adamyyc
Active Member
Final Master Plan for Crescent Road has been posted to the City’s Engage webpage: https://engage.calgary.ca/crescentroad
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Urban Development and Proposals Discussion
- Thread starter Surrealplaces
- Start date
I like some of things in the plans for Crescent Road. Cutting down on the amount of parking will hopefully cutdown on the amount of dudes with their loud mufflers. I like the plans for landscaping between the multi-use path and the main walking path. Maybe I'm being selfish as a cyclist, but I would rather have seen the multi-use path used primarily as cyclists/scooter/skateboard pathway. Today it's mostly used for cyclists, but it gets crowded quickly if there are even a few pedestrians on it. When I'm there as a pedestrian, I prefer the main walkway anyway. Overall though, it looks good.
CalgaryTiger
Senior Member
Seeing this reminded me to go look up what's going on with the 33/34 Mainstreet.
Looks like there was a project update in October: 'The City is beginning hydrovac exploration work in Marda Loop along both 33 and 34 Avenues S.W. between Crowchild Trail and 18 Street S.W. This work is required so we can study the soil and road structure of the area, and to identify both City-owned and third-party utilities (Atco, Enmax, Shaw, etc.). This information will inform our final designs and allow us to plan construction efficiently.'
If there's funding the work begins next year: 'The Marda Loop Main Streets project continues to progress, with plans to begin construction in 2023 pending funding availability.'
You can also view the 33 and 34 Avenues S.W. combined roll plot on the project webpage. Some things I noticed: Festival street is now the 'loop' that surrounds the Marda Loop Brewery and not between 34 and 33. Also looks like there will be a set of lights at 34 and 20.
Looks like there was a project update in October: 'The City is beginning hydrovac exploration work in Marda Loop along both 33 and 34 Avenues S.W. between Crowchild Trail and 18 Street S.W. This work is required so we can study the soil and road structure of the area, and to identify both City-owned and third-party utilities (Atco, Enmax, Shaw, etc.). This information will inform our final designs and allow us to plan construction efficiently.'
If there's funding the work begins next year: 'The Marda Loop Main Streets project continues to progress, with plans to begin construction in 2023 pending funding availability.'
You can also view the 33 and 34 Avenues S.W. combined roll plot on the project webpage. Some things I noticed: Festival street is now the 'loop' that surrounds the Marda Loop Brewery and not between 34 and 33. Also looks like there will be a set of lights at 34 and 20.
zagox
Active Member
100% agree - the image above even foresees a business dude in khakis talking obliviously on a cell phone in the bike lane! Bikes in the bike lane, walking and taking phone calls on the gravel path!
CBBarnett
Senior Member
Overall the Crescent Road Plan looks good - it's not revolutionary and could go a lot farther to reduce car access/parking, but will be a major upgrade and closer to what the area actually is - a regionally significant viewpoint that attracts many people to visit at all times of the year.
One thing in the city's report that surprised me is just how low traffic volumes actually are. Most people are accessing the area by foot or cycle already, at all times a year. I thought that might be the case but rarely do we see such specific local data to prove it. Here's the data they provided:
At the end of the report there's this proposed traffic calming plan. All pretty standard stuff, but good to see.
My only gripe is that this is a one-off project. On the main inner city corridors where the commuter v. local needs trade-offs is more complex I get the one-off need to balance. But for every side street and local traffic area like this, every single community in the inner city has problems with speeding and road safety, and lots of poor pedestrian/cycling access issues. Let's not just create a few publicly-funded gated communities for the wealthiest and loudest voices, let's make our entire inner city like this regardless on if you have a teenager make-out lookout point in your hood or not.
We don't need to build walls and barriers, visitors and commuters in cars can still access everywhere - but if you leave a main corridor in the inner city, the assumption should be much slower vehicle speeds everywhere, all the time. The approach demonstrated here should be standard practice in every neighbourhood.
Though I don't have any stats, I think there used to be much higher vehicle traffic in the pre-covid days. Adding the extra temp lane for pedestrians, and having intermittent road closures over the past two years seems to have toned the number of vehicles. Taking away some of the parking should tone it down even more, which will be nice.
Duck Lightning
Active Member
FCC1982
Active Member
Right ?!
CBBarnett
Senior Member
Today's article on rental demand, echoes many of the same ideas discussed on here for the past few years:
Apart from short-term interest rate/cost disruptions, I can't see any future where rentals don't continue to outpace ownership in Calgary. This is particularly true given our long-term deficit in rental supply compared to every other large Canadian city. More rentals will be good to see and an inevitable step to transitioning to a major city.
With the booster article, here's the downer one - also echoing many of the ideas discussed on this forum:
This hits on the impacts of all the issues - Transit has lost the initiative and seems uninteresting/unable to make real change. While the article probably over-emphasizes the downtown v. elsewhere reason for transit's ongoing problems, the reality is it's a land use failure at TOD sites combined with the structural inefficiency of sprawl, car-centric development. This is a massive hole to dig out of and can't be don't by Transit just shuffling it's shrinking budget around. Structural reform in both land use and operations is needed.
Why post these articles together?
TOD. Why are all these people in the second article trying to make cross-town trips from Hawkwood or Ranchlands? Because the choices where people have to live is ridiculous if you want to take transit - "affordable" suburban apartments scattered randomly throughout all neighbourhoods - all at too low density and with zero mixed use - so you are condemned to have a low-frequency feeder bus with a transfer to a low-frequency main line LRT or MAX line. Outcomes are entirely predictable.
As in the first article - demand for rentals is there. We have lots of infill suburban apartment buildings going up and more always coming. Where are they going? Marda Loop (no LRT). Northland Mall (no LRT). Kinglands near Chinook (no LRT any sane person can walk to). So the problem isn't demand itself, it's that demand is being distributed to areas with ineffective transit service.
Compare the Crowfoot Station. Scale is in people per hectare. Dark purple is highest density.
To Metrotown in Vancouver region. Note, I kept the scales the same which undersells Metrotown. Densities in the purple areas here are 5x as dense as in the purple area near Crowfoot:
Transit and Calgary's planning needs to get it's act together - and soon. Every apartment building we put in a random, inaccessible by transit location is a missed opportunity and future transit critic that can't wait to be a driver.
In Calgary, apartment building construction is booming as more Canadians embrace rentals
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/calgary-rental-apartment-construction-1.6648089Apart from short-term interest rate/cost disruptions, I can't see any future where rentals don't continue to outpace ownership in Calgary. This is particularly true given our long-term deficit in rental supply compared to every other large Canadian city. More rentals will be good to see and an inevitable step to transitioning to a major city.
With the booster article, here's the downer one - also echoing many of the ideas discussed on this forum:
Hurry Up And Wait: The Absurd Realities Of Captive Calgary Transit Riders
https://www.sprawlcalgary.com/calgary-transit-bus-commutersThis hits on the impacts of all the issues - Transit has lost the initiative and seems uninteresting/unable to make real change. While the article probably over-emphasizes the downtown v. elsewhere reason for transit's ongoing problems, the reality is it's a land use failure at TOD sites combined with the structural inefficiency of sprawl, car-centric development. This is a massive hole to dig out of and can't be don't by Transit just shuffling it's shrinking budget around. Structural reform in both land use and operations is needed.
Why post these articles together?
TOD. Why are all these people in the second article trying to make cross-town trips from Hawkwood or Ranchlands? Because the choices where people have to live is ridiculous if you want to take transit - "affordable" suburban apartments scattered randomly throughout all neighbourhoods - all at too low density and with zero mixed use - so you are condemned to have a low-frequency feeder bus with a transfer to a low-frequency main line LRT or MAX line. Outcomes are entirely predictable.
As in the first article - demand for rentals is there. We have lots of infill suburban apartment buildings going up and more always coming. Where are they going? Marda Loop (no LRT). Northland Mall (no LRT). Kinglands near Chinook (no LRT any sane person can walk to). So the problem isn't demand itself, it's that demand is being distributed to areas with ineffective transit service.
Compare the Crowfoot Station. Scale is in people per hectare. Dark purple is highest density.
To Metrotown in Vancouver region. Note, I kept the scales the same which undersells Metrotown. Densities in the purple areas here are 5x as dense as in the purple area near Crowfoot:
Transit and Calgary's planning needs to get it's act together - and soon. Every apartment building we put in a random, inaccessible by transit location is a missed opportunity and future transit critic that can't wait to be a driver.
- For Transit - changes need to address the culture of complacency and a bizarre/unchanging fixation on park-and-ride, despite it never proving to be material portion of ridership. Chop park-and-rides from the mandate entirely, replace with aggressive targets for increasing the population within 100m of a transit station.
- For planning - far more sweeping changes are needed than the incrementalism that powered our last round of urban redevelopment. Structural reform that actually incentivizes density in a transit-supportive distribution is needed. Endless car-capacity improvements eating up valuable transit-accessible land need to go too.
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MichaelS
Senior Member
JTron
Active Member
Everything written by him is a joke. A sign that the two outlets who publish his stuff (The Herald and CBC) have checked out, and are too lazy to find writers that have an interesting and relevant take. Of course their market is people in the 60-80 year old range who don't like change.Richard White, if you’re reading this, retire. You’ve aged out of saying anything interesting and you unapologetically reinforce the status quo, while simultaneously crowning yourself an “urban realist” and writing anyone who would like to improve from what the status quo is off as an “urban idealist”. Let me be the first to say, retire, you are unbelievably uninteresting, have no unique takes and your only audience left is senile or lives in Airdrie or Cranston.
White: Calgary’s urban growth reflects reality
Every two years, Calgary developers apply to Calgary’s city council to get approval for the creation of new communities at the edge of the city based on the…calgaryherald.com
Sincerely yours,
“An Urban Idealist”
Does anyone remember a few years back when he wrote an article talking about how the newly built east side of the River walk pathway was a fail? It's the perfect example of how the guy has zero vision.
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JTron
Active Member
Not just Calgary falling more into line with the rest of Canada, but Canada falling in line with the rest of the world. The vast majority of the world rents and lives in multifamily. Calgarians and Canadians have been spoiled when it comes to owning SFHs, but that's not the way of the future.
CBBarnett
Senior Member
I was wondering about that - and perhaps counter-intuitively, more about what such a proposal says about your existing TOD supply. We can demonstrate that suburban apartment demand is real and ongoing with projects all over the place, but developers appear uninterested in developing existing TOD sites. Leads to two possible conclusions:
- There is lack of demand for TOD itself
- There is lack of supply of TOD sites possible to develop
But #1 lack of demand can't be true in all contexts and scales - we see demand everywhere with all the many random apartments springing up in the inner city and inner burbs. We've added 25,000 people a year to the region, every year, for decades and plan to continue to do so for decades to come. Demand does exist for mid/high density apartments even in suburban locations - it's just not Vancouver-scaled nor being distributed to TOD areas.
Or is it?
We've actually seen substantial TOD developments in the past decades at stations like Sunnyside, Brentwood, Dalhousie - indeed pretty much every site within walking distance of a station on the NW and W lines is seeing apartment plans come together where the land use and lifecycle of properties allows. Of course, these projects are all piece-meal and uncoordinated resulting in pretty mixed outcomes on creating actual quality TOD communities. Brentwood's public realm is a major miss, for example, as it's just a pocket of density surrounded by nothing and parking lots.
I think the case can be made it's actually lack of quality TOD supply from terrible land use planning that's the issue - there's surprisingly very few redevelopment opportunities at the stations themselves, as almost everything within 200m of a station is publicly owned park-and-ride and/or highway infrastructure setbacks (NW, NE) or a CPR corridor (S). On the private land side, it's not much better - besides a few pockets, many stations have near-zero infill developments to intensify the single-family home R-1 zoned areas that dominated every quadrant from the 1970s-2000s.
Exploring this a bit, here's a summary of the NW line's land uses at a super high-level. The NW is where I would expect the most consistent apartment demand - house prices have remained relatively high for decades, it's largely built out, and it has the most major transit-supportive density of activity outside the core at U of C and SAIT. In theory, a reasonably good place for apartment investments:
- Sunnyside - actual, ongoing TOD success. Land uses allow for it and demand is steady. No overly wide roads or park-and-rides.
- SAIT - all institutional lands. No real redevelopment possible near the station, beyond the campus development itself.
- Lion's Park - those senior towers at the Northland Mall were built in the 2000s, but is otherwise locked into R-1 neighbourhood with no redevelop at any meaningful density.
- Banff Trail - has the restricted covenant issue and R-1 zoning walling the community off, plus motel village, Crowchild's canyon and McMahon's parking crater on the other side.
- University - has same issues of SAIT and Banff Trail combined - institutional use on one half and R-1 with covenants on the other.
- Brentwood - some success, but limited by an underutilized 1,000 stall surface lot combined with institutional uses and strip malls + two highway interchanges.
- Dalhousie - some success, no interchanges nearby and reasonably nice place. Best TOD sites are locked into a 1,000 stall park and ride site on the north side, and a major church parking lot to the south.
- Crowfoot - brutal. 1,000+ stalls of park-and-ride, highway interchanges, 1990s-era power centre all surrounded by R-1 zoning. Not a real chance for TOD short of the power centre being redeveloped.
- Tuscany - park-and-rides, some density. Too new to redeveloped, hill to the north, storm ponds and the nearby 1 km wide Stoney/Crowchild interchange limits future potential if demand ever did materialize
This is all surface level analysis to be sure - I haven't even mentioned parking policies yet in this rant - but to me it's pointing to more of a supply-side issue of lacking quality TOD sites able to be redeveloped, not lack of demand for TOD sites themselves. Plus, on the supply-side the city actually has control, there's limited demand-side options available. The trick has to be to coax existing demand to allocate more efficiently by un-breaking our anti-transit land uses and policies.
The Midtown proposal, to it's credit is an attempt to create new TOD supply - just a seemingly amateur one that proposes somewhat unrealistic Vancouver-scale density (at least in the short-term) so that the cost the cost of a new LRT station can be split to make the project worth it. If new LRT stations were $5M instead of $50 - 100M, I think we'd see less density proposed here.
zagox
Active Member
What’s your analysis of the Matco lands at Westbrook? It would appear to be “quality TOD supply” but it has not resulted in quality TOD. Is it just the vagaries of one developer and one deal that doesn’t point to any larger trend?
CalgaryTiger
Senior Member
I've always thought all the wasted parking on these sites are massive untapped residential potential. Just go down the red line south from 39 Ave station, every station has that potential:
Chinook, tons of small and large power centre retail parking lots but no residential within 1 KM of here. But there's a mall across Macleod.
Heritage, lots of small power centre retail across Macleod, then there the unfinished London thing. They built that huge pedestrian bridge and I'm sure people walk here from Acadia but they walk through a lot of power centre parking to do so.
Southland, if you like driving and big box shopping you've found your heaven; Superstore, Canadian Tire and across Macleod Walmart, Lowes, etc.
Anderson, this has been covered... And across Macleod there's a mall. How do malls not build apartments of their surface parking?!
Canyon Meadows, if you liked Southland's big box stores, you'll want to venture across Macleod to a mix on some strip mall shopping here: Avenida, the cheap theatre place, oh and while you're here check out all the car dealerships!
Fish Creek, least they redid Shawnee and there is St. Mary's across Macleod
Shawnessy, two in a row with some residential nearby and more coming. But alas here's another Superstore and across Macleod small retail andan employment hub.
Somerset-Bridlewood, this is like Southland but at least its not separated by a major road. However, across Macleod the employment hub mentioned above continues.
My point, if power centre's were redeveloped and added some residential (and their direct customer base) we'd get TOD. And if Macleod could ever be tamed (north of Anderson, south of there is a lost cause), it would make the areas around these station far more walkable and enjoyable.
Saying all this I completely get, retail and residential developers, at least here, don't really same to play on the same playgrounds.