“One of the funny things about the ring road debate is that we’ve never had that debate.
– Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi
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From the Calgary Herald: $5-billion cost for last leg of Calgary ring road ‘horrendous’.
Coun. Brian Pincott has long warned that the ring road leg won’t help much with southwest Calgarians’ chief need: to get a quicker way downtown, past the bottlenecks around Fish Creek Park or Glenmore Reservoir. If he could choose how to use billions of provincial funds, he’d opt for upgrading Glenmore Trail and the Deerfoot interchange, and spend the rest on transit, rather than a freeway planned decades ago.
“It ended up sort of being in a way, mythologized as being the ultimate solution, and then you just get on this path dependence: you’ve just got to have it. You’ve just got to have it,” Pincott said.
“Our thinking has evolved over the last 50 years. This road hasn’t.”
Motordom must be fed.
Having lived in Calgary’s south for 6+ years I concur that the west side ring road will do little to help traffic get downtown . However it helps trucks and cars get westbound to BC.
Further Deerfoot Trail and transit improvements are indeed needed, too.
Given Calgary’s weather and urban layout a car, or often two, is a necessity. Only when we moved to Vancouver did we downsize to one car and use that far less than in Calgary.
Inconsistent provincial interest in developing municipalities’ multi-modal urban transport networks is a defining constant across Canada…