Yes, and those smaller sites should all have building commitments attached to them. No suburban land developer would sell a lot without requiring construction to start within a reasonable amount of time, but the City didn’t attach that condition to the Westbrook lands. Seems like a solveable...

Completion of Massively Expensive Suburban Car Infrastructure Causes City Council to Accelerate Planning for More Expensive Suburban Car Infrastructure Without Any Irony or Self Reflection

… and we abandoned the pool and built some giant new pools in the suburbs, so one side will have a dirt lot … and we condemned the mall, so the other side will have an even bigger dirt lot! We are building on the great success of the Westbrook Transit Oriented Dirt Lot!

Formerly Mazaj Lounge, which closed after people kept getting murdered in their parking lot.

$10 mil for a 3 bedroom “sub-penthouse”? Sounds about right …

Just to articulate a positive vision here and not dump on the Banff train too much (because I love the idea) this would be my thinking: - Double track the corridor wherever it’s “easy” - Shared single track with CPR freight over the bridges (4x Bow, Elbow, Kananaskis) and in tight spots (eg...

Consistent electric service every 15 minutes would be great, but that means expensive overhead catenary and substations, and a dedicated track all the way downtown including new dedicated bridges over the Bow and the Elbow. I doubt those will survive the inevitable 'value engineering' exercise...

The bike piece seems fixable given the giant road widths, but the bigger miss to me is the lack of integration with transit. U/D could have been a showpiece for how to integrate BRT into a neighborhood- think dedicated lanes, direct routings, and level boarding with the first floor of major...

For sure a rowhouse on Crescent Rd or a duplex in Mount Royal would be >$1M. But RC-G upzoning is the only part of the strategy that asks every Calgarian to actually accept some change in their neighborhood in service of doing something to create more housing. If the wealthiest parts of the...

A good step forward, but this far from the last battle on upzoning to R-CG citywide. From the live wire article: “She reminded Coun. Sharp and other councillors that there still must be a debate and public hearing on whether the upzoning goes through.” The Elbow Parkers that staged the...

... aaaand it's another Kensington project appeal ... (trombone sound)

(Herald article) - So the new airport CEO wants rail service “as fast as possible” … duh although no mention of wanting to the airport to pay for any of it. Also interesting in that article is Adam Waterous of the Calgary-Banff rail project saying that “Essentially what we’ve proposed is that...

I’m not too fussed about lack of retail in this building - it’s a pretty small footprint at ground level, and 9A isn’t going to be an attractive high street with the LRT fence on one side. However, totally makes sense that rental buildings are harder to sell on as mixed use. Condo developers...

I am talking about routes like YYC to Ottawa and Los Angeles (in this round) and YYC to Fort St John, Yellowknife, Saskatoon, and Regina (in the earlier round of cuts) that had 2 mainline carriers before and now May get the same amount of service but from only one carrier.

My hope is that the wave of residential conversions will be an opportunity for both more streetfront retail and more residents, and eventually that will create the political will to fix the one way freeways.

Urban Star is a land investor and it’s unlikely they are ever going to be building projects like these. In theory the model is they will entitle and then sell these projects to a developer that will build them, but I can’t remember any examples of that actually happening.

The main impact of the AC pullback is not going to be number of seats available, it’s going to be the price of those seats, particularly for business travel where Lynx and Flair aren’t realistic choices.

In an era where most people use GPS on their phones to navigate everywhere, +15 businesses are hard to find. I've never gone to a +15 type business (or its equivalent grade-separated indoor pedestrian network in Edmonton, Montreal, Houston, etc) unless I was intimately familiar with the area.

We just spent $87 million expanding the capacity of Crowchild, which is only 1200m away. This project and the 3 other towers along the 14th st corridor are enough evidence that 14th st - at least from 17th ave to 10th ave - can become a great main street if we have the vision.

I hope over the long term that this might allow direct flights from Calgary to some smaller airports in the western US that don't have enough O&D traffic to justify directs right now. e.g. Sacramento, San Jose, Oakland, Albuquerque, Boise, Reno, Bozeman, Spokane.