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That is a good question! I don't know why they don't create a standard for roads here. Basically all of the streets in the Downtown and Beltline are oversized and one-way because the original intention of the Plus-15s was to turn our Avenues into freeways and that spilled over to the Beltline, back in the day. With the push for downtown revitalization strategies at the City, they should be creating streetscape master plans that put streets on a major road diet and create way more liveable streets. In the East Village, they upfronted the public realm improvements to lure residential/mixed-use development using TIF financing from the Bow Tower to do it. It worked (even if the investment is slow), but they don't seem to take the same approach downtown which is dumb. The avenues downtown are ridiculously oversized one way car sewers that could easily accommodate wider sidewalks/patio spaces, curb extensions, tree-line assignments and in some cases adjustments back to two-way streets. But they don't put the public realm improvements first, and because of that residential investment lags because developers have no idea what the intended finished condition would be. The current paradigm and extremely car-oriented nature of the streets isn't luring the investment (other areas of the inner-city are) for residential development, but the downtown lacks urban design guidelines and focus and no one knows what it is supposed to look like, because there is no vision. Not to mention Part 3, Division 1, Table 1 of the Land Use Bylaw is holdover policy from 2P80 that the City enforces for "Public Realm Setbacks" that are literally just renamed from "Road Widening Setbacks" and no one at the City has ever clarified a vision for what they would ever do in those setback areas. Until the City creates urban design guidelines for these areas and begins following there own Complete Street Guidelines, no developer knows what they are doing with these streets, let alone what the intent of the "public realm setbacks" are on streets that are already, clearly, way to wide and car-oriented. Many of which are downtown and in the inner-city. God forbid the City use there already over-sized ROWs for public realm improvements. Instead the City prefers to just eat up developers land to do those "public realm improvements" that they have zero vision for, and just continue to never address the aggressive car-oriented design that the Transportation department at the City has mandated for decades and has no flexibility on.
calgaryherald.com
