I can see that line being very valid when it comes to Edmonton City Centre. It's always been this very awkward implementation of a suburban shopping mall with bad hours, it's been dying for ages, and there is nothing out there that can reverse its fortunes. It will never actually work as it's...

Especially since road improvement budgets have ended up hidden in bike lane costs in the past, like the time the downtown grid was purported to cost over $10 million but the vast majority of that cost was traffic lights that were going to be replaced anyways.

It's been one of my main connections to downtown as is, but it could really benefit from being more than sharrows, and from better crossings for Kingsway, 111 Ave and 107 Ave. We also make heavy use of the old rail path by 121 Street, but it's a bit of a portage to get there. The newly opened...

Seems like a bunch of the "contraflow bike lane" routes could benefit from this treatment. This whole northeast of downtown stretch between 118 Ave and Jasper Ave has great bones for biking but has kind of been short-changed on the infrastructure front.

Absolutely ripe for a Talus Dome, yep.

I don't know who needs to hear this, but the bike infrastructure in the 96 street renewal is actually nice.

So Stratosphere's Pilot development has its first row almost framed. It seemed to go up in a hurry, probably because they're bringing in modular components. Meanwhile, they've also been building out foundations, to the point of having several more rows in various stages of completion.

Admittedly belated tip, but if you have young ones who are trick or treating, or are a grown ass adult with a shirt that says "costume" and nostalgic for Halloweens gone by, or some octogenarian ne'er do well with a hankering for Hawkins Cheezies who needs to be kept out of trouble...

I would actually not hate going to Calgary if there were just reliable, frequent train service with travel times even just similar to driving using equipment less cursory than the old Budd RDCs. I would probably even go there for fun. At the whole 160-200km/h threshold, you can run a proper...

Right? The only thing really wrong with it is its location. It would be a good centrepiece to an actual park somewhere walkable... like Beaver Hills House Park. 🤔

Only the NX and Streetside are condo. Encore, Landmark, Mutti, Carbon Busters, Crimson Cove and Ocheller (ie everyone who has completed a house there to date, plus Carbon Busters) are freehold.

That matches with what we were seeing when we looked, and a lot of the houses on our "maybe" list were infills in Westmount. And a friend of ours actually did end up buying one. He might've gotten a bit more space to work with and maybe a better location for walking to 124 street, but there was...

When the other half and I were looking, yeah, we could find cheaper townhouses, out at the ragged edge of the ragged edge of the sphincter of suburbia, and with much more questionable build quality, no district heating, no solar, no legal secondary suite, no patio, less appealing architecture, etc.

Meanwhile, Encore has sold most of these houses still under construction, including at least half of the ones on the left and ALL of the ones on the right (including those which are just foundations. The latter screams "investment buyer", but the ones on the left are discontinuous enough that...

Hmm. I wonder if the Zaidis want to cash out.

I'm starting to wonder if their rebrand was due to Oilers Entertainment Group dropping a 'cease and desist', because it doesn't seem to have been part of any strategy to do anything better.

(It would be pretty cool if they moved the Talus Dome to Beaver Hills House Park, admittedly.)

By the by, one of the big selling points to moving to this neighbourhood is that we checked out one of these houses in the middle of January. It was still being finished inside, and the heating system was not yet online. The only heat source in the entire house was a space heater and it was...

That’s Stratosphere on this rainy afternoon. Anything else I should catch while I am out?

Let me go for a little walk and take some pictures. They seemed to be moving quite rapidly over the last couple weeks.