[CBBarnett]

Instead the outcome is bad for pedestrians, the less-able and cyclists. But at least car movements were relatively preserved! Yet another successful Made-in-Calgary solution. Just use best practices from other places you knuckle-draggers. Separate cyclists, pedestrians and vehicles within existing ROWs. It is not hard, especially in this case that neither street has receiving bus lanes - just pure and simple bad design from mobility engineers re-inventing the wheel, while cherry-picking NACTO standards to suit the argument for a bad design.

I really don't get why mobility engineering isn't more lazy and uses off-the-shelf designs. We seem to go to all this energy to often make it no better for drivers, yet worse for everyone else and added a good chunk of extra overhead and costs debating non-standard designs. Goes beyond cycling stuff, almost every intersection seems custom in this city.

I've been fascinated by this for decades and I still can't really get to the bottom of "what are we trying to do here exactly?" Like yes - make cars go faster is a common thread on many designs - but it's also far messier than that. It's like we seem to love over-complication and new attempts to solve already solved problems. There's also this unusual interplay with stormwater engineering that seems to help exacerbate the problem here - everything colliding to create bizarre street scape designs that really aren't a thing in most other major cities.

My most illustrative pet-peeve is this - 3 poles where 1 could work (there's also a 4th just out of frame), plus a non-standard drain and curb profile, all on a narrow sidewalk, making it narrower. Literally no one else build like this, let alone on the busiest corner or the busiest pedestrian main street in a major city:

These 15th Avenue cycletrack intersections at 2nd and 5th Streets follow in this tradition. For some reason - that's not particularly obvious - we added a bunch of weird curbs, complexity, poles, user conflicts and weird sloping profiles to something that could have been solved with an off-the-shelf design 10,000 times before in other cities.

The only silver lining is for sure we won't build like this again, we literally never do! It's a new customize design each time

 

[trtcttc]

The biggest scooter issue for me the still rampant parking that just fully blocks the sidewalk. I just toss the scooters into the street or the grass if I come across one blocking the walking path - if you aren't fit, in a wheelchair or have a stroller, it can fully block you from travelling on a sidewalk.

It probably seemed like a minor thing when they first allowed this, but ended up being one of the most anti-pedestrian (new) things we've done in recent decades to allow private scooters to park on public sidewalks.

We should really just expand the parking spots. A single car's parking spot can probably hold 10+ scooters? At least in downtown, making additional spaces for scooter-only parking will help with the random drop offs. Compliance won't be perfect, but they seem to have a working relationship with the companies (Ctrain pilot), enforcing the parking rules shouldn't be hard.