Red Star
Active Member
I can't stand the new cycle track intersections on 15th. I just ride my bike in the traffic lane and skip over the convoluted intersection.
- Thread starter Cowtown
- Start date
Calgcouver
Senior Member
As any rationale person on a bicycle would. These completely go against best practices.
CBBarnett
Senior Member
It's definitely one of the best candidates in a while for a project post-mortem to understand the step-by-step decisions that led them to the design they did.
Rather uniquely, I struggle to see the design bias - usually the bike stuff is obviously watered down to support the car movements and turns. In this case the bike facility is totally sub-optimal, but it also doesn't seem to be for a reason that benefits anyone. The accessibility routes are also sub-optimal, the sidewalks are sub-optimal. Nothing makes sense, there was no winners at all in the design. I can't imagine how anyone was happy with the outcome here.
Put another way - good, standard bicycle and pathway projects are shelved and compromised all the time that are fully in alignment with design convention, past projects, national comparisons etc. Almost unheard of to skip all the way through to the end and actually build this intersection with this design and survive all the push-back they would have received along the way. Makes zero sense.
CalgaryTiger
Senior Member
Sadly, I believe this type of intersection is going to be repeated at 20th Street and 50th Avenue in the southwest.
trtcttc
Senior Member
Seems to be the new Calgary standard. They are doing it on the under construction 19th street NW too. I get the logic because of limited space, but the design and colours makes it hard to understand what is the correct path is for bikes and pedestrians aren't going to expect it. With the exact same design, if they had the asphalt path be continuous and concrete around it, it's a much better visual cue for everyone that a bike could cross here.
CBBarnett
Senior Member
All this is getting more into the cycling thread than this one, but my quick thought is the one commonality between all these somewhat strange designs: the designers seem to be unafraid to allow mixing of pedestrians and cyclists, particularly at intersections.
Compared to 20 years ago, it was all about keeping each separated. In additional to these bizarre intersections designs, the new new riverwalk sections really went big into mixing so that bicycle commuter traffic and pedestrian share much of the same space. I will never really understand the motivations that created this kind of outcome:
Not sure what triggered that change in design attitude. Perhaps scooters and electric-assisted mobility have really blurred the lines here (e.g. scooters have been declared more of a sidewalk thing, despite travelling at speeds of a bicycle sometimes). Or it was too politically and engineering challenging to keep the cycling facilities on the street leve (although that doesn't explain what happened on 15th Avenue as it's a hybrid mostly at street-level, or why the river pathway is so into mixing all of a sudden).
I don't think that mixing is a bad concept overall, just seems to be applied kind of arbitrarily - as if our goal becomes to creating mixed spaces, regardless of the context. Either mixing is a priority in and of itself for some reason, or some other constraint and design style is incentivizing this mixing space outcome even against obvious unappealing trade-offs.