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Calgary Parks & Green Spaces

Mountain Man

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Hi All. Don't think we have a parks thread, so I figured I would start one.

City is beginning engagement on Paskapoo, I personally hope they barely touch it as it's great the way it is! it's quite steep and has lots of single track and dirt trails, perfect for mountain biking and trail running. Not sure how they will pave it, but I'm sure that's the goal...
 
The city is cancelling their plan to make the north parking lot in Edworthy Park a paid lot. Very happy about that, was a really dumb idea to begin with.
The pay for parking was the least offensive part of the package for me. As part of this they were also putting in a giant overflow parking lot that would have tripled the amount of parking spaces, eating up the grass and park space.

The whole exercise is a good reminder of just how amazing the parking is culturally - it's so entrenched into how many systems and teams think about the world that the parking authority and parks department have the confidence to pave over a park to add more without any engagement, it's just an base assumption that more parking = more good.

Equally amazing, the general public can never conceptualize that parking follows basic economics 101 principles - supply and demand are in fully effect. If you don't want to pay for parking in a popular area, you probably won't get parking very easily.

So the status quo prevails once again!
 
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.
 
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:
1750785395946.png


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!

1750785926876.png


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!
 
Another thing is Edworthy is already overloaded on nice days, which is when the parking would mainly be needed. If it's a case of more parking needed so people from other parts of the city can access the river/pathway for rafting or cycling, I'd rather see parking added somewhere else or more tributary cycling paths leading to the river.
 
Another thing is Edworthy is already overloaded on nice days, which is when the parking would mainly be needed. If it's a case of more parking needed so people from other parts of the city can access the river/pathway for rafting or cycling, I'd rather see parking added somewhere else or more tributary cycling paths leading to the river.
As demonstrated the world over in countless ways, beyond a certain concentration, cars are too inefficient of space users to provide mass mobility.

First question is often forgotten but important - "should we do something at all when dealing with congestion at this park?" Is it important that people with cars can access a place? Or do we accept congestion as a fundamental consequence of the inherent space inefficiency or cars? Yes people get grumpy, but does it really matter at all that we do something? If it's only a few weekends a year, does any of this matter?

As we often assume reflexively that the answer to the first question is "yes, we should do something". Next question is "what do we do"?

Assuming land is finite, in a park context that leaves only two options:
  1. Decrease demand for the park- by making it worse, remove greenspace, remove amenities, pave things over, make is unattractive and uglier.
  2. Increase capacity of the park - by making it better, improving access by other more efficient modes of travel and expanding park capacity to handle increased demands.
They chose option #1 and never asked the first question in Edworthy's case.
 
Definitely agree about the interchanges there, they actually expanded the one from SB Shag to EB 16th a couple years ago, you can see the old road alignment on satellite still. Think they did this to increase the merge lane on 16th. The South Shaganappi plan doesn't talk about the interchanges IIRC, though they should definitely try to utilize that space for more than cars.

Anyway, I live in Point McKay so this change would affect me directly. I love walking in the green space between the community and the bike path, but the part they were proposing to pave is kind of wasted space and almost never has anyone in it. I think the biggest benefit of an increased parking area that didn't change for parking would be for cycle commuters in the summer, the existing lot can be completely full by 8AM some days.
 
I think we need to pick our battles, charging for parking here was a fight worth fighting. Fighting paving over a wasted bit of grass, probably not worth it. Context does matter though because what some saw as a wasted bit of grass at Millennium Park should've been allowed to be fought for...

Taking the bus by Millennium Park is a daily dose of sadness. That decision needs to be versed by the next council. Give Pennylane back their money, the city doesn't need or want it. Keep what work you've done but you cannot allow Pennylane to do what they've done to Millennium Park. For the suburban people, that place is going to cause a traffic nightmare on 9th Ave (Bow Trail) and 11th Street for the whole of Stampede.
 
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