Jill Browne, from home and away

Monday, April 4, 2011

Home: Calgary, Alberta, Canada

Up at the airport yesterday to drop my friend off, I saw the newly-closed Barlow Trail.

The feds are expanding YYC, Calgary International Airport. This means building a runway where we now have a road, Barlow Trail. In fact it’s the main road for reaching the airport from anywhere east of Deerfoot Trail and north of Memorial Drive.

Barlow is a strange road because although there is a Barlow north of the river, and a Barlow south of the river (the Bow River, that is), and these two Barlows do line up with each other, they aren’t connected. Very confusing if you don’t know what you’re doing and you get on Barlow south of the river expecting to take it to the airport.

No worries now, though. Barlow is closed at its north end so you can’t use it to get to the airport at all.

Find another way and don’t trust your GPS. Revert to that good old-fashioned map thing.

Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Home: Calgary, Alberta, Canada

In addition to deciding to stop adding fluoride to Calgary’s drinking water, the City Council approved (by one vote, I understand) the building of a tunnel underneath the airport.

Without such a tunnel, the expansion of the airport will create a kind of barrier for those who want to get in and out of north-east Calgary.

The Mayor said it will cost more not to build the tunnel than it will to build it. I suppose the more comes from dealing with the stress on the rest of the infrastructure.

Now the city engineers and outside contractors have got a big job ahead, though in radio interviews the city’s engineer seems calm about it. Building a tunnel in and of itself is not an extremely difficult feat of engineering, and the city staff have already got a lot of the preliminary work done. The kicker is that the airport, which is federal property leased to the airport authority, is going to build the new runway starting soon. Barlow Trail closes in April 2011. It’s now February.

Expect lots of digging.