I don't think it would have tripled the size, they would have expanded to the area south of the Shaganappi Pump Station and to the south of the Riverstone Towers overflow lot.
Plans can be downloaded here. That being said, more spaces to park will definitely bring more people to the park, and it's already quite busy. What the city needs to do in there is improve the pathways, there is the one pathway and you get people walking 5 wide down it or letting their kids run all over the place. This pathway is part of the bike path and is quite frustrating to cycle through.
Widening of the pathway is a key thing they need to do in a bunch of places, this area is near the top of the list. I support that kind of thing, because it actually is addressing the park's problem - it's very popular and can get crowded. The response to
increase in park demand should be build
more park capacity - either physically grow the park or expand the park's amenities to handle the increasing flows of users.
Instead our obsession with cars and parking intervened from the beginning. The problem was identified as a supply/demand of parking not the park itself. So the solution proposed was
physically shrinking the park by paving over more of it with parking.
You are right though, it's only about 2 - 2.5x the existing parking area. However, it's a substantial proportion of the greenspace on the north side of the Bow. Perhaps a better way to frame it - let's shrink the north side of Edworthy park by ~30% to accommodate more parking.
Looking more broadly, I deliberately zoomed out to showcase how much public land is in the area of Edworthy, and how little is used for an actual park:
All that green space, but the only green space ever contemplated for more parking is the park space, not the giant bloated interchange nearby. Yes even touching a curb in the interchange would be expensive, but that's a crutch - the problem is the question isn't even asked if we should use the mobility right-of-way for more mobility infrastructure (parking). That would be too outside the box thinking and force too many planning silos to collide!
In the long-term plans for the area, there's an opportunity for improvement (in 30 to 50+ years or longer) where the park area may actually get an opportunity to expand - of course, it will never be contemplated for expansion unless the road capacity get's it's upgrades as a pre-requisite!
It's all about how we frame the problem - this whole debacle was brought to us by a distortionary obsessions and sole-focus on parking and car circulation.
The actual amount of park and green space - the very thing we are trying to increase access to and expand capacity of - barely got mentioned and the unsolicited parking proposal was to shrink the very thing people want more of!