An Airport Tunnel for all of us
The following article was cross-posted from www.nenshi.ca (Mayor Nenshi's re-election campaign website) once the 2013 election was over.
On time and on budget!
Those are words I like to hear, and we heard them in July from the City of Calgary team working on the Airport Trail Tunnel project--a team that had been working on this important piece of infrastructure for more than a year. They recently passed a major milestone and turned over the last section above the Airport Tunnel to the Calgary Airport Authority.
[For more information about this project, visit The City of Calgary’s Airport Tunnel website]
Even before I ran for mayor in 2010, I advocated strongly for the creation of a tunnel that would go underneath the new airport runway. So it’s certainly satisfying to see it coming to fruition for Calgarians.
But how can a tunnel be so important?
Simply put: We need it. This tunnel has been in Calgary's transportation plan since 1995 or before. It's not just about access to the airport -- it's about creating an East-West link in a city that is severely short of them.
Without the tunnel, there will be no access to east Calgary for a distance roughly the same as the distance between City Hall and Heritage Drive.
Furthermore, the far northeast is one of Calgary's few remaining identified growth corridors. Thousands of new residents and businesses are slated to be added to this part of the city in the upcoming years, and they will need road and transit infrastructure. Far from enabling unsustainable sprawl, getting the right road infrastructure in place before we build communities helps us serve them more effectively by transit, and helps us build more complete communities, where people can live, work, play, shop and go to school in closer proximity. This was one of our few chances to get it right in the first place, instead of forever playing catch-up.
Furthermore the tunnel is about transit as much as about cars. The Airport Trail Tunnel will serve express buses from the outset (I hope to be on the first bus through!), and it is designed to accommodate an LRT link when we are ready for one.
It’s a big project, but we're almost there. The physical structure of the tunnel is built, and next steps involve installing the mechanical and electrical components of the tunnel and paving the road through the tunnel.
I'll see you there when it opens in May 2014!
-- Naheed K. Nenshi
On time and on budget!
Those are words I like to hear, and we heard them in July from the City of Calgary team working on the Airport Trail Tunnel project--a team that had been working on this important piece of infrastructure for more than a year. They recently passed a major milestone and turned over the last section above the Airport Tunnel to the Calgary Airport Authority.
[For more information about this project, visit The City of Calgary’s Airport Tunnel website]
Even before I ran for mayor in 2010, I advocated strongly for the creation of a tunnel that would go underneath the new airport runway. So it’s certainly satisfying to see it coming to fruition for Calgarians.
But how can a tunnel be so important?
Simply put: We need it. This tunnel has been in Calgary's transportation plan since 1995 or before. It's not just about access to the airport -- it's about creating an East-West link in a city that is severely short of them.
Without the tunnel, there will be no access to east Calgary for a distance roughly the same as the distance between City Hall and Heritage Drive.
Furthermore, the far northeast is one of Calgary's few remaining identified growth corridors. Thousands of new residents and businesses are slated to be added to this part of the city in the upcoming years, and they will need road and transit infrastructure. Far from enabling unsustainable sprawl, getting the right road infrastructure in place before we build communities helps us serve them more effectively by transit, and helps us build more complete communities, where people can live, work, play, shop and go to school in closer proximity. This was one of our few chances to get it right in the first place, instead of forever playing catch-up.
Furthermore the tunnel is about transit as much as about cars. The Airport Trail Tunnel will serve express buses from the outset (I hope to be on the first bus through!), and it is designed to accommodate an LRT link when we are ready for one.
It’s a big project, but we're almost there. The physical structure of the tunnel is built, and next steps involve installing the mechanical and electrical components of the tunnel and paving the road through the tunnel.
I'll see you there when it opens in May 2014!
-- Naheed K. Nenshi
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