Calgary Openings, Closings, and Developments

[Bill Bumface]

Originally Posted by DownInFlames

Kensington isn’t just coffee shops and restaurants. There are offices that need vehicle access for their clients.

There are tons of delivery vehicles who use those roads too.

I’d love to see car-free areas in the city but they need to be designed that way from the start. We have enough problems trying to shoehorn in bike lanes on established roads while still accommodating regular traffic.

I think that's why old Europe works so well. They had cities designed for pedestrians have to integrate cars into, not the other way around.

I do think there are some ok middle grounds out there. Pedestrian focused areas that happen to let the delivery vehicles etc. on them seem ok. In those scenarios, it's the cars that feel like they are in the way of the pedestrians and have to maneuver there way around them carefully, instead of the other way around.

[Fuzz]

You'd probable also still need to have it as a road that can be used as one, because I don't think the Fire Department would be all that interested in the proposed plans.

[Ozy_Flame]

Originally Posted by PepsiFree

I’m all for pedestrian-only areas where they make sense, but when your solution to school drop off is to park and walk for 15 minutes then it feels like it’s kind of a pointless conversation.

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?

It's pointless to commiserate about negatives without actually talking about cost vs. benefit, and for whom.

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.

Of course, defaulting to 'no' is a very Calgary thing. Ric McIver gives this two thumbs up all day every day. It even makes his moustache twinkle.

[Fuzz]

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?

It's pointless to commiserate about negatives without actually talking about cost vs. benefit, and for whom.

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.

Of course, defaulting to 'no' is a very Calgary thing. Ric McIver gives this two thumbs up all day every day. It even makes his moustache twinkle.

Nope, just saying no to this one because it's a poorly thought out idea. It's Ok, we all have bad ideas sometimes. Well, not me, but everyone else.

[PepsiFree]

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?

It's pointless to commiserate about negatives without actually talking about cost vs. benefit, and for whom.

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.

Of course, defaulting to 'no' is a very Calgary thing. Ric McIver gives this two thumbs up all day every day. It even makes his moustache twinkle.

Maybe those are the kind of questions you need to have answers to before deciding to close entire roads “because”? I don’t know if you’ve even listed a single benefit that can’t be achieved in other less disruptive ways.

It’s not even defaulting to “no.” It’s just that your idea isn’t practical and makes the area worse for everyone but the people who live directly outside of it in Sunnyside and Kensington Village, and probably still worse for them because it increases the traffic and parking issues in those communities. If it’s for everyone, it has to be for everyone. Your idea somehow makes it for no one, which is kind of incredible.

There definitely ways to make pedestrians the focus of an area without just permanently shutting down the roads and shrugging your shoulders.

[Wormius]

Just imagine if the Sun & Salsa or Lilac Festival were held on a regular weekday and ponder if that makes any sense.

[Ozy_Flame]

Originally Posted by PepsiFree

It’s not even defaulting to “no.” It’s just that your idea isn’t practical and makes the area worse for everyone but the people who live directly outside of it in Sunnyside and Kensington Village, and probably still worse for them because it increases the traffic and parking issues in those communities. If it’s for everyone, it has to be for everyone. Your idea somehow makes it for no one, which is kind of incredible.

This is the dumbest, most ridiculous statement you've made in this thread. You suggest what I say is horrible, yet cannot defend how your idea is even remotely better and feasible, and you offer no data to back that up and just dog-wag your terrible rebuttals.

It's basically your opinion against mine, and you think you're winning because . . . . PepsiFree. Enough narcissistic hot air to fill a blimp.

Stay safe in that bubble. Bigger cities have done more bold things with better areas.

Terrible.

[topfiverecords]

Originally Posted by Wormius

Just imagine if the Sun & Salsa or Lilac Festival were held on a regular weekday and ponder if that makes any sense.

Remember the outrage when Memorial was reduced to one lane each way for a few hours on a Sunday afternoon?

[topfiverecords]

[timun]

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:

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:

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!

[calgarygeologist]

The straightforward solution for cars and pedestrians on 10th is an elevated roadway from the middle the bridge to 5 Ave. The pedestrians can frolik on the street level while cars zoom by above their heads to get in/out of downtown. The beauty of the elevated road is that they might be able to alter the light frequency at Memorial/10th Street which could ease congestion along Memorial. The elevated roadway would only need to be a single lane in each direction because without any parking/intersections the traffic will flow nicely.

[Hack&Lube]

Originally Posted by Ozy_Flame

Isn't he part of that stable of conservatives that includes Craig Chandler, Jonathan Denis and Dan McLean?

From what I read on Reddit, the family is closer to the Sopranos than Dan McLean (whom I met after he got trapped in an elevator for an hour lol).

[marsplasticeraser]

Banff closes their Main Street all summer and it’s glorious as a traveler and from locals I know.

Parking has been moved from main street to a Couple of hundred meters away.

The change is better for businesses, better for travellers in banff, better for locals as cars are now at edge of town.

Pedestrian streets work, but require a bit of thought to make a success. 10th would be a challenge to do, but Kensington road to 12th seems like a big opportunity.

Side note: it’s baffling how losing one (one!) street has people losing it. Feels really entitled.

[calgarygeologist]

Originally Posted by marsplasticeraser

Banff closes their Main Street all summer and it’s glorious as a traveler and from locals I know.

Parking has been moved from main street to a Couple of hundred meters away.

The change is better for businesses, better for travellers in banff, better for locals as cars are now at edge of town.

Pedestrian streets work, but require a bit of thought to make a success. 10th would be a challenge to do, but Kensington road to 12th seems like a big opportunity.

Side note: it’s baffling how losing one (one!) street has people losing it. Feels really entitled.

Not even close to the same because Main street handles maybe 1% of the volume that 10 Street does and Main street has a parallel road 100m away to handle the closure.

[PepsiFree]

…did I get called a narcissist by the Toronto resident getting mad at people for poking the most obvious holes in his vision for a Calgary community he doesn’t know anything about?

[PepsiFree]

Banff and Memorial are actually good examples of how temporary or seasonal changes can have a positive impact for pedestrians while mitigating some of the negative impacts for others. They are “piecemeal” I guess but it wouldn’t make sense to maintain them all the time.

That said, I love the Banff closure, but I’ve read (here I think) that residents where the traffic gets diverted to absolutely hate it.

[timun]

Originally Posted by marsplasticeraser

Banff closes their Main Street all summer and it’s glorious as a traveler and from locals I know.

Parking has been moved from main street to a Couple of hundred meters away.

The change is better for businesses, better for travellers in banff, better for locals as cars are now at edge of town.

Pedestrian streets work, but require a bit of thought to make a success. 10th would be a challenge to do, but Kensington road to 12th seems like a big opportunity.

Side note: it’s baffling how losing one (one!) street has people losing it. Feels really entitled.

Banff can make it workable because there is a huge stream of tourists that keeps the place afloat. Banff Ave is ancillary to the experience: people go to Banff to see the park, not the kitschy gift shops. Convenience for the locals is entirely irrelevant.

Literally no tourist goes out of their way to patronize a business on 10th St NW or Kensington Rd, and there are nowhere near enough 'locals' to keep the businesses afloat on their own. You need to make concessions to keep the 'non-locals' interested in travelling to the neighbourhood, and right now there is nowhere near enough infrastructure to accommodate alternative means of getting to the area.

Condescending as PepsiFree may be, this:

Originally Posted by PepsiFree

Here’s how I would do it, since all my fans are obviously wondering:
- Throw a massive parkade in there somewhere. Think 5+ levels (actually maybe one around 12th and one around 5th… and maybe one in the middle).
- Close Kensington Cres to vehicle traffic.
- Remove street parking from Kensington Road between 14th and 10th and on 10th between Memorial and 5th (plus remove it from all the little side streets like 11A that don’t connect to anything)
- Add bike lanes and/or more extended patios to Kensington Road and 10th.

Fixed it.

... is at least somewhat realistic. Eventually if you get to the point enough apartment buildings are built in the area you may reach a critical mass where the retail businesses can be self-sustaining, but until then you need the 'non-locals' to come there. And if you get rid of the vehicular access entirely, kiss all that business goodbye.

[Table 5]

I live in the area, and am generally a pretty urban minded guy... but sorry Ozy, closing 10th Street off to cars would be totally insane in the membrane. Maybe if there was better access between Memorial Drive and 14th/Centre Streets, you'd have an argument, but as it stands it would just push everyone into the residential streets of Hillhurst and Sunnyside...which would piss off drivers and residents alike.

Closing something like Kensington Crescent is a much doable idea.

[Ozy_Flame]

Closing Kensington Crescent is of little value. It's basically a road used as a parking lot, very little foot traffic to justify that (what retail are you going to need to have no cars to access there? It's a spit and smoke zone for Side Street and Freehouse). This would just allow cars to continue unabated in the area, but now you're taking away a parking lot and forcing them back onto Memorial and more congestion on 10th/K Road intersection.

The vast, vast, vast majority of people are walking Kensington Road and 10th. They're not ducking into that alcove for much.

This is like a timid pilot project idea. I mean sure, go for it, but it's kind of pointless and does nothing to enhance the experience for actual pedestrian traffic. Moves the needle insignificantly.

[Ozy_Flame]

Originally Posted by PepsiFree

…did I get called a narcissist by the Toronto resident getting mad at people for poking the most obvious holes in his vision for a Calgary community he doesn’t know anything about?

Lived there for 35 years. Continue to come back and visit home.

But do go on, the weight of all that humility must be fatiguing.