Calgary Roads Discussion Thread

[Inferno099]

Originally Posted by calgarygeologist

Are the induction loop controls at traffic lights widely used across Canada or does Calgary have a significant amount of these? I ask because so many drivers have been pissing me off lately (and this could go in the gear grinder thread) by stopping to far back on the intersection and not triggering the lights. A bad one that I run into often is the dual turn from Shaganappi onto Dalhousie Drive. The other weekend it was backed up with 20+ cars in each lane because the idiots up front in both lanes were too far back. I had arrived and waited for three lights before they finally moved up and triggered the arrow and cars had already been waiting ahead of me.

Often times I see the cars that are too far back with pretty new plates so I wonder if they are new to Calgary and unfamiliar with the loops. Old people are often bad for this as well.

Agreed regarding people staying too far back to trigger lights. Interestingly my family was driving in Cochrane this weekend and there was a sign in the middle median on the road turning south onto highway 22 that basically said - move up to the stop line to trigger the traffic lights. I have not seen that before, but could be used unfortunately in many areas in Calgary.

[Inferno099]

Originally Posted by calgarygeologist

Now that the West ring road is done and the bridge over the Bow is done does anyone know if there are any plans to eliminate the 80 km/h zone south of Nose Hill Drive?

There is also another 80 km/h zone further south for about 200-300 meters close to a turnoff / overpass. Cannot remember exact area but it is a strange spot and for such a short distance before turning back to 100 km/h.

[Don Benji]

Originally Posted by morgin

Left lane turn traffic also blocks through traffic. I can’t describe it properly, but the timings are all off so the right turn light seems to go before the people wanting to turn right can physically get to the turn lanes, since they are blocked by people turning left and going straight.

It’s seriously an insane design.

The previous intersection had a merge lane onto Crowchild when heading west on 24th Ave. They decided to widen the lanes on Crowchild Tr but removed the merge. The added wait times at the set of lights has increased congestion and idling. Strange plan.

[powderjunkie]

Originally Posted by Don Benji

The previous intersection had a merge lane onto Crowchild when heading west on 24th Ave. They decided to widen the lanes on Crowchild Tr but removed the merge. The added wait times at the set of lights has increased congestion and idling. Strange plan.

It was a pretty short merge lane starting from a near dead stop - or often from a dead stop considering it is a heavy pedestrian area (which is a recipe for disaster when you have motorists intent on getting up to speed.

Now it's a dual right on green only. In the before time it didn't take much straight and LH traffic to back things up to where you couldn't make it to the merge lane anyways.

I suspect this is a thing where it feels way more annoying than it actually is. Overall intersection function is marginally different (probably slightly better for some movements and slightly worse for others) while safety is significantly improved

[Jimmy Stang]

Nearby and maybe slightly related, but I'm actually pretty happy with the Crowchild and 16th Avenue improvements over the past few years.

Southbound Crowchild to Eastbound 16th Avenue: getting rid of that short little mergy yield nonsense as you join 16th is an improvement - now you join 16th in your own, new lane.

And Westbound 16th going North on Crowchild: Previously you'd have to do the Banff Trail thing and then wait, but getting directly onto Crowchild by the Denny's is really nice. And again - a new lane!

I'm not sure why that took decades to figure out. Relatively minor tweaks with big improvements to traffic flow.

And I suppose that's where it becomes related to the 24th Avenue intersection. More continuous lanes on Crowchild at the expense of a controlled merge on 24th. I'll take that trade off for the net benefit.

[Don Benji]

Originally Posted by powderjunkie

It was a pretty short merge lane starting from a near dead stop - or often from a dead stop considering it is a heavy pedestrian area (which is a recipe for disaster when you have motorists intent on getting up to speed.

Now it's a dual right on green only. In the before time it didn't take much straight and LH traffic to back things up to where you couldn't make it to the merge lane anyways.

I suspect this is a thing where it feels way more annoying than it actually is. Overall intersection function is marginally different (probably slightly better for some movements and slightly worse for others) while safety is significantly improved

I've been driving this route for 32 years. Never found the previous transition from 24th heading west to Crowchild to be a problem. There is so much room to have made the merge even better than it was but they took it away. It was a very simple crosswalk to navigate as a pedestrian because you were only looking one way at one lane. During the busy hours traffic now backs up significantly further than it used to because there is at least two minutes added to the intersection. It was immediately noticeable after the change.

[Don Benji]

Originally Posted by Jimmy Stang

Nearby and maybe slightly related, but I'm actually pretty happy with the Crowchild and 16th Avenue improvements over the past few years.

Southbound Crowchild to Eastbound 16th Avenue: getting rid of that short little mergy yield nonsense as you join 16th is an improvement - now you join 16th in your own, new lane.

And Westbound 16th going North on Crowchild: Previously you'd have to do the Banff Trail thing and then wait, but getting directly onto Crowchild by the Denny's is really nice. And again - a new lane!

I'm not sure why that took decades to figure out. Relatively minor tweaks with big improvements to traffic flow.

And I suppose that's where it becomes related to the 24th Avenue intersection. More continuous lanes on Crowchild at the expense of a controlled merge on 24th. I'll take that trade off for the net benefit.

Agreed, those two tweaks make so much more sense. I also like the bus stop at 16th East off crowchild in that former long yield lane.
I don't get why the merge on 24th had to go though.

[GioforPM]

Originally Posted by Inferno099

Agreed regarding people staying too far back to trigger lights. Interestingly my family was driving in Cochrane this weekend and there was a sign in the middle median on the road turning south onto highway 22 that basically said - move up to the stop line to trigger the traffic lights. I have not seen that before, but could be used unfortunately in many areas in Calgary.

Near either 17th ave or the Sarcee/Glenmore interchange I think. They made a couple minor mistakes with lanes there IMO.

[powderjunkie]

Originally Posted by Don Benji

I've been driving this route for 32 years. Never found the previous transition from 24th heading west to Crowchild to be a problem. There is so much room to have made the merge even better than it was but they took it away. It was a very simple crosswalk to navigate as a pedestrian because you were only looking one way at one lane. During the busy hours traffic now backs up significantly further than it used to because there is at least two minutes added to the intersection. It was immediately noticeable after the change.

Very simple once you cross the totally kinda sort of maybe a crosswalk at the 24 St intersection assuming you have no mobility challenges and can deal with a vertical curb:

https://maps.app.goo.gl/tPN8ppNXdxxxbLpKA

Was the iteration with two straight through WB lanes and the regular merge better? Perhaps, but the 24 St access still made it a cluster####.

And it's not necessarily about whether it's a problem for the mergers...it almost certainly limited the throughput of Crowchild NB on green, which has ripple effects all the way back to the Bow River bridge and beyond. There's a reason the biggest freeways have ramp meters (stop lights metering traffic on the on-ramps)

[Fuzz]

It seems there is a stupid limit on the red, too. It should be green pretty much any time Crowchild NB is red. But in this image:


https://maps.app.goo.gl/9G5qaMhDq79oTDPq7


you can see it's red, for no logical reason other than perhaps the fear people turning EB 24th to NB Crowchild driving like morons who shouldn't have a license.

[Fuzz]

https://maps.app.goo.gl/qYHtX4xhMKkJCd8D9


Yup, see, here's a moron that would cause an accident, so I guess we can't have logical traffic flow...

[powderjunkie]

Originally Posted by Fuzz

It seems there is a stupid limit on the red, too. It should be green pretty much any time Crowchild NB is red. But in this image:


https://maps.app.goo.gl/9G5qaMhDq79oTDPq7


you can see it's red, for no logical reason other than perhaps the fear people turning EB 24th to NB Crowchild driving like morons who shouldn't have a license.

Looking again the big thing they achieved with the last iteration is 4 through lanes on NB Crowchild (maybe somebody already said this?) - the merge lane essentially became the 4th through lane. 33% more capacity on the main route.

Considering the ongoing investment to improve flow from the south it's a sensible idea to open the final cork in the bottle as much as possible. That demand isn't going to induce itself, afterall.


I'd love to see them try the converging dual turning lanes though, as long as they put up a webcam for us to enjoy the inevitable carnage.

[Mazrim]

Originally Posted by Fuzz

It seems there is a stupid limit on the red, too. It should be green pretty much any time Crowchild NB is red. But in this image:


https://maps.app.goo.gl/9G5qaMhDq79oTDPq7


you can see it's red, for no logical reason other than perhaps the fear people turning EB 24th to NB Crowchild driving like morons who shouldn't have a license.

If the EB left was a single that might doable. With a dual left that's way too risky.

[Fuzz]

Originally Posted by Mazrim

If the EB left was a single that might doable. With a dual left that's way too risky.

It's kind of self correcting though, over enough time.

[Don Benji]

Originally Posted by powderjunkie

Very simple once you cross the totally kinda sort of maybe a crosswalk at the 24 St intersection assuming you have no mobility challenges and can deal with a vertical curb:

https://maps.app.goo.gl/tPN8ppNXdxxxbLpKA

Perhaps you haven't been to this intersection in the last three years. The city fixed all of the curbs in that area. You posted a google image from ten years ago.

[Torture]

Originally Posted by Jimmy Stang

Nearby and maybe slightly related, but I'm actually pretty happy with the Crowchild and 16th Avenue improvements over the past few years.

Southbound Crowchild to Eastbound 16th Avenue: getting rid of that short little mergy yield nonsense as you join 16th is an improvement - now you join 16th in your own, new lane.

And Westbound 16th going North on Crowchild: Previously you'd have to do the Banff Trail thing and then wait, but getting directly onto Crowchild by the Denny's is really nice. And again - a new lane!

I'm not sure why that took decades to figure out. Relatively minor tweaks with big improvements to traffic flow.

And I suppose that's where it becomes related to the 24th Avenue intersection. More continuous lanes on Crowchild at the expense of a controlled merge on 24th. I'll take that trade off for the net benefit.

When I did the second GDL road test years ago they took me to the southbound crowchild / eastbound 16th ave mergey yield.

Good thing they cancelled the second road test otherwise what confusing place would driving tests take you as a 'gotcha'?

[Mazrim]

Originally Posted by Fuzz

It's kind of self correcting though, over enough time.

If you offer to pay the City's legal fees during the "adjustment" period, I'm sure they'd do it!

[powderjunkie]

Originally Posted by Don Benji

Perhaps you haven't been to this intersection in the last three years. The city fixed all of the curbs in that area. You posted a google image from ten years ago.

I'm aware. The comment I was responding to said it was fine for the last 32 years - I was pointing out that it definitely was not for a lot of use cases.

The 2016 changes were obviously long overdue. Then we spent $87M improving the bridge over the Bow. Which is cool, except Crowchild effectively squeezes back to two lanes 1km north of the river. So we really just helped that bottleneck fill up faster, and improving the throughput at 24th was the natural remedy. Which they did by adding another lane (which never fails) and removing the merge (which was certainly hindering the throughput of the right through lane to some degree).

That's the beautiful thing about spending on roads. It's futile and pointless unless you keep spending more and more and more ad infinitum in a never ending quest to maintain the status quo. Because really that's all we achieve in 99% of cases - getting travel time back to where it was a few years earlier (after spending millions and months+ of increased travel time during construction)

Of course transit and mobility spending suffers from a similar 'problem' - except the spending that begets spending actually results in compounding returns instead of diminishing returns.

[Shazam]

That's a misanalysis.

The goal was to shove the traffic up. Because what would happen is that NB traffic would get stuck on the bridge, since there was exactly one NB lane, so by the time you made it to the 10 Ave lights, there was hardly any traffic. Just getting to the 24th Ave lights took forever.

$87 million was also to rehabilitate the bridge. I'm going to go on a limb and say that most of that money was for the rehabilitation and additional lane. I mean maybe the original design of the bridge shouldn't have of all things an exit lane.

I find the notion of induced demand comical. By that asinine logic all you'd have to do to make money is open a business and wait for the customers to start buying.

[rohara66]

Will 22x bridge be done in 2024... seems unlikely. FML