These intersections aren't destinations, nor are they stopover points. For certain sit down food/beverage establishments aren't ever going to survive here, when the competition is fierce on better frontage more to the heart of the adjacent area. It's also at the end of the main zone. You're not going to draw the crowd that far from the core of 17th.
The hill, the limited Scarboro access, the lack of an "18th Ave" road to the SE, the poor 16th Ave and the limited turning create a frustrating zone for drivers that need to do a loop in order to find a place to park. Even if it's not really that difficult, people are psychologically lazy before attempting.
This. I think traffic volumes and congestion are the main problem with the attractiveness of the area is the traffic, but there's some challenging structural reasons for why traffic is such a problem here that are hard to change. In addition to the list above I added some opinions below for consideratio:
This is a sloppy diagram I made to think about it - from a perspective of heading towards the core, green circles are controlled intersections that provide access across 17th or 14th, yellow are uncontrolled. Red are barriers.
By design, we are concentrating all local movements, and a bunch of ones further away, into a single intersection (and have been for decades). Original community design of Scarboro and Mount Royal from 100+ years ago caused this, but was further exacerbated by the more recent traffic calming to protect the rich, single family areas by creating barriers to alternative movement patterns. The result is a traffic volume at the intersection that is really difficult to manage in a walkable area without more dramatic interventions.
Unusually for the era this intersection's congestion problems first emerged in the mid-20th century, the city seemed to be unsuccessful on 17th or 14th to do road widening and tearing out a ton of houses to add more capacity with turn-lanes and other car infrastructure which is an unexpected win.
Unfortunately, the incremental changes since have all favoured car through-put and attempting to marginally reduce signal delay at the main intersection. This is always to the detriment to the walkability and retail corridor itself. Here's my list of anti-urban, anti-pedestrian pet peeves that exacerbate an already challenging area for walkability and urban development.
1.
The McDonald's drive-thru - Already discussed, but a failure of adhere to approved plans, policy recommendations and urban context to rebuild this giant drive-thru. Adds yet another redundant circulation, cut-through traffic, car noise and headlights in a walkable and dense area. Opposite of what we want to do if the goal is to have a quality urban main street.
2.
Parking bays - added as a condition of development to avoid traffic delays for these projects. I've complained about this before but the big issues is that it's a "rule" that's randomly and arbitrarily applied, not every project triggers it in this area (or in any other). All this arbitrary interference with the pedestrian realm to add about 12 car capacity to park a few feet from an intersection that sees 30,000 cars a day. Meanwhile sidewalks are shrunk, development is set further back and restricted and everything for a pedestrian is slightly worse. The parking isn't benefitting the businesses, more than the car volumes are hurting it.
3.
16th/15th bypass - I can't think of another example where the mobility needs of commuters are prioritized and encouraged to just cut-down a side street to go around an intersection. How the community didn't create a nuclear-level fuss when this was first put in decades ago, I have no idea. The idea of course, is to decongest the intersection by allowing some traffic to skip it. The result is a high-speed, high volume cut through on a local side streets with endless risks to pedestrians. It's the reason this development becomes an island - forever surrounded by a endless line of circulating commuter traffic.
4.
15th/17th intersection signalization - the most recent upgrade to convert a pedestrian blinker to full controlled intersection. The project was never engaged upon that I was aware of (part of the non-transparent, black box world of traffic warrant-based upgrades), but my assumption was that it was done for safety reasons. The downside is they took a popular pedestrian access with zero wait time and made it a 3 minute plus signal delay to cross 17th Avenue here. All that population density in Bankview that would have had direct access to 17th Avenue shops and the Beltline now has a 3 minute time penalty each way. Ironically of course, the reason this pedestrian delay is "acceptable" is because it avoids the long "unacceptable" time penalty to vehicles that would have added a few seconds delay here. Signalizing this intersection with such as long pedestrian penalty is a perfect example of "pedestrian safety is a priority.... when it doesn't slow down cars".
In summary
The problem with the immediate area's congestion is structural and long-term, but also incremental and invisible on small and big decisions since. The root cause is that when the choice between local economic activity and pedestrian movements was weighed against vehicle movements, the pedestrian and local activity has always lost here. This development is actually the first legitimate opportunity at scale to reset things, however there's only so much to do when incremental transportation improvements are always favouring commuter car movements over local ones.
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