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General Construction Updates

Annoying that the big images aren't directly accessible from the website

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Wish the city had the balls to keep Macleod 3 lanes forever.
 
Mountain Man said:
Are the materials supposed to be similar to the BMO Centre? That would be pretty cool if they were, even though the materials don't look as good as the BMO renders...
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I don't have a photo, but the canopy will probably be the same copper material they installed on the new utility building north of the station. Think West LRT after the patina sets in.
 
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whatchyyc said:
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Wish the city had the balls to keep Macleod 3 lanes forever.
Click to expand...
These look really great.... but I remain skeptical of this entire project and the 17 Avenue extension. I struggle with the trade-offs and who is benefitting from this whole new project.

Let's get the obvious out of the way - of course, it's a far nicer transit station than what we have. That's a big win, we can incorporate the best thinking in design, better lighting, safety, visibility etc. - these are all great things and no arguments here. It's not surprising that almost anything we build in 2022 is far nicer than a unloved, unmaintained 1980s station shoved to the far side of 4 lane one-way and only really used for major events.

And that's the problem - the factors that made the old station unloved and have the issues are not really changing that much. Fast forward 20 years with our now old new station - has any of these things changed by 2042?
  • station will still be super event-dependent (huge crowds occasionally, empty much of the rest of the time).
  • station is still on the far side of a 4 lane one-way arterial separated from the major growth and activity of the Beltline.
  • station will still be just as noisy from MacLeod nearby.
  • guessing from the rendering it will probably a bit more windy and a bit less weather protected (this is partly intentional to make it less hospitable to discourage camping out and the anti-social behaviours that the old station became known for).
If that was all that we are trading off, the station investment would be hard to tell the value of - a refreshed station is nice, but hard to say if it actually makes Stampede Park more popular or the LRT more attractive. Many LRT users don't care if it's noisy or weather protected - as long as the train works. Maybe the shiny/new factor is all that we really need to solve lots of problems.

But that's not all this project is doing. By adding the at-grade crossing for the 17 Ave extension, this "transit" investment is ironically expected to both make transit both slower and less reliable. Every passenger on the south leg of the Red Line will have a slightly slower trip now, as the at-grade crossing requires slower operations at all times than existing conditions with no crossing. There will be more collisions and delays from the inevitable street-level interactions over time too. On major event days, "operational" measures will have to be sufficient (e.g. put out a few security guards to stop crowds of hundreds of pedestrians from blocking the train). Even if you have really good police and security and really obedient 20,000 hockey fans - I remain skeptical that this approach will not inevitably lead to further LRT delays.

Okay - so the LRT system's efficiency or reliability isn't a winner here. Who is the winner?
  • Pedestrians can now cross at-grade to the park which is great and more efficient - true, but I hope that all these new circulation patterns don't trigger any traffic engineering model to suggest a wildly long signal length on Macleod Trail NB or an advance-turn green ahead of the pedestrians from 17th Ave to Macleod NB as both would cut into that benefit. Previously pedestrians had to go up and over - kind of a pain, and sketch on the ramps when not busy during the event days - but not particularly slower than waiting at the long light to cross Macleod.
  • Stampede can have improved connectivity to help achieve it's long-range plans to become a "year-round destination" - except all areas south of 17th Ave extension are planned to remain as parking lots forever, reaffirmed in the most recent planning exercises as recently as a few years ago. Most of the areas to the north are planned to be unchanged and the future-former Saddledome site is a long-term parking lot in the plans. So what are we connecting to exactly?
  • It'll be super easy for all the major conventions to access the station and help sell events here - sure, but is it really that much easier than it is now to access the LRT? There's a grade-separated overpass that connects right into the convention centre. Does this new design and interaction with the LRT actually attract more events or make a meaningful difference for the convention crowd? Surely the $500M fancy new convention centre is enough to sell itself right?
  • Extending 17th Avenue on the east end finally will stop the dead-end and trigger nearby development - maybe, but the construction and investment signal has already happened. Any new developments that weren't already in the pipeline from before any of this new station / 17 Ave extension was thought of? Anything triggered by this investment directly?

In other threads I have complained about this before with the Stampede, Victoria Park, the Flames and CMLC - but there's some real stakeholder issues in this area and this is another example.

Putting on the tinfoil hat - it appears to me we had a convention centre booster/CMLC/Stampede/connected corporate business community made up of the regular suspects, visit a few American convention centre cities and use their lessons to design an inferior transit station with real LRT network consequences. Every American city visited by CMLC in their research presentation has far inferior public transit systems compared to ours.

The benefits to the the Stampede and the connected stakeholders seem pretty speculative and uncertain, but the trade-offs from the tens of thousands of daily transit users are real and likely. The stakeholders who are wanting to benefit can take a risk on a marginal an unclear business case, as they aren't paying for it - the public is. It's not like it's their money at risk if all this connectivity benefit doesn't yield any development, vibrancy or activity they claim it will. Worst case scenario - business as usual. Just with a slightly worse LRT system.

In summary - and apologies for being a downer on a nice rendering - but I just don't see the benefit of all this effort. I would be happy to be wrong, but I don't see how the permanent loss of LRT efficiency is worth the trade-offs here.
 
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CBBarnett said:
And that's the problem - the factors that made the old station unloved and have the issues are not really changing that much. Fast forward 20 years with our now old new station - has any of these things changed by 2042?
  • station will still be super event-dependent (huge crowds occasionally, empty much of the rest of the time).
  • station is still on the far side of a 4 lane one-way arterial separated from the major growth and activity of the Beltline.
  • station will still be just as noisy from MacLeod nearby.
  • guessing from the rendering it will probably a bit more windy and a bit less weather protected (this is partly intentional to make it less hospitable to discourage camping out and the anti-social behaviours that the old station became known for).
If that was all that we are trading off, the station investment would be hard to tell the value of - a refreshed station is nice, but hard to say if it actually makes Stampede Park more popular or the LRT more attractive. Many LRT users don't care if it's noisy or weather protected - as long as the train works. Maybe the shiny/new factor is all that we really need to solve lots of problems.

But that's not all this project is doing. By adding the at-grade crossing for the 17 Ave extension, this "transit" investment is ironically expected to both make transit both slower and less reliable. Every passenger on the south leg of the Red Line will have a slightly slower trip now, as the at-grade crossing requires slower operations at all times than existing conditions with no crossing. There will be more collisions and delays from the inevitable street-level interactions over time too. On major event days, "operational" measures will have to be sufficient (e.g. put out a few security guards to stop crowds of hundreds of pedestrians from blocking the train). Even if you have really good police and security and really obedient 20,000 hockey fans - I remain skeptical that this approach will not inevitably lead to further LRT delays.

Okay - so the LRT system's efficiency or reliability isn't a winner here. Who is the winner?
  • Pedestrians can now cross at-grade to the park which is great and more efficient - true, but I hope that all these new circulation patterns don't trigger any traffic engineering model to suggest a wildly long signal length on Macleod Trail NB or an advance-turn green ahead of the pedestrians from 17th Ave to Macleod NB as both would cut into that benefit. Previously pedestrians had to go up and over - kind of a pain, and sketch on the ramps when not busy during the event days - but not particularly slower than waiting at the long light to cross Macleod.
  • Stampede can have improved connectivity to help achieve it's long-range plans to become a "year-round destination" - except all areas south of 17th Ave extension are planned to remain as parking lots forever, reaffirmed in the most recent planning exercises as recently as a few years ago. Most of the areas to the north are planned to be unchanged and the future-former Saddledome site is a long-term parking lot in the plans. So what are we connecting to exactly?
  • It'll be super easy for all the major conventions to access the station and help sell events here - sure, but is it really that much easier than it is now to access the LRT? There's a grade-separated overpass that connects right into the convention centre. Does this new design and interaction with the LRT actually attract more events or make a meaningful difference for the convention crowd? Surely the $500M fancy new convention centre is enough to sell itself right?
  • Extending 17th Avenue on the east end finally will stop the dead-end and trigger nearby development - maybe, but the construction and investment signal has already happened. Any new developments that weren't already in the pipeline from before any of this new station / 17 Ave extension was thought of? Anything triggered by this investment directly?
Click to expand...

I think that you're being really harsh here; just because the Stampede board and the Flames ownership suck doesn't mean that they couldn't accidentally do something okay from time to time. The Elbow River park is pretty nice, for instance.

Your first set of problems largely boil down to the fact that being near Macleod sucks. Sure, but a transit station rebuild was never going to change that. It sucks when I drop my ice cream cone, but I'm not going to blame a transit station for not catching it. The Chinook station rebuild didn't move the station closer to the mall, and it didn't make the freight line less noisy, but it made the station easier to access (particularly for people with reduced mobility), and that was the primary goal of the rebuild.

By saying that climbing and descending three flights of stairs is 'not particularly slower' than waiting at a light for a minute, I've learned more about your relative physical mobility (and whether you have kids in a stroller) than I have about the benefits or demerits of this project. This project also adds a station access at 14th Ave, much closer to most of the residential buildings in the area (Alura/Sasso/Nuera/Blvd/Keynote). One thing that might make the station less 'event-dependent' is if all the people who live nearby save a couple hundred metres and three flights of stairs accessing it.

Talking about trains being slower because they're crossing at grade is wildly overstating things; the next stop is under 800m south of here, the train spends most of it's time accelerating and braking in this section. If it accelerates at half speed until it's clear of the grade crossing, that adds about 7 or 8 seconds by my rough calculations (using Wikipedia's properties for an S200). 7 or 8 seconds is a rounding error in transit travel time around here.

Calling a station rebuild a failure because development hasn't happened within one year of the shovels hitting the ground is also incredibly premature. Bridgeland sat empty for five years before there was any development whatsoever; once the park and the first run of buildings on 1st St were built, it was another couple of years before the next one, and it's really only been around 15+ years after the original announcements that we've seen it be as hot as it is now. This is particularly true when you would expect restaurants and retail to be a key component in any new development on 17th -- after the last two years they've had with the whole pandemic thing. By the standard of one year, construction not yet done, there's not been a single piece of transportation infrastructure in this city that has ever triggered nearby development. Including the original CPR itself, which took two years to get from the announcement of the route to development in the land around the station. Maybe it'll happen; maybe it won't happen; maybe it will happen but it would have happened anyways since central 17th Ave is already built out -- this is something that can't meaningfully be judged in the 2020s.

The big problem, and the one we agree on, is obvious. The first time I heard of this project I was talking informally with someone from CMLC, and the very first thing I said was exactly what you brought up; the crowd control issue. The station is being used almost entirely by crush loads of hyped-up (and often literally intoxicated) unfamiliar transit users, and I 100% agree with you that this is the worst possible crowd to try to control over a grade crossing. The CMLC person was confident that this wouldn't be an issue; I agree with you and remain pretty skeptical. But I'm willing to see what happens. I think it'll be pretty clear the first Stampede or playoff run whether this is a problem or not.

The one counterpoint I'd note is that there already exists something very much like this; an at-grade crossing of the LRT at the Stampede grounds -- on the south end of Erlton. It doesn't have the same size crowds that Vic Park has, but I went through there multiple times this past year, including after the fireworks, and it's been pretty busy but I didn't see a problem with crowds blocking trains. (There are problems; there isn't enough pedestrian space and Macleod's light timings are preposterous during Stampede; dozens of people waiting for a long time to cross a nearly empty road - but orderly waiting nonetheless). I don't remember ever hearing about this as a problem. Erlton doesn't get 20,000 drunk sports fans after a game, so maybe that will be a problem. Or maybe it won't; Banff Trail gets 40,000 drunk sports fans after a game with an at-grade crossing.
 
Yeah took my dog down there today…. I’m surprised at how awful the wall looks. I thought they were going to at least cap the steel with something. It just looks sooo unfinished.
 
UrbanWarrior said:
Yeah took my dog down there today…. I’m surprised at how awful the wall looks. I thought they were going to at least cap the steel with something. It just looks sooo unfinished.
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The initial renderings showed a large portion of the wall being covered by a grass hill with plantings. It would be a shame if that has disappeared in favour of the bare metal look and some wheat.

Screenshot_20221017_162635.jpg
 
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