My dream for this is the main hall of the north building of the Telus convention centre. There were concerns about it being even more uneconomic as a convention centre after the BMO expansion was finished. When else do you get a large column free hall that has great loading dock facilities...

Most cities that build airport links find they underperform compared to other parts of their system. Airports are bad trip generators compared to the number of people coming and going proximate to the airport (what we are being told when we hear X people work at the airport, plus passengers).

It aligns to a potentially future 7th and 8th Avenue subway. Built to save a boat load of trouble in the future, not to be used anytime soon.

I believe so. Other more expensive solutions could be used like a wider bore or parallel tunnel to contain a lot more evacuation and smoke management space. Somewhat. The problem comes when a presenter talking about the report can’t or won’t contextualize the cost of the incremental pie bits...

A long response which jumps around a bit: Because each of the 6 (not counting 16th or the possible one to the south) stations would cost $200 million in today's dollars. Then add in 16+ smoke and evacuation structures plus the land for them (any run longer than 400 metres between evacuation...

underground to get into the median of Centre makes sense given the elevation change. The crossing at grade onto Centre seemed like a false economy to me, trading a long term expense (slow, plus traffic impacts) to save maybe $50 million bucks up front. After that going under or over 16th makes...

It isn't that they hated underground, it is that the city never found a way/was unwilling to mitigate risk besides throwing more money at the problem from the project base budget, instead of accepting the risk of cost overruns from the tunnel and covering it out of city only reserve funds, for...

Floor plate size requirements force us into building typologies that are more expensive and allows for less experimentation. Sure, lets just lock point towers with high ratios of services and circulation on podiums into law. Then keep FAR the same, effectively reducing the amount of space...

Oh a different. Schools added capacity there like nobodies business, because their government has been even worse than the UCP on post-secondary funding.

Far less of a constraint, plus far fewer houses that are compatible with that type of conversion. Also the surge in Ontario was so much steeper, that the housing market is trying to catch a rocket (there isn't a great analogy that is the reverse of catching a falling knife)

Lots of shadow additions, with old housing being split into multiple units. Plus for international students especially, there is crowding. A single house to three two bedroom apartments, then with 6 people each in them.

Yeah. Fully elevated, automated. A travesty we didn't seriously cost it as an option.

^ when you’re in a rainy place, and you access control stations (and need the floor space necessary for fare gates), and you need to protect your ROW, you end up with a much higher baseline configuration.

Funding is allocated by population. Yeah. Here are the number of international students in Ontario. The number is plummeting. Hard to overcome that!

Bow Valley College's pre-federal international student changes (2023-24) was 9,577.4 full time learner equivalents. 2655.7 of those were international, up from 507.4 in 2014. If they're following sector trends, they'll bottom out at around 1,000 if they're lucky this academic year. There is...