses and laying the road surface in what was an open area.
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The ring road delays were mostly due to treaty obligations, in that we couldn't just take the land. Just get on with it? How would you have moved this process along?
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Y'know what's funny? If the "just get on with things and get them done and fast" strategy was employed we probably would have colossally under-built Stoney Trail. Take for example the east leg, which was planned in part on the premise that it would help alleviate the traffic on Deerfoot. And it did!
... For about two years, after which traffic on Deerfoot was as bad as it had ever been.
So instead for the southwest leg, to minimize the risk of having to go back to the Tsuut'ina for another land swap deal, the province bargained for a crapload more land than they needed in the immediate term, and the road was built with an extra-wide median to allow for additional lanes to be added years from now without having to rebuild interchanges to accommodate.
And this is what people think of it:
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Originally Posted by Table 5
I'm no engineer, and I'm sure there are a lot of factors that would make a train line more/less expensive, but I get the sense that we also sometimes go a little overboard with the size of our infrastructure. We tend to super-size a lot of things. Ie, when I look at Stoney Trail, in many places you have massive median gaps that you could land a fleet of A320's in, or interchanges/curves that just seems to go on forever (but then the speed limits don't match up). All that additional land, earthworks, concrete, and maintenance etc, can't be particularly cheap. Other countries seem to be able to build high quality roads on a much more efficient footprint... but we seem to always need the F350-sized option.
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(not trying to pick on you, Table 5, it's just your comment couldn't have more perfectly illustrated this)
You get #### on for under-building stuff, you get #### on for over-building stuff... Infrastructure engineers just can't win. With respect to the Green Line, it doesn't matter what happens: there will always be a vocal portion of the populace who think it's a stupid over-built waste of money, another portion who think it was half-assed and should have been much more substantial, another portion who will be happy with it on day 1 but dissatisfied by day 700, and a silent portion from whom it's just "meh, whatever".