Mind you, this would be rare evidence of englightenment on the part of our local government -- at least, our municipal politicians. Hizzoner Mayor Dave "Bronco" Bronconnier recently opined that there was no urban sprawl in Calgary -- because all those single-family dwellings in developments threatening to spread up to Red Deer and down to Lethbridge are on 30-foot lots, instead of quarter- and half-acre lots, which used to be the case.

These things, rond points or "roundabouts," are a good idea. If you can go, you go, with little waiting around.

Mind you , Saskatoon once had one, but farmers kept getting stranded within it because they'd go in backwards, so the city fathers got rid of it.

These things are hell on hayseeds.

1. Lights promote idling. More interchanges and flyovers mean less idling.

2. Better LRT routes mean less vehicles on the road. Surface LRT lines with level crossings promote idling and are a safety risk. Think 36th st.

I dunno, that's what I do.

I very much believe that developers should pay ALL of the costs associated with their projects, including new roads. To just put up a mall and leave the rest to municipal and provincipal governments is cheating. The Fraser Valley (east of Vancouver) is a mess. Thirty years ago it was mostly rural; the best farm land in the country. Now, it looks like Los Angeles, with suburban developments and huge malls everywhere. Downtown Hope suffers because Hope residents shop in the big mall in Chilliwack. Downtown Chilliwack suffers because Chilliwack residents shop in the big malls in Abbotsford. Downtown Abbotsford suffers because Abbotsford residents shop in the big malls in Langley, etc. The whole Fraser Valley has become one big traffic jam.

There is a ROW close to my new house and a station allotment (Saddleridge) that is a ten minute walk from my door. The extension to the current line to hook it all up would be about 5-7 kms along dedicated ROW's with no land purchases required. The projected completion date for the Saddleridge stop: 2023!!!! AARGH.

The problem with public transit is that everyone wants his neighbor to ride it.

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I rather like the Skytrain concept and design. It is too limited in scope and it needs another few lines to be effective.

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If you had to ride a bus system that's being operated in tandem with Skytrain, you mightn't like it so much. Being hellish expensive both to build and operate, Skytrain hoovers up so much money the bus system is starved for funds. In Greater Van, the board of TransLink a year or two ago cut all night bus service. Nothing, so far as I'm aware, now operates between 1:40 a.m. and around 5:40. Night workers are hooped.

Around 2001 or so, when I was briefly involved in some transit activism in Vancouver, I read that Skytrain ridership had been absolutely flat from 1990 to 2000. No growth whatsoever, despite considerable growth in several of the areas it (the original line, that is) passes through. The rather lazy 1980s-era decision simply to send it down the same route as the old Inter-urban car line evidently didn't serve as many people as it might have.

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Toronto's streetcar and subway tracks are built with the same guage meaning, theoretically (if you modify the way power is delivered to the vehicle) you can run a streetcar on the subway or a subway car on streetcar tracks.

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The San Francisco system, the Muni, works like this. It's quite common to get on a "subway" car at an underground station, only to have it emerge at grade level some distance later, and operate as a streetcar. Later still it'll duck back underground, gopher-like.

I don't know how popular the system is with locals, but we hayseed tourists dug it.

[ 18 November 2003: Message edited by: 'lance ]

Don't get me wrong, there are other good systems in North America (NYC, Toronto, Montreal), but I've always found Boston's system the easiest to use and navigate, as a tourist.

Re: Roundabouts. Halifax's roundabout(s) are an object lesson in bad design. They are (were) too small to accomodate the traffic they handle(d). The Armdale Rotary comes to a grinding near-halt every day, twice a day, and needs to be manned by traffic cops at these times. The belated MicMac rotary was much worse...traffic used to line up all the way from said rotary to both bridges in the afternoon rush. That is a distance of either three kilometres (old bridge) or five kilometres (new bridge). If you see roundabouts as a solution, make them large enough to accomodate future traffic, not 2003 traffic.

I would question why Toronto is replacing transit cars at 30 years. Metal fatigue? Why not overhaul and upgrade.

Sky Train was a bad idea. It uses an odd gauge which means that every piece of rolling stock has to be custom built - by Bombardier! Why am I suspicious? Calgary bought off-the-shelf light rail for a fraction of the price. BTW, I remember riding Calgary's street cars.

Sky Train actually runs over the old BC Electric right of way. BC Electric had two lines to New West, a line through Richmond to Steveston and a line all the way to Chilliwack. They also had a line from Victoria north up Interurban Ave. to a destination near the present ferry terminal.

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One of the best solutions for cities is the ring route which allows traffic to move quickly around without going into the center.

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No way. All that does is push development farther out. Look at Deerfoot Trail, originaly a ring road, now a mess. In Edmonton, millions are spent on the new Anthony Henday ring road that is already being infected with strip malls and suburbs.

A ring road would help Calgary out a lot. At the bare minimum, it would divert the through traffic from driving through the middle of town. It would also open up the south to resonable access from the NW.

We used to live in BC's Northern Interior; supposedly a long way from everything. Curiously, now that we live in the Fraser Valley, our mileage has quadrupled! That's primarily due to bad design. The simplest tasks seem to involve driving and driving and driving and . . . .

Calgary's problem, as you comment on, is that the developers have been allowed to spread the city out with virtually no control. This will keep happening; even after they run out of water. Ultimately, Calgarians will pay for this.

*****

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I like the concept of the Skytrain, not the implementation. Elevated right-of-way, automated service, covered & heated stations.

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I suppose the elevated ROW has something to be said for it.

All our LRT platforms should be completely covered and heated. If that means building enclosed platform stations then so be it.

Okay, that's my comment on London, Ontario traffic problems, which after reading this thread, don't seem so unique to London anymore.

Funny thing, traffic frustrations. While driving in Toranna this summer, sitting in bumper to bumper traffic on both expressways and major arterial roads, I didn't feel frustrated. That's because when I glanced around, I didn't see five or six small things that could be fixed or adjusted that would improve traffic flow. It was just a problem (for the most part) of volume.

Not so in London. I can go on with tedious examples of intersections and roads no one is familiar with, and I might still, but I can cut it short by saying that the problems stem from retrofitting roads that were designed for different times, by people who make the blunder of siezing on a magic bullet solution when what is required are many carefully tailored to the situation small adjustments.

There is no panacea for traffic problems.

A roundabout for London's Egerton/Hamilton/Trafalgar intersection seems a good idea, particularly with the increased volumes on Trafalgar when the Hale/Trafalgar overpass over the CN line is built. However, to put one in that is large enough to accomodate projected traffic would require the demolition of two large old churches, a long established family run business, perhaps and old stage coach hotel, and likely a greasy spoon restaurant.

For many good reasons, that ain't gonna happen.

On the other hand, I've used roundabouts in other places that moved traffic well and were no where near as confusing or difficult as many people think they are.

The idea that frightens me most is this one of traffic calming. Not that I'm against it. I drove through some residential streets that ran off of Bloor West in Toronto where speed bumps were added, and it was a good idea. Nothing else could be done.

Butcha know, in London and elsewhere, overflow traffic from major roads and intersections happens not because everything else has been tried first, but because no one has stood up and made that hard decision to expropriate a strip of grass from a church (Oxford and Quebec) so a left turn lane can be put in, or because they are afraid to deprive an ugly strip mall of two or three parking spots so a right turn lane can be put in. (Wharncliff and Oxford)

Municiple decision makers, be they politicians or administrators are lobbied and pulled in many directions at once, and this is very well reflected in our roads which try to be all things to all people.

We need to designate some roads for commerce, certainly, but not all roads. Some have to be designated as primary traffic movers, and designed as such, taking out all the bottle necks and road blocks, like bus stops where busses can't pull off the road, Tim Horton drive throughs, and, well, any impediment to traffic movement.

Increased use of one way roads is another idea that I don't think is used enough.

[ 19 November 2003: Message edited by: Tommy_Paine ]

Unfortunately, it's not just planners doing a bad job. Believe it or not, many of them are familiar with such new-fangled notions as roundabouts and ring roads and increased transit service (btw, ring roads are a bad idea, they've never worked).

For instance, the whole property tax system is one huge incentive for municipalities to encourage sprawl. Sprawl equals more tax revenues.

Secondly, provincial and federal governments encourage sprawl by subsidizing its infrastructure (water and sewer servicing, etc.) but they do not fund the service infrastructure for more compact development (eg. transit). This makes sprawl cheaper for municipalities to develop.

Thirdly, at least in Ontario, you have the OMB, which has the power to override any planning decisions local municipalities make in favour of hte developers--and often does so. Developers like sprawl. It's easier to sell to the public. It's what they're familiar with.

Fourthly, the primary tool of planning--zoning--was developed entirely on the idea that it is a good thing to separate land uses (residential, commercial, industrial, etc.) and thus inherently encourages sprawl.

It would be nice to live in a world where, if only those dumb-ass planners knew what they were doing and put in a few freaking roundabouts or timed the traffic lights, congestion and traffic would magically disappear. It is a bit more complicated than that. Planners, by and large, really do know what good design looks like and try their best to get it in there. But they have to get it past council, past provincial planning boards, past provincial and federal laws constraining their authority, past the developers, and so forth. They have to do so with tools developed when "sprawl" was considered a good thing.

The result is that developers work the system, playing different governments, and government departments, off against each other. Rules and regs are nibbled away at and all changes are piecemeal. Improvements in one location can cause disruption in another.

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If you really want to make a difference in these issues, try working to reform property tax laws, zoning, the authority of provincial planning boards, provincial and federal subsidies to municipal governments, and so on. It will have a far greater impact.

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City council has voted to restore the $15m cut from the Glenmore-Elbow-10st SW interchange.