O O Ø O O O O
GE5 Delivers
A portion of the major grade-separated interchange project close to my house has been completed. This was as major a road building project as Calgary typically undertakes, attempting to disentangle the traffic of two north-southbound roads from one arterial east-west road. The shorthand for the project is the GE5 interchange: The Glenmore Trail, Elbow Drive, 5 Street West interchange.
(Incidentally, do any other cities make a habit of naming their largest highways trails?)
The GE5 project started in 2005, and is scheduled to be completed in 2008. During that time it has created an unholy mess, both in terms of traffic and the state of the neighbourhood. Many homes in the adjacent community of Mayfair were expropriated and destroyed, and many others have had their property values damaged by their new proximity to the inhumanly scaled interchange. (As it was put to me by a city official: “The city has determined that their property values and quality of life have not been impacted. We provided them with a sound barrier amenity.”) Their neighbourhood will now be demarcated—like so many others in Calgary—by unsightly sound walls.
The construction has cost me approximately ten minutes extra in commuting time, every day, each way, for two years.
The Glenmore underpass component of GE5 was just recently completed. Now east-west traffic can flow freely under Elbow Drive. (Access to and from Macleod Trail and 5 Street are still up in the air, however.) Finally, I thought. I can put all that dusty, delaying, construction nonsense behind me.
Silly, naïve me.
Traffic has in no way improved. Where there used to be one light at the Glenmore and Elbow intersection, there are now two at the top of the overpass, separated by the width of the Glenmore lanes below. Calgary has a well documented and inadequately explained penchant for combining traffic lights and overpasses.
Additionally, the lights at the intersections to the north and south are still required, to allow two-way access to local communities Mayfair and Kelvin Grove, respectively. There are thus four controlled intersections within a span of approximately two blocks. After three years of so-called infrastructure improvements.
Hilariously, traffic still backs up onto Elbow, owing to congestion at the Glenmore causeway to the west. This beautifully illustrates the principal that traffic will expand to more than fill all available capacity.
Infrastructure boosters will proclaim that the causeway is also being widened. Would they also proclaim that the causeway work is the final piece of the puzzle, ameliorating southwest Calgary’s traffic congestion for all time? No. It will simply move the pressure point to some other, perhaps unanticipated location.
I should be grateful for the slowdown at Glenmore. It prevents intersections closer to my home from becoming similarly congested. I had lately argued in favour of keeping Glenmore and Elbow a flat crossing, to discourage commuter traffic. The GE5 interchange however, seems to accomplish this beautifully, and for the low price of $110,000,000.
Evan Spence
July 31, 2007
OOØOOOOXXXII
August 1st, 2007 at 11:15 am
Seems to me that more people should work from home more frequently to reduce the commute problem. Of course as technology and WiFi and other options become more readily available we will be able to just plug into the Matrix from wherever.
I’m amazed that we basically spent $110,000,000 for more lights. Lights are cheaper than the space required to do proper clover leafs to allow merging without lights…if we already appropriated so many homes whats the deal with a few more. Just do friggin clover leafs?
August 1st, 2007 at 9:04 pm
You forgot to include one more Glenmore Trail headache that is the cause of many a headache. When there is even a hint of rain, the underpass below Macleod Trail tends to fill up like a swimming pool and seems to take days to drain. One would have thought that the Powers That Be would have come up with a master plan to deal with this as it seems to be a common occurance!
August 2nd, 2007 at 12:42 am
That’s great, Bighair. You proposed turning a $110 million dollar mistake into a 200 million dollar mistake, with the added benefit of destroying even more of Kingsland.
Thanks for taking the polar opposite view, and demonstrating the sort of clear thinking that makes tragedies like the GE5 politically feasible.
August 2nd, 2007 at 7:19 am
Well as I see it you can’t have it both ways. You either get traffic lights or turn the inner city into a major turnpike. Of course Calgarians can’t merge in traffic either so maybe the cloverleaf idea doesn’t work. Regardless the city was going to do something tragic at exhorbitant cost. Even though I totally appreciate the rant and agree either approach is overkill, what is an alternative?
August 2nd, 2007 at 8:21 pm
The alternative is to move out to the coast…
No. Wait. I have to pass more than enough Albertans afraid of the corners on the Malahat as it is…
:-)
August 3rd, 2007 at 12:53 am
Don’t create false dichotomies. This is not a choice between (a) destroying more homes and (b) having more traffic lights. The real choice is whether the government should be building these things in the first place.
Seeing you boil it down to these two options is pretty solid evidence that the government shouldn’t have anything to do with roadbuilding.
August 7th, 2007 at 12:03 pm
Seems to me if you can’t work with the roads you got, expansion or otherwise then alternatives are:
1) more commuter rail? You need to appropriate property somewhere to build another ugly corridor that nobody wants at exhorbitant cost
2) heavily tax those driving downtown to force carpooling rather than providing incentives which is less effective (as a taxpayer I’m supposedly paying for the privilege to live downtown..well it’s time for suburbanites to pay for the privilege to drive downtown and park in $600+ per square foot parking stalls)
3) add carpooling lanes to Deerfoot and Crowchild?
4) more buses - hyrdogen fuel cell technology is about to take off with new cooling improvements
I’d be pissed if my home was appropriated too or I had a giant sound wall built beside my yard. I don’t like either solution. Of course if I’d lived there for the past 15 years and saw the increase in traffic, why continue living there? I would have moved long before with the original Glenmore development.
August 7th, 2007 at 12:53 pm
Bighair:
1) Trains rock. Yes. Build trains. In fact, I’d be happy if they stopped building roads, and started building trains instead. Train to Banff. Train to the airport. Train to those godawful mega-strip-malls.
2) You forgot toll roads.
3) Carpooling lanes don’t work. This has been demonstrated a thousand times over. carpooling is a fundamentally flawed idea. You’re more likely to sell one-seaters than convince people to ferry their neighbours around.
4) Busses are just big carpools.
August 7th, 2007 at 1:59 pm
I like trains too. Toll roads implies building more roads which we can only do around the city so we end up like Houston with some big ring roads, but on a couple of major arteries into the city. Not sure that really solves the problem. Carpooling is flawed when you aren’t being taxed heavily to do so. It depends on the good of people which generally doesn’t work. For once I’m in favor or more taxes. Busses are like trains that go to your house. What’s wrong with that if it actually means fewer cars? Tax cars, pay for busses making busing more affordable and convenient. It’s just a flexible train system if you ask me.
August 7th, 2007 at 4:14 pm
Or you could try this. I moved as close as possible to work: my wife and I bike. In addition to exercising my fat belly I get to don a smug and self-righteous smirk as I glide past lines of traffic. I also get to exercise the male need to go as fast as possible on pavement. I would consider it quite an achievement to be pulled over for speeding on my Kona.
Carpe Cyclum.
August 14th, 2007 at 9:43 am
I agree that four lights within about 300 yards of each other is silly. Living near the GE5, as I do, I can tell you that the City could have made Elbow Drive free-flowing, but they deliberately chose not to, because that would simply encourage more Elbow Drive traffic, which would result in more congestion further north on Elbow Drive. You might consider this another victory for the Elbow Parkians.
August 16th, 2007 at 9:57 am
ahhhh - how I miss Glenmore and Elbow. Not that WinterPeg is any better. We have Route 90 - 3 lanes at 80 km/h that reduce to 2 lanes at 50 km/h and then back to 3 and 4 lanes at 80 again…..sheesh. We even have light and rail crossings on our Perimeter highway (how about an overpass or 2?).
Go to Minneapolis - the road system there is well thought out, with lots of freeways leading into residential suburbs. Yes - they have tons of traffic issues too (not counting the bridge issue of recent). its far better than many metro area’s I’ve driven in.
Can’t wait for my next visit to see how far Calgary has progressed since I left for the middle 3 years ago.
January 5th, 2008 at 10:27 am
Elbow Drive is not (and should not be) a freeway. In other words, it’s supposed to have traffic signals.
January 7th, 2008 at 12:33 pm
No road is supposed to have that many signals to cross a single road.
And what is so sacrosanct about Elbow? It’s a road. it’s purpose is to convey traffic from point A to point B. Is the purpose of a “freeway” to wreck the traffix pattern of every road it crosses?
You live on Elbow, don’t you Vince?