What's particularly frustrating is that there's an easy fix to the issue of vehicle traffic - ban left turns in the afternoon for a couple of hours at three intersections. The City could also remove about 15 street parking stalls (and one curb bulb-out) and create eastbound left turn lanes at...

What's particularly odd is the continual repetition of the lie that this was always envisioned as temporary. The initial web site made no mention of temporary changes; it didn't say they would be permanent, but neither does the engagement around the construction of the Green Line or the Ring...

I never thought of it either, but it is actually shorter than other likely North American based itineraries: It's much shorter to go across Asia; at least as the crow flies -- I think that the actual airliners may not cross North Korean or Iranian airspace, or go over the active invasion of...

Edmonton Trail is a Primary Transit Network corridor, that is -- according to the plans -- slated to have 10 minute or lower frequency service. At 9th Avenue (the closest point to the station), it's over 500m between Edmonton Trail and Centre St, which is around an 8 minute walk. It doesn't make...

One place of saving money -- both on construction and rolling stock -- is dropping the 9th avenue station. It's always been silly (slow down as many people taking the train from the north to benefit the fewest people possible), but the recent Local Area Plan has made it a complete white...

I use the 3rd ave pathway because I go to places on 3rd Ave. Not sure how riding on the river pathway solves that. Not shopping and dining in Chinatown will be what solves that in the future, I guess. In other news, the permanent cycle track on 12th avenue has been removed between 3rd and 4th...

I know there are a few people on here who are quick to talk about how important a stable regulatory environment is for the energy industry; I'm sure they'll be back from their summer holidays soon. It seems odd to me that there is a bunch of land that is incredibly important for agriculture...

Those are average daily volumes. But it's interesting, I had a look at west downtown access at a bigger scale; here's the 2018 volumes and the change since 2000: Traffic is down a lot on 11th/12th, but it's also down almost everywhere. Percentages can be a little misleading, though; the 7%...

Over the years, the 3 has had service cuts and the 301 has had service increases -- the right thing to do, IMO. When the 301 started, (Sept. 2004) it had 6 buses an hour in the peak, and only 2 an hour in the offpeak. The 3 meanwhile had 10 buses an hour in the peak, and 6 in the offpeak. Today...

If the Green Line existed today at-grade, would we spend billions of dollars to tunnel it to increase car capacity on 12th Avenue leading to a two-lane bridge? Would we spend billions to increase car capacity on the roads it crosses like Macleod, which have had declining traffic volumes for...

I stand by my statement; the possible explanations for choosing the option that costs a hundred times more and gives worse results are not very flattering. The strongest arguments are "trains are cool", which I'd be pretty fine with if an 8 year old were planning a transportation system, and...

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...