The thing about more studies is maybe they will produce different results from the last study. Here's the summary table for the 2019 Rail to Banff study: Comparing the medium case for bus and rail, the bus alternative provides: 84% of the ridership 1% of the capital cost 22% of the operating...

None of this makes any sense; it's tying two bad and one good project together; they each have completely different requirements, both technically and in terms of what is needed; the only common themes are that they look vaguely similar if you don't know much and squint, and that there's...

The no balcony thing makes sense on one hand -- walk around any inner city neighbourhood and look at the balconies; you'll see stuff stored out there, a barbecue, flowers if they're ambitious, but rarely any people. But on the other hand, as a prospective tenant, it's something that people look...

I shoulda gone back to take better pics of that sidewalk area, but it's very nearly textbook IMO. Nice, wide clear zone sidewalk. Furniture / landscaping clearly on both sides of sidewalk, with benches between green zones; maybe there's enough space for the trees to thrive (I'm not a tree...

Section 95 of the NHA built almost 200,000 houses in the past four decades, and would have done a lot more if it hadn't gutted by the Liberal government in 1994. The new program seems to have created 35,000 houses as of 2019, but the problem is that the governments in between built up a massive...

As a scale thing, in 2021 there's around 37K workers in NAICS 22 - Mining, quarrying and oil and gas extraction and they're almost all working in oil and gas (about 1250 in other forms of mining; ~300 in coal, ~450 in metal ores, ~550 in non-metallic mining e.g. rock quarries and gravel pits...

I realized I actually put together a look at the industry mix in the Calgary CMA but never posted it. The standard classification for industries, NAICS, has 20 categories. Here's the current mix: Note oil and gas in the bottom center, with a black outline, a little under 5%. With 20...

There was another plan posted here by Duck Lightning a little while ago. And there was fewer trees in that empty space than you'd think: The area marked "Polar Bear 1" was I believe a bighorn sheep, and the area marked "Polar Bear 2" was the bison area, and in the south end a whooping crane...

What's richly ironic is that the City doesn't actually want any more office skyscrapers built for the forseeable future anyways. They're literally paying people who have built office skyscrapers to do something else. Meanwhile, the initial set of downtown cycle tracks have all had residential...

That petition site includes a City study that was done in the fall of last year and never released, only surfaced with a FOIP request. A substantial increase in cyclists on the corridor!

It's a great choice; it's direct and there are better car alternatives available for north-south travel. Elbow doesn't need to be four lanes for almost any of it's length; it's not a very high volume road; mostly in the 20K range. It's really a no-brainer; assuming the City wanted to respond to...

That's really not true, though. It's true that we're not still an oil and gas town. People who live in Calgary and are involved with industry know that Calgary isn't still an oil and gas town. But people who already live in Calgary and are involved with industry aren't the ones that a national...

I wish the Calgary Transit staff who zealously defend keeping traffic speeds dangerous so that they can save precious seconds, even though it loses customers* could like go for lunch with the Calgary Transit staff who are incredibly uninterested in things like stop consolidation, Kassel curbs or...

Another update on the deconstruction at 17th Ave and 4th St. You can see the big Mammoet crane on site.

Sure thing! Happy for you to do so. I'll send you a DM ('start conversation' I guess) with my email if you want more info or have any questions.

One other thing that green paint would help indicate is that there is a continuous path through for cyclists; the first example (at 17 Ave just east of the gas station), the asphalt for cyclists ends some distance before the intersection and it would not necessarily be clear for an unfamiliar...

It's interesting work, although very planning-student-y, for good and for ill. Here's the actual projects. "Missing Middle" is such an unfortunate thought-terminating cliche. One in three dwellings in the city are of this type; is that really missing? A lot of the student work was looking at...

It's cobbled together and primarily for my own amusement and edification; it's probably against the terms of use or whatever so I don't want to give it out willy-nilly. Run down was maybe a strong term, but generally anything built in the past 30 or so years includes insuite laundry and a...

There absolutely is. It's not as bad as Vancouver or Toronto, but almost all of the solutions to housing affordability are not overnight solutions, they take years to implement, so it's important to act quickly to try and avoid things getting worse. As of the 2021 census, about 35% of renter...

Not of all time... I'd love for the last step before occupancy permits are issued to be for someone to come out with a copy of the rendering and just hold it up and see if they can keep a straight face. But full-on deceit has no penalty, so guess what we get.