Ozy_Flame, bro... your idea of just arbitrarily closing vehicular access to Kensington Road and 10th Street is pants-on-head stupid. You may have lived in Calgary before, but the fact that you had questions like this:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ozy_Flame
Who's walking 15 minutes to school drop off? Where is the school? Where are the pickup spots? How many people are we talking about? Where are the currently going that would change their route?
|
... shows that you've been gone long enough to not know WTF you're talking about.
And that fact that you wrote this:
Quote:
|
Kensington is for the whole city, not just the residents who live there. That's the whole point of a high street and major commercial/tourism area.
|
... without a hint of irony, is laughable. If you close off Kensington Road east of 14th, and 10th Street from Memorial to 5th Ave:
who in the flying #### does that benefit, other than
potentially the residents who live there?
E.g., if I want to go from my house to Side Street Grill on Kensington Crescent, I would currently drive up Crowchild to Kensington Road, find some street-side parking somewhere along Kensington Road or angle parking on Kensington Crescent—or let's even say I'd park my car at the CPA parking lot on Kensington Road between 11th and 11A Street. I'd get there in 10-15 minutes, park my car, and walk two minutes to the pub. I'd be there in a total of 15-20 minutes.
Your solution is I park my car...
somewhere, who the #### knows where because in your harebrained scheme that parking lot on Kensington Road would disappear. Optimistically at the CPA lot by the old fire hall at Memorial and 10th, but that'll get filled damned quick with the subsequent reduction in parking capacity along Kensington and 10th. So, probably more likely the CPA lot at 4th Ave and 8th Street downtown, and I'll have to walk across the Louise Bridge. That'll be a similar 10-15 minute drive to the lot on Memorial, plus ~7 minutes' walk to Side Street at the very least. Or, 15-20 minutes to the lot downtown, and a 15 minute walk across the Louise Bridge (or the LRT bridge), for a total of 30-35 minutes to get there.
Or you'd have me take transit: a 25-minute wait for a bus, take a 20 to 45-minute-long bus ride, get off somewhere downtown between 5th Ave and 8th Street and 7th Ave and 6th Street SW, and then walk 10-20 minutes across the Louise Bridge. A total of 55-90 minutes. Or something cockamamie like take a bus to a C-Train station and take the Red Line train to Sunnyside and walk 10 minutes from there. At the very quickest that would be 60 minutes, but if I didn't catch a precisely-on-time bus and transfer to a precisely-on-time train that'll take me easily 90 minutes or more.
Do you honestly think that makes any sense for me? What a preposterous pain in the ass; I'd probably never frequent a business in that area ever again. In order for your idea to work you'd need much, much more densely occupied housing in the surrounding area, because those businesses would have to rely on the local population to keep themselves sustained. The patronage of people who live further afield, like me, would evaporate. That's the gist of Fuzz, PepsiFree, Bill Bumface and others' posts: you're putting the cart before the horse. You're proposing a wholesale change that would kill those businesses in the interim. What you're proposing would result in the same problem we have with downtown retail: not enough residents to keep those businesses going. Downtown is a dead zone after 6:00 pm because not enough people live there, not because it's (to borrow from Bigtime) a "car sewer". The people passing through the area along the "car sewers" are the only thing keeping the businesses alive!