Recent content by CBBarnett

I get what you are saying about the urban design impacts of high-floor, at-grade rail in downtown, but respectfully the solution isn't to convert to low-floor, it's to convert to a metro tunnel, ideally splitting the lines up. The root cause of downtown's vibrancy issues is not the LRT's design...

There's always trade-offs, but I think the high-floor platforms do a reasonably good job, especially how they are the whole sidewalk wide. As much as building integration isn't always perfect, the number of users and how busy 7th Avenue every day suggest to me that perhaps it's not as big of a...

I like this mystery detective location game. My guess is the "Eighth Avenue Place" pillar clue is actually a red herring, and is just part of the building itself. The building on the back left of the sketch is the back-of-house of either the Cowboys casino or the convention centre. That...

I think a couple things are true, the Ship will probably be fine (in the end), but they are fair to be concerned and shouldn't be assumed to know everything about how the development process works, and the planning process isn't the only tool here that is being confused together. For example, I...

I feel old to have been around long enough to see the full cycle, the chaotic implementation and long-term negative development implications from the road widening project in the 2000s, finally giving way to a changing tide as market conditions and rule change overcame the problems of that...

Every time I visit Edmonton, the expression I keep coming back to is "wow if they had another million people, this would be such a great city". The city has great bones, they just need a bit more meat! They have lots of main streets and historic nodes to build from, have demonstrated more...

It's kind of wild seeing the next set of small, big cities really emerge with consistent growth. Winnipeg: 951K Quebec City: 903K Hamilton: 871K Kitchener - Waterloo: 701K London: 633K To put that in perspective, Winnipeg is currently where Calgary was in 2001. Who knows what the future will...

Thanks for sharing these updated diagrams. Could you elaborate on what you mean about shadowing and "looming mass"? What's the difference? My position on this one remains that height and shadows are a bit of a red herring, distracting the conversation from more material ground-floor...

I am old enough to remember the Iraq War, the Americans spent a ton of time trying to convince the world that weapons of mass destruction were a big threat. There was all sorts of media coverage and debate in the months (years?) leading up to the actual invasion, plus a bunch of summits and UN...

I think that's why some major infrastructure systems like transit and water - once they reach a certain scale - really need to be converted into a regulated utility type structure with a dedicated tax/fee support structure and mandate that can better resist the pressure of short-term and...

A real test will be the ability of the city to manage the vehicle flows around there, add street parking etc. The density, retail and transit adjacency are fast making Westbrook the node to watch for converting a suburban place into something far more urban. The trick will be to let the vehicle...

Didn't Westjet centralize a lot of US flights to Calgary to consolidate demand here given the massive drop-off throughout the country? Pretty wild change in travel patterns to to see international volumes approach US ones.

The expression that comes to mind here is "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent." Only in this case, the US government is the "market" - chaotic, inconsistent and self-harming policies, grabbing heads-of-state by helicopter, flip-flopping on trade and tariffs. These...

So AB was the clear winner, but the relative scale is interesting too. Quebec was the single greatest negative migration, but due to a large population doesn't really register. Same with Ontario. Sask, Manitoba and New Brunswick were the biggest relative losers, while PEI and AB were both the...

It's easy to forget how much these numbers are influenced by international immigration (as opposed to interprovincial migration and natural growth). Ontario was slightly positive natural growth (+7,000), slightly negative interprovincial migration (~-900) and really negative international...