61st Ave Residential | 64m | 19s | Cadillac Fairview | Zeidler

Had to run an errand at Chinook and snapped a few updates from around Calgary’s south central area.
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The various new buildings going up in the Chinook area are, to say the least, nothing special but if we can get enough development happening to achieve a sort of critical mass, it will hopefully start to transform into a more interesting "uptown" area, like Metrotown, Houston's Galleria or Buckhead in Atlanta. Obviously there's lots of work to do to get there...
 
This one will be great - boring, functional high density urbanism. Doesn't need to be sexy, just needs some scale to kick-start a market for apartments in this area. This is a perfect project to do so as a kick-start.

Eventually I want to see Calgary Transit reverse it's trends of de-emphasizing Chinook as a major transit hub over Heritage, which will always be far inferior from a land use perspective. The Chinook area is and probably will remain the single most important daily hub in the southern half of the city for the foreseeable future, over time it should start forming a concentration of bus and Max routes more like downtown and less like a typical suburban LRT feeder bus park-and-ride.

Always frustrated by the long range plan that doesn't make it obvious that Chinook should be a major hub, and to a lesser extent Market Mall which isn't even on the long-term line map.




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CBBarnett said:
de-emphasizing Chinook as a major transit hub over Heritage
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To my eye, isn't this due to the ease of access to and from the station area. Buses need to be able to get in and get out quickly. If you have ever tried to leave the Home Depot, PetSmart and Staples parking lot on the weekends you know how frustrating it can be to drive in the area. The road network around Chinook cannot facilitate added buses without creating dedicated lanes and queue jumps. Heritage has the road capacity, even with the weird bus loops. I think it is that simple.

If Glenmore, Fairmont/Centre, and Macleod area had better road designs than sure Chinook, with its hub potential would be best suited as a Transit Hub but it just isn't.
 
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CalgaryTiger said:
To my eye, isn't this due to the ease of access to and from the station area. Buses need to be able to get in and get out quickly. If you have every tried to leave the Home Depot, Petsmart and Staples parking lot on the weekends you know how frustrating it can be to drive in the area. The road network around Chinook cannot facilitate that will without creating dedicated lanes and queue jumps. Heritage has the road capacity, even with the weird bus loops. I think it is that simple.

If Glenmore, Fairmont/Centre, and Macleod area had better road designs than sure Chinook, with its hub potential would be best suited at a Transit Hub but it just isn't.
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Your are right - that's probably why the focus on Heritage, it's a tactical decision based on existing conditions but it's also pretty short-sighted. The same avoidance of congestion logic didn't seem to apply to road capacity investments - when traffic got worse in the 2000s in the area, we spent $200M to upgrade Glenmore/Elbow/MacLeod in recognition of the importance of the E-W traffic and connectivity through the area.

The long-range plan should be to entrench the Chinook area as the major transit hub in south-central Calgary because of how much traffic it generates, rather than avoid it because of how much traffic it generates.
 
Albertasaurus said:
The various new buildings going up in the Chinook area are, to say the least, nothing special but if we can get enough development happening to achieve a sort of critical mass, it will hopefully start to transform into a more interesting "uptown" area, like Metrotown, Houston's Galleria or Buckhead in Atlanta. Obviously there's lots of work to do to get there...
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Something that caught my attention was how busy it is at Chinook and the surrounding sidestreets. Especially 61st Ave. I hope we see more development along 61st.
 
A fair sized population around the area, and it's growing steadily. The counts aren't 100% reliable and says the numbers are from 2025 'estimates' but with so much construction and new builds in the area it's difficult to say., The statscan census tract calculator would give better results I think.

16K estimated for this area shown highlighted.
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This one a 1.25 km radius from just south of Chinook shows 19K in the radius.
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Looking at the census tracts in the area, we can see there wasn't a huge amount of growth from 2016 to 2021, going from 20,232 to 20,643.

Census tract 2016 - 2021
825 0013.00 4,683 - 4,700
825 0029.00 7,050 - 7,156
825 0030.00 4,594 - 4,869
825 0012.00 3,905 - 3,909

There wasn't much in the way of developments in those tracts 2016-2021, but there has been a lot since 2021.
Kingsland Junction 579 units
Kings Landing 135 units
Glenmore Place 284 units
Elbow 5 Eight 214 units
Belvedere Place 214 units
Lumino C 121 units (finished just after the 2021 census)

Add in some of the smaller multi-family builds, and we should see a roughly 10% increase in population to the area.

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