JonnyCanuck
Senior Member
Does a mixed use project called Blume ring a bell with anyone? The city issued a building permit for this for $39 M.
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Urban Development and Proposals Discussion
- Thread starter Surrealplaces
- Start date
Calgcouver
Active Member
Northhill and the Centre North (Banff Trail, Capitol Hill, Mt Pleasant, Tuxedo Park, etc.) of the city seems to have a lot of ground-oriented infill that has gone on, its pretty surprising actually.
JonnyCanuck
Senior Member
Further to this. The DP application says 968 units. I don't know whether that is all residential or includes the hotel. This is going to be a massive development. Probably should have it's own thread as information becomes available.
ByeByeBaby
Active Member
Every business owner thinks their clientele are a bunch of clowns.
They don't say it in so many words, but they always think that the two parking stalls outside their restaurant are vital to their 80 seat restaurant. Unless their clientele are literal clowns, packed 20 to a car, then that makes no mathematical sense.
Business owners in dense urban areas routinely overestimate the proportion of visitors by car; they typically think car visitors are twice as high as they really are. See this study in Toronto (10% came by car; 70% of business owners thought it was more than 10%, including 30% who thought over a quarter of their visitors came by car) or this one in Vancouver:
Business owners also underestimated transit users, who are actually pedestrians when they're going to and from high street businesses.
CBBarnett
Senior Member
Wow - I had no idea volumes are down 40-50% the past 25 years. I wonder if we tracked pedestrian volumes would you see the inverse?
One issue with some of the transportation data is that studies typically look at only weekday, rush hours counts. The logic for this is fairly simple - weekday rush hours are likely peak road demand and congestion, so therefore if you measure the traffic counts during peak, upgrade the road to accommodate the highest volume, you'll have enough capacity at all other times.
For streets with other functions than commuting, like 17 Avenue, this is a major disadvantage as it's only a small fraction of the story about how the street works and what capacity needs to be planned for. Rush-hour based counts favour driving and car capacity. It doesn't count Saturday afternoon walking traffic or evening traffic where pedestrian counts (and therefore the sidewalk capacity needed) is the highest.
At a basic fairness perspective, if the logic is to build our roads to meet peak capacities, surely we should be mode agnostic - shouldn't we at least try to count pedestrian demand peaks and request space in the road for that? A step further into the strategic direction - we have a transportation sustainability triangle that helps inform which mode is better to enable, pedestrians being higher.
That's what I am talking about in lacking mechanisms to match pedestrian demand and sidewalk capacity - we see a prolonged collapse in car travel demand, roadway stays the same, despite measurable drop in traffic. No idea if that kind of thing factored into the 2017 - 202X rebuild project, but the decline in car demand should have been a visible trend when that project was imagined.
At the same time, if we counted pedestrian peaks, we would see a prolonged increase in pedestrian demand (my hypothesis). But we don't count it. If we did we would only count rush hours - important but not peak pedestrian traffic.
Taken together that's the disconnect - roads are design for driving capacity and demand, but only ratchet upwards - decreases in demand don't lead to available capacity being freed up easily or often. Pedestrian demand is anecdotal and disconnected from capacity planning. Even if we did know the counts, it's not clear that would/could influence capacity and design outcomes.
MichaelS
Senior Member
BP number or address available?
MichaelS
Senior Member
Yes, this will be huge from what I have seen. I have been regularly checking DMap to see if drawings get posted, will definitely warrant its own thread when enough information is available to create one.
Sambo
New Member
Parking options can be limited so many people just avoid businesses on 17th now.
JonnyCanuck
Senior Member
For Blume ... BP2022-03635
Calgcouver
Active Member
Anywhere worth being has a parking problem in a city IMO.
outoftheice
Active Member
Regarding 17th Ave and parking, I think the biggest issue is that we do off-street parking very poorly in this city and so on-street parking becomes the default go-to for drivers, even though most drivers absolutely hate parallel parking.
Here's a perfect example from the intersection of 17th Ave & 8 St SW:
There is not one but FOUR parkades that are accessible from this intersection. Can you spot them? Can you spot them doing 50 km/h? Do you know if they are full or empty? Do you know the rate you have to pay to use them? Will you be able to leave your car overnight or access it later in the evening?
Unless you know ahead of time because you have some local knowledge of the area you aren't going to use the ample off-street parking that is provided in the area. So where will you park instead? On whatever empty space you can find on the street of course which makes street parking in Calgary become this untouchable thing in the minds of area businesses.
Now contrast this with off-street parking in popular districts in Europe:
Or, closer to home, Banff National Park:
This kind of signage makes it quick and easy for drivers to locate available off-parking within a popular district. Signage at parkade entrances can then be upgraded to prominently display hours of operation and rates. If the City of Calgary really wanted to, they could offer incentives to private parkade operators within a certain district to ensure rates were standardized to make it easier for drivers. Once all that is complete, you've created an environment where reducing on-street parking will have minimal impacts on area businesses.
This strategy won't work everywhere but there are certain areas in Calgary where it would work very well. 17th Ave, Kensington and East Village all have plenty of existing parkades that sit empty the majority of the time. Direct traffic into these parkades and then let's have a conversation on how to make better use of the on-street parking spaces so that pedestrians, cyclists and businesses can benefit. That will take some leadership and some investment by the City of Calgary though and sadly I haven't seen any indication they're interested.
Here's a perfect example from the intersection of 17th Ave & 8 St SW:
There is not one but FOUR parkades that are accessible from this intersection. Can you spot them? Can you spot them doing 50 km/h? Do you know if they are full or empty? Do you know the rate you have to pay to use them? Will you be able to leave your car overnight or access it later in the evening?
Unless you know ahead of time because you have some local knowledge of the area you aren't going to use the ample off-street parking that is provided in the area. So where will you park instead? On whatever empty space you can find on the street of course which makes street parking in Calgary become this untouchable thing in the minds of area businesses.
Now contrast this with off-street parking in popular districts in Europe:
Or, closer to home, Banff National Park:
This kind of signage makes it quick and easy for drivers to locate available off-parking within a popular district. Signage at parkade entrances can then be upgraded to prominently display hours of operation and rates. If the City of Calgary really wanted to, they could offer incentives to private parkade operators within a certain district to ensure rates were standardized to make it easier for drivers. Once all that is complete, you've created an environment where reducing on-street parking will have minimal impacts on area businesses.
This strategy won't work everywhere but there are certain areas in Calgary where it would work very well. 17th Ave, Kensington and East Village all have plenty of existing parkades that sit empty the majority of the time. Direct traffic into these parkades and then let's have a conversation on how to make better use of the on-street parking spaces so that pedestrians, cyclists and businesses can benefit. That will take some leadership and some investment by the City of Calgary though and sadly I haven't seen any indication they're interested.
Mountain Man
Senior Member
The thing to remember is there are so many office workers downtown who drive that any and all parking space is taken by workers and it leaves little for retail traffic. Even in short term stalls I see people go down every hour and feed the meter.
lemongrab
Active Member
Since the guidebook fiasco is going to mean a few years of radio silence on big urban-development issues, the next place for a broad/progressive/controversial conversation in this city should be around the societal values/costs of parking (everywhere).
I don't think this is very likely and would be doomed to fail, but I think it could still be a step in the right direction. 80% of the population would have a kneejerk "war on cars" reaction, but if even a quarter of those engage critical thinking on the idea then we might actually win some hearts+minds and make some progress in the long-run.
While there could be some policy ideas/framework, the objective should actually be more communications based [rather than really trying to push through controversial policies that would end up watered-down and ineffective].
Or maybe just start with a really well-designed pilot-project that sparks a conversation.
I don't think this is very likely and would be doomed to fail, but I think it could still be a step in the right direction. 80% of the population would have a kneejerk "war on cars" reaction, but if even a quarter of those engage critical thinking on the idea then we might actually win some hearts+minds and make some progress in the long-run.
While there could be some policy ideas/framework, the objective should actually be more communications based [rather than really trying to push through controversial policies that would end up watered-down and ineffective].
Or maybe just start with a really well-designed pilot-project that sparks a conversation.
MissingMiddle
Active Member
A lot of the work done was on the underground utility upgrades/relocations. Ripping up some asphalt and replacing with a wider sidewalk would not take long if they did it a section at a time.
How much does it slow traffic when someone tries to parallel park in the single westbound lane of 17th on a Friday Night?
CBBarnett
Senior Member
I agree with @outoftheice on signage, if there's an issue on parking it isn't lack of supply. A quick scan of the business district's website is fairly comprehensive for off-street parking.
https://17thave.ca/parking/
- Total off-street stalls listed on 17th Ave website: 1,548
- Total off-street stalls built since 1996 on Tompkins Park: 636
- Includes The Royal, Hanson Square (best buy building), Mount Royal Block (shoppers building), Mount Royal Village East (former London Drugs building)
- Decline in E/W 17 Ave traffic along Tompkins Park 1996 - 2019: ~-45%
- Population of 17 Ave facing communities, 1996: 25,266
- Includes Beltline, Lower Mount Royal, Cliff Bungalow, Mission
- Population of 17 Ave facing communities, 2019: 35,079 (+9,813, ~+40%)
We increased parking supply on 17th Ave by at least 70%, also saw a reduction in traffic by 45% at Tompkins Park, and people still *think* there is not enough parking. Part of it is the signage/parking awareness story, but a bigger part is that 17 Ave is less dependent on car trips and parking than it might once have been. The surrounding communities grew by nearly 10,000 people in the same period.
Car culture is a theme in all this and is the source of much bias in thinking about what 17th Ave is, should or could be. The transportation engineers, visitors and people and businesses think more people drive to 17 Ave than they do, largely because cars are such inefficient space users it always seems like traffic is wild and there's no parking available even if there's actually 45% less drivers in the area. This bias is reinforced because we only bother to count cars reasonably accurately, so we don't have good data to support the counter narrative that says people are clearly visiting the street using other methods and the trend of the street is changing substantially.
This bias and failure to accurately understand how people are changing how they use 17 Ave is one reason why the sidewalks stayed so narrow when it was rebuilt.
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