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Urban Development and Proposals Discussion

Here's another post of the same rendering but a bit closer-up.

Image13.jpg
 
Few years ago when Great Gulf bought that parcel it was on the news and they mentioned that Great Gulf is committed to bringing top notch and big development to that parcel to replace YWCA
 
Morshed said:
Few years ago when Great Gulf bought that parcel it was on the news and they mentioned that Great Gulf is committed to bringing top notch and big development to that parcel to replace YWCA
Click to expand...
Yeah there is that yuge sign on 4th Ave just as you enter downtown off Memorial - pretty sure it's for this project and it's been up for years. Must have been a boom-time hopeful that they are sitting on. Who knows, maybe that too will go purpose-built rental!
 
cowGaryBerta said:
Yeah there is that yuge sign on 4th Ave just as you enter downtown off Memorial - pretty sure it's for this project and it's been up for years. Must have been a boom-time hopeful that they are sitting on. Who knows, maybe that too will go purpose-built rental!
Click to expand...
It's somewhere in this blog under the name Highcliff, I believe. they were supposed to open a sales centre 18 months ago but never did. Another sign that market demand for large scale condo projects is just not there yet.
 
Meikkhaell said:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/stampede-station-revamp-1.5141417

I speak from experience, this stretch of Macleod is fucking nuts as it is. Driving to Flames games I've waited literally 20 minutes to turn left onto 25th. Getting out after a game is nightmarish. It's at least another half hour of waiting just to turn left off Macleod and go West. And now they have the brilliant idea of putting even more lights and crosswalks on one of the busiest roads in the city?
Click to expand...

Guess what? Cars are incredibly inefficient at moving a lot of people through a small space. At a MAXIMUM a vehicle lane can move like 2000 people per hour. And that is free-flow traffic. A train can move 20K-30K per hour. Pedestrians walking is about 10K/hr. It's almost as if trying to move a large amount of people using the least space efficient mode of transportation is going to cause congestion. Maybe they should encourage those modes that move orders of magnitude more people in the same amount of space? ?‍♂️
 
Surrealplaces said:
@MichaelS posted something about this a while back iirc. It seems to me the YWCA parcel was sold to the developer (Great Gulf I believe), and I thought they had submitted a land use application, but it's not showing up on the city's website.

Whatever the case being, it sure looks interesting, the towers are different from anything we've seen in Calgary.
Click to expand...
The land use application for the YWCA site was approved by Council. It was LOC2017-0067. The redesignation was to one of the stock districts CR20-C-20/R-20, so nothing would show up on the development map anymore for this.
 
cowGaryBerta said:
Yeah there is that yuge sign on 4th Ave just as you enter downtown off Memorial - pretty sure it's for this project and it's been up for years. Must have been a boom-time hopeful that they are sitting on. Who knows, maybe that too will go purpose-built rental!
Click to expand...
I think those signs are for the lot to the north of 4th Ave (also owned by Great Gulf).
There may be signs on the YWCA site as well but I haven't noticed.
 
haltcatchfire said:
new-lrt-station.JPG


artist-renderings.JPG


This is going to do wonders for that end of 17th.
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Are we finally getting rid of the horriffic fence between MacLeod & the C-Train tracks ?? That would be great.

I would still like to see a pedestrian overpass over MacLeod though.
Something like they did at Chinook would be nice.
 
FCC1982 said:
Are we finally getting rid of the horriffic fence between MacLeod & the C-Train tracks ?? That would be great.

I would still like to see a pedestrian overpass over MacLeod though.
Something like they did at Chinook would be nice.
Click to expand...
I don't believe the city will ever do a project like that one again. The on-going costs of keeping the city portion of the bridge up to the standards of Chinook's management is big money.
 
Mountain Man said:
They will probably keep the fence to discourage jay walking.
Click to expand...

I'm pretty sure he was talking about the current hideous fence being replaced by a fence that isn't hideous. I believe anyone on this forum understands the need for a fence, but design choice should be a lot more important to this city than it has been historically. Calgary has a shocking amount of chain link fences, most of them being in public space.
 
FCC1982 said:
Are we finally getting rid of the horriffic fence between MacLeod & the C-Train tracks ?? That would be great.

I would still like to see a pedestrian overpass over MacLeod though.
Something like they did at Chinook would be nice.
Click to expand...

I respectfully disagree with pedestrian bridges in this context. We already have one and look how that turned out - safety concerns, ugly and creates a barrier. And as many implicitly pointed out - doesn't even solve "the problem" of traffic congestion because you still have it today. All a pedestrian overpass will do in this location is add inconvenience to pedestrians and create barriers.

The Victoria Park Station project (and this discussion) got me thinking, that Calgary's inner city has really got to commit to being a better pedestrian place with way less half-measures and compromises. I see no evidence here (or elsewhere) that 4 - 6 lane fast one-way thoroughfare couplets create better places or cities. You can't have both a car-prioritizing inner city and a pedestrian-prioritizing one. I speak of the inner city specifically, because pedestrians are literally never prioritized south of 25th Avenue SW and North of Sunnyside. Only a tiny sliver of our core is even close to being a truly great walkable area; even in this tiny box of the inner city that has hope, pedestrians are compromised everywhere:
  • Long traffic signals and advanced greens to speed up cars
  • Unnecessary & (most frustrating) random, un-usuably wide lanes that take up space that could be for pedestrians
  • Loud and fast traffic prioritized
  • Terrible quality sidewalks with countless sidewalk obstructions (permanent like poles and parking signs, temporary like lost construction equipment etc.)
  • Countless pull-out lanes/vehicle ramps/alleys that slope sidwalks, create unnecessary sidewalk angles, barriers and dangerous conflicts with vehicles
Surely if we want any areas to unequivocally prioritize pedestrians in the inner city, Victoria Park would be high on the list of places to do it? Why would any of the hypothetical tourists from the hypothetical hotels in our hypothetical entertainment district want to be there today? Nothing encourages them in the slightest to walk around and explore under the current setup: ugly, nothing to walk to, confusing/dark/scary if you don't know where you are going, and all this with constant traffic noise on Macleod, 12th and 11th roaring nearby. I hope that CMLC and the Victoria Park plan are the start of changing this.

We could justify our failures by saying ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ "oh well, it'll always be a car-dominated city" (which may be true). But it doesn't have to be an entirely car-dominated one. And if we want to compete for talent, residents and jobs that require diverse and dense urban environments, we aren't lacking MacLeod Trails ... we are lacking the pedestrian core that is truly pedestrian.
 
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I think the overpass at Chinook is an improvement. I used to cross that intersection all the time, and it was a major hassle as a pedestrian. I haven't used it myself, but I would think it would be safer than trying to cross the road.

FWIW, I'm not a fan of overpasses in general, just the location at Chinook.

CBBarnett said:
I respectfully disagree with pedestrian bridges in this context. We already have one and look how that turned out - safety concerns, ugly and creates a barrier. And as many implicitly pointed out - doesn't even solve "the problem" of traffic congestion because you still have it today. All a pedestrian overpass will do in this location is add inconvenience to pedestrians and create barriers.

The Victoria Park Station project (and this discussion) got me thinking, that Calgary's inner city has really got to commit to being a better pedestrian place with way less half-measures and compromised. I see no evidence here (or elsewhere) that 4 - 6 lane fast one-way thoroughfare couplets create better places or cities. You can't have both a car-prioritizing inner city and a pedestrian-prioritizing one. I speak of the inner city specifically, because pedestrians are literally never prioritized south of 25th Avenue SW and North of Sunnyside. Only a tiny sliver of our core is even close to being a truly great walkable area; even in this tiny box of the inner city that has hope, pedestrians are compromised everywhere:
  • Long traffic signals and advanced greens to speed up cars
  • Unnecessary & (most frustrating) random, un-usuably wide lanes that take up space that could be for pedestrians
  • Loud and fast traffic prioritized
  • Terrible quality sidewalks with countless sidewalk obstructions
  • Countless pull-out lanes/vehicle ramps/alleys that slope sidwalks, create unnecessary
Surely if we want any areas to unequivocally prioritize pedestrians in the inner city, Victoria Park would be high on the list of places to do it? Why would any of the hypothetical tourists from the hypothetical hotels in our hypothetical entertainment district want to be there today? Nothing encourages them in the slightest to walk around and explore under the current setup: ugly, nothing to walk to, confusing/dark/scary if you don't know where you are going, and all this with constant traffic noise on Macleod, 12th and 11th roaring nearby. I hope that CMLC and the Victoria Park plan are the start of changing this.

We could justify our failures by saying ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ "oh well, it'll always be a car-dominated city" (which may be true). But it doesn't have to be an entirely car-dominated one. And if we want to compete for talent, residents and jobs that require diverse and dense urban environments, we aren't lacking MacLeod Trails ... we are lacking the pedestrian core that is truly pedestrian.
Click to expand...
 
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