Quote:
Originally Posted by inv4zn
Futureproofing infrastructure should be a priority, but so much effort is spent on cleaning up shit from yesteryears that there aren't enough resources to do it.
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This is what's always struck me as the root of the problem: nobody thinks far enough ahead. Hwy. 1 through Coquitlam/Burnaby is a good example: the HOV lanes were put in a mere, what, 10-12 years ago? Now they're tearing it all up to do it all again. Wouldn't it have been smarter to go to five lanes with express bus lanes and the like right from the start?
Sure, people then would have been harping on the gov't spending all that money and land on a huge highway that's virtually empty... but they'd be happier for it today. And with the way the cost of EVERYTHING has shot up the last half-dozen years, it would have cost SUBSTANTIALLY less to have done in then.
The Cape Horn Interchange is an even better example of band-aid construction: in the last 20 years, I can think of at least three major re-alignments that did little to IMPROVE traffic flow - it just shifted some of it from one place to another while keeping most of the bottlenecks in place (like the freeway overpass). They're finally, with the Gateway Project, doing it all right - effectively redoing the entire thing from scratch. Before it was like a half-assed interchange between Hwy. 1 and Lougheed, with United and the Mary Hill Bypass linked in as an afterthought... the planners this time around appear to have realized that you have FOUR major commuter routes connecting in one place, and have designed things to be more accommodating to that fact.