As I kicked the hornet's nest with the "silliness" comment - inferring that doubling a highway right-of-way next to a major activity centre + university + rapid transit system is perhaps is a bad thing - let me try to stitch this back together into TOD and Northland and what it all means.
I am convinced we can't have both. We can't get a good Northland TOD (or in most other locations) if we continue to expand our car-orientation in all things. I went overboard on this response, so I made section breaks for folks to argue with me more effectively.
Why We Can't Have Good TOD & Freeways
Obvious Reasons - Land & Other Modes of Travel
We literally don't have room for buildings if we eat up all our transit-adjacent land with highways and ramps. On top of that wider and louder highways make the land adjacent to them worse places to be - sound, traffic, and general ugliness. Further, what highway expansion does in this scenario is making a trade-off of land - we are temporarily improving the longer, car trips at the expense of the shorter, transit ones. We are trading developable land close to transit and services for developable land further out and car-dependent. All this impacts the development market - drive to you qualify in full effect.
Beyond the hundreds of millions it will cost to build the Crowchild expansion the land trade-off on the Mcmahon site is real - it's 10 acres (11% of the total site area, and notably the 11% closest to rapid transit). There's the potential to reclaim 4 acres from reducing the loops on University Drive .... but that's likely going to be impacted by a stormwater facility (in the report), and it's the farthest away from transit anyways. The language is worth remembering "we
will reserve this land for Crowchild" vs. "there's some potential we might get more developable land". More on this in my next section.
Beyond the space trade off, every walking, cycling or transit trip is made longer, more dangerous and more unpleasant by projects like this. Every trip is less competitive than it would be because we over-design everything to accommodate cars. This undermines the whole idea of TOD in the first place - locating people in places where it's easier to get around without a car!
Less Obvious Stuff - Car Culture
Over the long run, this car-orientation of everything does is limit our ability to look at urban problems - it's car culture.
@gsunnyg and
@Calgcouver summarized it well.
It's not a war on cars - the cars won decades ago in a landslide victory - its that car culture makes it impossibly harder to achieve any other form of development. Even if they want to, every decision by a developer or planner about what Northland or another potential TOD area on Crowchild could or should be has to fight against an entrenched car-oriented trend and context, limiting choices and raising costs on all other styles of development. Over time these barriers have even been codified within the rules themselves in the form of parking regulations, setbacks and access requirements - all cementing that cars need everything, everywhere and no cost is too high. The Crowchild expansion plan is perfect example of car-culture at work.
Crowchild vs. TOD
Even I agree we should do a grade-separation at 24th Avenue and create a free-flow Crowchild. But that's not everything that's proposed.
What's proposed is to expand the width of all right-of-ways, add turning access everywhere (many with dangerous slip lanes), maintain all the redundant accesses everywhere (via Crowchild, University Drive, 16th Ave etc.). Connectivity is good but the trade-off is enormous - entrenching car-dominance for another generation while taking acres of land from more productive purposes, while undermining all other modes of travel with longer, more dangerous routes. The plan can't imagine a world where everyone can't drive everywhere all the time, with as many free-flow and multiple redundant routes. No cost is too high.
Here's a particular example - this one look familiar?
Car culture is so powerful, we think that Glenmore & MacLeod is a such a good design for an intersection that we should build another one. Both 16th/Crowchild and MacLeod/Glenmore are within 500m of an LRT station. All this effort, money and land to create a redundant turning access with University Drive - which will be maintained. Also 16th to 24th Ave will be maintained via the frontage lanes. Also access for all the cut-through traffic in motel village will be maintained. To create redundant connectivity for cars, land and the safety/efficiency of all other modes are the sacrificed. Come live at the new TOD - now with 3 extra lanes on every road nearby!
Conclusion - What does this mean for Northland TOD and Other Hopefuls
To be a good TOD development, Northland would have to fight against all this culture of car-orientation. It would also have to see enormous investment in every other mode to get only marginally competitive transit, walking or cycling infrastructure today - falling behind again in a future where Crowchild continues to expand. Every expansion pushing the Crowchild bottleneck somewhere else, generating a new car-oriented project and more sacrifices of land and the viability of other modes.
It won't end unless we actually choose TOD over freeways from the start. Does this mean we bulldoze all our freeways? Nope - it just means we can't keep giving our arterials endless expansions, wasteful redundancies and not consider the impacts and trade-offs honestly. The freeways that we do need should be planned for the fact they are terrible for local development, they should be planned to be buried/capped/trenched one day. Yes - this is ridiculously expensive. Yes - this should come from the roads budget. Cars caused the mess, cars should pay for it.
Until we more honestly cost the trade-offs we can't have freeways and good TODs in the same area. Without that pivot in our culture, I won't be surprised every time a developer folds to the overwhelming car-orientation they are working within and proposes something like the Northland redevelopment we are getting.
