The trade-off between mobility and access is a perpetual challenge in urban areas: Land development fuels demands for new accesses to through-routes, yet the more access points that are provided, the poorer the through-route will perform. And to further complicate the puzzle, who should pay to provide that valuable access? At $15-25 million for your typical urban interchange we’re not talking small change, but for one high-quality regional center in southeast Calgary the benefits of a new interchange were too valuable to pass by.
When completed, the $200-300 million Deerfoot Meadows shopping complex in southeast Calgary will be one of the largest in Canada and with up to 1.4 million sq ft of retail space, including IKEA, the popular Swedish furniture store, amongst its prestigious tenants.
The highway, known as the Deerfoot Trail, is a major north-south artery running through this urban center of 1 million. Carrying over 100,000 vehicles a day, the Deerfoot Trail freeway is of strategic importance to the city of Calgary, the province of Alberta, and forms a part of the north-south CANAMEX trade corridor extending from Alaska to Mexico. The potential to provide excellent exposure was evident, but for the development to have direct access to the highway would be icing on the cake that most developers simply dream about.
Previously zoned industrial, the 360 acres of land located in the southwest corner of the Glenmore Trail interchange (soon to include over 4,800 parking stalls) had no direct or easy access to the Deerfoot Trail—and none was planned. It’s unusual for developers to get into the highway building business, but when access is important to your business it pays to get involved.
To provide adequate merge and diverge distances, the final design, whittled down from 12 preliminary layouts with variations, incorporated a modified partial cloverleaf interchange with braided or basket weave ramps. This design was determined to provide great access convenience for the future occupants of Deerfoot Meadows, meet the needs of the surrounding community and provide a design that is robust enough to serve traffic needs far into the future and to fit in with the long-term highway corridor plans.
ARA Engineering of Calgary also needed to design the direction signing—an important aspect particularly for a new (and complex) interchange serving a regional center. ARA decided to investigate the computer generation option for the 15 signs of varying complexity that were required. The software program they chose was GuidSIGN developed by Transoft Solutions of Richmond, B.C., the developers of AutoTURN. GuidSIGN automates the sign-design process using standard templates that can be modified to various agency requirements. Darcy Taylor, ARA’s project director, tried out the downloadable demo first and realized that it made a lot of sense. “With virtually no learning curve our drafters could easily jump to it. We were able to produce a variety of signing concepts and signing schemes in literally a matter of minutes, review these with various parties, make changes and resubmit sign drawings so quickly and efficiently that it made this part of the project run very smoothly.”
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