I love design students, and there's learning value in them doing projects, but promoting this beyond that is kind of ridiculous. It's entirely sizzle and no steak; it's not even clear what is being proposed. A slow streetcar? A mountain bike pathway over thousands of rail ties? Just buzzword salad and pretty pictures. It connects "the multi-cultural SE Calgary" even though it's entirely in the NE. The Bluff, offering views so good you can see downtown. Downtown Chicago. That map showing a walkshed involving walking straight across the Transcanada Highway. This is fine for a student project; but why would you embarrass them by promoting this to a wider audience?
The core premise of the project, all the design fluff aside, is to provide yet another opportunity for the redvelopment of light industrial/commercial land, except with worse transit connectivity than at all of the LRT stations already surrounded by light industrial/commercial land, plus all of the new LRT stations on the Green Line also already surrounded by light industrial land.
Literally the last thing we need for sustainable redevelopment in light industrial/commercial land is to make even more land available. If all of the transit-proxmiate infill on commercial land over the last 20 years -- London at Heritage, Renaissance at North Hill, the residential/retail from Brentwood, the office buildings by Franklin, the food hall at Avenida -- had been built at one single LRT station, it would be a bustling, thriving, mixed-use community centre, and there would be demand for more. Instead, they're dribs and drabs, none living up to their full potential. Adding more sites is actually exacerbating this problem.
