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General Construction Updates

Surrealplaces said:
I thought they re-did 3rd street about 20 years ago, but could be wrong. It's busy with pedestrians at rush hour times and at lunch, but dead otherwise, and what I would classify as a solid fail. Caffe Artigiano is the only reason it a pulse. The problem is that there is no place for businesses along the corridor. Most buildings are cold, sterile facades of granite or glass with entrances facing onto the avenues. The lights along the walkway are so bright that you need sunglasses to walk it at night. There is literally no reason to be on this side street except as a passageway get between Eau Claire and Stephen Ave.
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I walk from Sunnyside to downtown via 3rd street and it is far more pleasant than any other N-S route because the sidewalks are wide. On 4th street SW when the C-train commuters walk northbound it’s like a herd of buffalo are pushing you off the sidewalk. It may not be the greatest retail experience but it’s very successful as a commuter link, and as you say it is busy with pedestrian traffic during commute hours.
 
Stephen Ave used to be car free but when they last re-did it they wanted to add vehicles back into the mix after 6:00pm to make it more vibrant and safe.
One thing I've noticed the last few years is the amount of de-icing used on Stephen Ave. In the winter it's a white chalky mess :confused:
 
zagox said:
I walk from Sunnyside to downtown via 3rd street and it is far more pleasant than any other N-S route because the sidewalks are wide. On 4th street SW when the C-train commuters walk northbound it’s like a herd of buffalo are pushing you off the sidewalk. It may not be the greatest retail experience but it’s very successful as a commuter link, and as you say it is busy with pedestrian traffic during commute hours.
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The fact that the 4th street sidewalks are overflowing with pedestrians is probably a good clue that 4th street should have been the street to get a pedestrian make-over. Perhaps, rather than trying to revitalize 3rd street with unique and high-quality finishings, they should spread out that money to make all of the other streets pedestrian friendly as well. Clearly the main reason that 3rd street was chosen for pedestrianization was not because it is a naturally important pedestrian corridor, but because its not important for cars (although even then there are still several concessions made for cars, like all the garage entrances along the street).

DougB said:
1986
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anigif_sub-buzz-7295-1518372522-1.gif
 
The more I live and commute and travel the more I think the future of streets is for people. Yes, transit and emergency vehicles and delivery trucks and uber and Lyft and taxis and private vehicles, but ESPECIALLY pedestrians and cyclists. I think we are going to realize that nearly every downtown street needs a bike sidewalk and a bike lane. You almost can't have a dense and happy city without this.

Toronto downtown not has a bike lane on more than half of the streets (though outside of downtown is sorely lacking). The next generation is not going to have money or space for owning a car (let alone a house).

Over time I could see wider sidewalks and bike lanes serving more purpose than roads for the entire grid-network part of Calgary.
 
RyLucky said:
The more I live and commute and travel the more I think the future of streets is for people. Yes, transit and emergency vehicles and delivery trucks and uber and Lyft and taxis and private vehicles, but ESPECIALLY pedestrians and cyclists. I think we are going to realize that nearly every downtown street needs a bike sidewalk and a bike lane. You almost can't have a dense and happy city without this.

Toronto downtown not has a bike lane on more than half of the streets (though outside of downtown is sorely lacking). The next generation is not going to have money or space for owning a car (let alone a house).

Over time I could see wider sidewalks and bike lanes serving more purpose than roads for the entire grid-network part of Calgary.
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Not to mention the fact that if we ever want to move to a post-carbon economy we cannot have people wrapping 2 tons of steel around them every single time they leave the house. Even if we all owned electric cars, the energy required to sustain this way of life is totally unsustainable. We know all this and yet it's like we're sleepwalking off a cliff. In cities around North America, we have to fight so hard just to take pre-war neighborhoods back from the car and return them to their original transit and pedestrian orientation. And yet, for every hard fought victory in the inner-cities, we build countless new neighborhoods that are 100% designed around the car and will force people into cars for generations to come. Right this moment we could just stop building new neighborhoods around the car. It's so simple, which is why it's so maddening that it's not happening.

Considering that GHG emissions from transportation is roughly equivalent to emissions from oil and gas, and passenger travel makes up the majority of transportation GHG emissions, I would gladly trade a couple of pipelines for having Canadian cities aggressively fighting personal vehicles. It's really insane. As the Ontario Liberals were introducing cap and trade, they were also consolidating services like hospitals and schools by closing down smaller, local facilities and moving services into mega-buildings out in the exurbs, which service larger populations but require almost everyone to get there by car.

(Sorry for the rant, but when our Beijing-level air quality has me praying for an early winter, climate change is centre of mind).
 
"even if we all owned electric cars, the energy required to sustain this way of life is totally unsustainable."
Except it isn't, and to get people to accept the carbon transition the only way to to go to a new era of carbon free energy abundance.

Living carbon free will be less efficient for sure - we will have to store a lot of energy in relatively inefficient ways (rather than just using the fossil fuel at the time we need it). But our society is really good at driving costs down of an activity when we want to.

I think adding more bike lanes, large pedestrian areas is a good thing, but they have to stand on their own merits. A policy that gets reverse because people hate it is one that gets reversed.
 
FCC1982 said:
Stephen Ave used to be car free but when they last re-did it they wanted to add vehicles back into the mix after 6:00pm to make it more vibrant and safe.
One thing I've noticed the last few years is the amount of de-icing used on Stephen Ave. In the winter it's a white chalky mess :confused:
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No reason why 8 Ave could not be permanently closed to traffic between Macleod Trail and 3rd St SW. There are no accesses to parkades or driveways along this stretch and virtually everything is already 'street facing' restaurants, retail or theatre. Other than people being able to park along there in the evenings, there is no through traffic to speak of. Only taxis and people wanting to show off their fancy cars. If there was ever going to be a pedestrian only (no bikes either) street in downtown, that is where it should be. It would be a greater destination than it is now.
 
The illusion of parking is a powerful thing for generating traffic. In the North American context we can compare to streets that kept being full pedestrian malls when Calgary reverted a bit, and relative successes.
 
RyLucky said:
The more I live and commute and travel the more I think the future of streets is for people. Yes, transit and emergency vehicles and delivery trucks and uber and Lyft and taxis and private vehicles, but ESPECIALLY pedestrians and cyclists. I think we are going to realize that nearly every downtown street needs a bike sidewalk and a bike lane. You almost can't have a dense and happy city without this.

Toronto downtown not has a bike lane on more than half of the streets (though outside of downtown is sorely lacking). The next generation is not going to have money or space for owning a car (let alone a house).

Over time I could see wider sidewalks and bike lanes serving more purpose than roads for the entire grid-network part of Calgary.
Click to expand...

I agree. A few small (but sometimes depressingly unsurmountable) changes can make a huge difference. Here's a few small things that don't cost a lot of money to do. It's not money, it's purely political (both "capital P" Political as in politicians and advocates, and lower-case "political" as engineering traditions, city department cultures, development industry practices etc.) why these things don't happen:

  1. Treat (and fund) the regional pathway network as a transportation system first, a recreation system second, a few years of targeted investments to fix broken links and add connectivity would make huge swaths of the city easy to bike in a low-stress, low-vehicle interaction network. New communities can go even further, deliberately making efficient pedestrian and bicycle routes core to planning rather than an afterthought. Improve the competitiveness of active mode infrastructure on travel times and usage increases. Less of this idiocy at Dalhousie LRT where bikes and peds divert for no reason on a critical pathway, more of this in Taradale but go a step further to raise the crosswalk, slow the vehicles and straightened our unnecessarily pathway curves.
  2. Enforce policy adherence to the city's traffic engineers to support active transportation, particular those that plan the inner city. Advanced-green turning, "green-wave" signals, beg-buttons and ridiculous long cycle lengths all favour vehicular movement over pedestrians and cyclists, openly contravening our "transportation pyramid" policies set over a decade ago. Random turn signals in place for the Bow tower construction a decade ago as "temporary" are still in place for no reason punishing pedestrians with delays. Weird lane-reversals are being designed with great effort to squeeze modest car-travel time improvements while everyone else waits all the time, nearly everywhere. It's nonsense, against policy and completely outdated way of thinking.
  3. Remove road restrictions for alternative uses. Streets space should be allowed to be other things other than automotive storage just as easily as it is to make travel lanes and parking. Summer patios on mainstreets instead of parking, on-street bike parking, bus "bump-outs", weekend closures in summer for more space/festivals etc. Just make it easy to do (no transportation department blanket vetos as has been the case in most situations in the past). Start challenging the opinion that roads are for only for cars with physical action where the community wants it. Devolve many transportation decisions to more local control and influence so walkable neighbourhoods remain that way. All inner city communities would see a vastly different street-space allocation if they had more say in what they wanted.
  4. Divert Calgary Parking Authority and any other parking funding revenue to active/transit projects in the area in which it is collected. Provides a way to fund projects and align incentives better. As most areas that have paid parking are areas with high amount of transit, bicycle and pedestrian activity and service already these investments can more than offset the long-range loss of funding for new parking capacity. Clearly aligning incentives is key - the inner city is an active, non-car dependent area and all policies should be set to support it, not pulling in opposite directions. Investing in the community its collected compensates the community for the excess traffic they put up with and makes them see the benefit more clearly from all the revenue generated from their streets from visitors.
  5. Remove all parking spot minimum requirements. Let developers make their own decisions and stop forcing wasting money on empty condo parking garages, stop preventing redevelopment of denser housing (laneway houses etc.) on the grounds that parking is an issue. If developers think a market exists for parking they will build it without a minimum in place.
20 years of all those policies in place - and actually practiced - and you'd have a vastly different city at the end.
 
JonnyCanuck said:
No reason why 8 Ave could not be permanently closed to traffic between Macleod Trail and 3rd St SW. There are no accesses to parkades or driveways along this stretch and virtually everything is already 'street facing' restaurants, retail or theatre. Other than people being able to park along there in the evenings, there is no through traffic to speak of. Only taxis and people wanting to show off their fancy cars. If there was ever going to be a pedestrian only (no bikes either) street in downtown, that is where it should be. It would be a greater destination than it is now.
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What about a high-quality, pedestrian-only street connecting the Beltline to downtown? Get all your land-uses in there (including high-density, highly pedestrian residential). No existing obvious candidates jump out without a little imagination - unless we actually seriously prioritized people over vehicles - and took half of 5th Street SW for example? Move buses to 4th Street and open two-way operations there, take 2 lanes of 5th Street for cycletrack, wide sidewalks and pedestrian priority (signals) and quality improvements (trees, benches)?
 
I've always thought that connecting 7th st. from downtown to the beltline would be the best option for this. The areas on both sides of the tracks are a bit quieter and make great walking and biking roads already.
 
darwink said:
"even if we all owned electric cars, the energy required to sustain this way of life is totally unsustainable."
Except it isn't, and to get people to accept the carbon transition the only way to to go to a new era of carbon free energy abundance.

Living carbon free will be less efficient for sure - we will have to store a lot of energy in relatively inefficient ways (rather than just using the fossil fuel at the time we need it). But our society is really good at driving costs down of an activity when we want to.

I think adding more bike lanes, large pedestrian areas is a good thing, but they have to stand on their own merits. A policy that gets reverse because people hate it is one that gets reversed.
Click to expand...

1. The GHG emissions caused by our car addiction is not just coming from the tailpipes. It's also caused by manufacturing the cars and building and maintaining the infrastructure to accommodate them. It is unsustainable for 80% of Canadians to be driving on a daily basis. By the way, in the past 20 years, the proportion of Canadians who drive to work has only declined 1% (from 81% to 80%), which is actually an absolute increase since the population is growing.

2. I'd wager that there is a significant number of North Americans who would give up car ownership if it was a realistic choice. However, for the vast majority of North Americans, car ownership is not a choice. It is forced on them by their governments. All I'm advocating is that we get to the situation where most North Americas have a realistic choice. We don't need to ban cars, but we do need to plan our cities around walking, cycling, and transit, and accommodating cars only as a second priority for those who are committed to owning a car.
 
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