I don’t know what it will take for someone to come in one day and just commit to a solid plan to twin the thing fully divided the whole stretch from Kamloops to the border so that we can drive between Vancouver and Calgary on fully divided highways. As it stands now I would rather drive through the US so I’m glad I have access to Air Canada employee travel so that I can get affordable flights instead of risking my life on that road.
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Originally Posted by Corndogger
Worse than that. Horgan and his supporters are okay with people dying just so they can fuck over drivers?
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That’s the problem with that side of the political sea. They will spend money, but often not so much on this these days. I get that they don’t want to build bigger roads or have more cars than they already do in the middle of Victoria or Vancouver, but out in the middle of nowhere it isn’t destroying any walkability score! Now, to be fair, the Malahat isn’t nearly as bad of a design as the 2 lane portions of the TCH are in interior BC. I wouldn’t say that they really don’t care at all about people dying because you could say the exact same about the fiscally conservative governments as well and then that would mean everyone doesn’t care about people dying. It’s more like they’re not sure what they’re supposed to do, doing anything will be terribly expensive, and that will take a lot of money away from running the province, so just leave it. It’s not a good solution, but it’s different than saying
cars are evil polluting machines so we won’t do anything to improve driving conditions. That would be more along the lines of Green ideas and even then...
The other side of that coin is more conservative (including B.C. Liberal I guess) governments doing the same but just because they refuse to spend the money so we’re basically screwed either way I think.
It’s like Highway 22 over here. Over capacity 2 lane junk with a lousy old cloverleaf hooking up to TCH. Too many have died on that thing. Should’ve been replaced years ago. I believe under our previous government drew a plan to replace this one and improve access from TCH but that seemed to be it, just a drawing.
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Originally Posted by ssiguy
I don't know what it is with BC. None of the parties have ever shown any interest in building a proper highway system. BC routes are not only completely inadequate but also downright dangerous, even major ones. BC has the shortest merging lanes onto freeways requirements in the country and many of them would be closed anywhere else.
Overpasses are almost NEVER built regardless of traffic or safety demands. The 91A just got a new overpass but it was over 30 years in the making. That one stop light stopped the freeway from being just that despite it's very heavy traffic volumes but it still took 30 years to get just one overpass built. When new roads are built, like the SFPR, they are built to the lowest common denominator in terms of capacity and safety.
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Sounds about like Calgary or just about anywhere over here. Our entire Glenmore trail which is the only real East-West skeletal is either awful cloverleafs too close together, really short merges, or traffic lights that should’ve even gone years ago. At least there they can actually build a real interchange between two freeways; here it’s put part of a cloverleaf and make some stupid offramp that goes through an obstacle course with traffic lights to make up for the missing loop ramp between the two busiest roads, make a plan to build a real interchange, and then never do it. Our city pushes for improvements, our provincial government started listening near election as usual and now with this one who knows, I suspect half of the improvements to be scrapped or dumbed down.
And then there’s that one traffic light on what otherwise would be a freeway stretch of our MacLeod Trail which reminds me of that 91 and 72 Ave, but we have no real plan to replace it. Then there’s the freeway exits that immediately cross a CPR and LRT line. That’s smart...
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Originally Posted by Mazrim
I'm genuinely curious - what makes you feel like that median is unsafe? Why do you feel like concrete barriers are unsafe?
There's a few things to consider here - if you look elsewhere in the world, there are plenty of high speed freeways in Europe and Asia that have narrow medians with barriers, and they function just fine. The land cost and construction cost of doubling your right-of-way for an open design in mountainous terrain is not probably going to save you much in the lifetime costs of accidents. If someone leaves the road, the percentage of them that get in serious collisions in a wide median is high enough that the cost benefit of what you're asking for is probably not worth it. If you're looking at it from a Vision Zero perspective, the likelihood of someone getting in a fatal collision when there are barriers on both sides of each direction of travel is likely lower in most collision types, especially since head-on collisions are removed.
Even when you design a road for a wide open median by current standards, the risk of someone traveling all the way across it is high enough that Alberta has recently started installing cable barriers on wide medians on some highways.
BC has been using the standard you're not happy with for many years now and continue to use it moving forward, which I imagine they wouldn't do if they started seeing more serious collisions and/or lawsuits because of it. The same cross section is being used by Parks Canada for the Trans Canada widening as well.
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I imagine Jersey Barries work just fine considering how much they are actually used. You don’t have to go as far as Europe to find highways divided by them. Any newer urban freeway will be divided in this way to save land. The grass medians are less violent when they work, but sure don’t seem to work so well on the older parts of Deerfoot here which is why they started putting up a wire, but I don’t remember the concrete barrier of the newer part failing as bad. I wouldn’t want to test it though. You can also go looking around the US too. There’s the Florida’s Turnpike for example that seems to be built to a similar standard as the twinned TCH in BC as far as dividing goes. It’s 4 lane divided by a Jersey Barrier, but it has the odd little break in it. That road however is grossly over capacity.
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