The sidewalk on the north side will be expanded/improved as development occurs. Ther is a 5.182m public realm setback (table 1 of the Land Use Bylaw) that will be used to ensure a proper wide sidewalk will be built and boulevard trees will be planted. However, this approach does have its flaws, as it is reliant on a landowner developing and creates very piecemeal upgrades (or none at all) for decades. But, that is the Calgary way usually.
This approach is at the root of the problem, based on the wrong assumption that car infrastructure critical part of the transportation system, whereas sidewalks are not a critical part of the transportation system.
Ironically in many situations, that same setback value helps to sterilize the sites it needs to activate by consuming such a huge portion of the lands as to render them uneconomic under many conditions. Further, it places sidewalk costs onto development in many situations instead of the public like the 16th Ave road expansion. This means the actual outcomes become a muddled mess of one-off negotiation between an application and the city, with significant inconsistency as a result. It's why we see some small townhome projects having to widen the sidewalk in-front of their development, while some larger apartment complexes don't despite having deeper pockets and more foot traffic - when so much is negotiated and subject to the random people involved, collectively the outcome for the network as a whole is effectively random. The sidewalk network becomes the patchwork mess that it is.
The contrast is staggering with road development. Not only is it too important to just trust development to do it (e.g. imagine the 16th Ave expansion being done in a similar piecemeal fashion for the widening where this development was required to widen the road to 6 lanes for the block in front of it), it's that the assumptions are also immune to any real influence outside of those involved. The plans and the designs are at cross-purposes - the whole idea of putting density here is aligned to the transit-oriented walkable growth approach - but we don't really care if it's actually attractive or possible to walk the 100m safely to the transit station that underpins the whole logic in the first place.
For a road expansion project that comes in 2 or 3x the original budget still managing to have 3.7 and 4.5m lanes is a wild outcome. It's like we built a house with a designer kitchen and top-of-the-line fixtures but there's no money for one of the exterior walls. Put another way - exceeding the minimum
is the minimum for roads, whereas doing the minimum for sidewalks is optional.
We see this approach in the application - always exceed the minimum for roads, only try to do the minimum for sidewalks. The west sidewalk isn't labelled but appears to be about 4 - 5 feet in width. Meanwhile this is the truck apron is this massive design below. Both sidewalks and truck apron design elements are important, but one of these two things gets a lot more attention in the design room than the other.
