GoVertical
Senior Member
Honestly it doesn't have to be high rises on this site, I'm just glad to see something finally going in on this lot!
- Thread starter MichaelS
- Start date
DougB
Active Member
That area is one of the few in Calgary giving off a 1960s style Toronto commie blocks fronting a freeway vibe
Cyric
Active Member
The crane is going up at this site today. I saw them bringing the tower sections to site this morning as I drove past.
VulkanX
New Member
Can confirmed the lot was a parking lot for a long time owned by one of the GM Dealerships and they used it for over flow of vehicles and large order's like fleets of trucks.
Here's a good arial shot for you
I'm also doing daily time lapses but happy to post a picture every now and then if anyone wants to know progress.
Here's a good arial shot for you
I'm also doing daily time lapses but happy to post a picture every now and then if anyone wants to know progress.
MichaelS
Senior Member
The time lapse will be cool to see. Thanks for posting the picture. Looks like you are also well suited to catch progress on this project when it starts construction:
skyrisecities.com
Calgary | Kings Landing | 21m | 6s | Uptown Residential | NORR
Recently found this on Cairo's site. Is this new? https://cairodevelopment.ca/projects/
Golfing guy
Active Member
Crane up at this site now
MissingMiddle
Active Member
That shot of Macleod Trail is very Boulevard Décarie in Montréal.
But cool that we're finally moving forward with dense housing in this area.
But cool that we're finally moving forward with dense housing in this area.
FCC1982
Active Member
Great to see this lot get developed.
Kōsō
Active Member
The location is awesome, but getting anywhere on foot is atrocious. I work in the area and getting across either Glenmore or Macleod Trail is downright scary (you are literally taking your life into your own hands). Vehicular traffic cannot comprehend why a pedestrian would be in this car centric area, so they don't even bother looking for them. A great location but a hell-scape for anyone not in a car.
CBBarnett
Senior Member
Let's all go for a walk to Chinook Centre, a local destination packed with amenities! Indeed, proximity to destinations Chinook is a big reason to live in the area in the first place. Two routes to choose from:
- 5 Street SW Route (to the left)
- MacLeod Trail Route (to the right)
As a starting point, I assume this development will get rid of a decades-old crime against pedestrians, the random disappearing and increasing sloped sidewalk to highway median transition on the Glenmore EB one-way ramp. +1 for improving the first block for each route (I am assuming the development will do this):
Now let's look at each route individually.
1. 5 Street SW Route (to the left)
First up is the intersection at the 5 Street Bridge over Glenmore. As we should come to expect, there is only a crosswalk on one side of the road, and of course it's the side farther from the regional destination. The reason of no east sidewalk on the bridge is likely due to a thoughtful engineer wanting to avoid a conflict between southbound dual turning cars on 5 Street to the Glenmore on-ramp. The result of this design choice is that every trip made on walking this route will require an additional crossing leg, and additional wait time at some very long signals - SB car traffic flows unimpeded. 3 crossings are signal timing based, 1 is a slip lane yield (at least our trip won't have to stop on this crossing, assuming cars yield).
Uh-oh - unfortunately 2/4 of our crossing required pedestrian button presses to even get a walk sign - it's the infamous "beg button". So it's not good enough to happen to walk up and just catch the green like the vehicles, we will unfortunately have to wait a full signal cycle to get to legally walk because we weren't already standing there:
Alright - so we are about a block and a half from home and about 10 minutes into our trip to Chinook. After missing the green, pressing the button and crossing the dangerous slip lane we are finally on Chinook Centre property at the NE corner of the whole 5 Street overpass mess. The Mall and it's amazing offers awaits!
A couple options. We can cut through the parking lot (straight) to the entrance beneath the theatre - clearly a bunch of people have done that as it's the quickest way inside. No sidewalk, wayfinding or any sign that's a quick route though.
We can go right, another seemingly popular choice given the dirt trail that has formed. This leads us into a very unclear area - is this a sidewalk? A median? Should we keep going or no?
That looks too sketch for me, let's play it by to rules and stay on the sidewalk. Plus I am bringing a stroller with a newborn so the random concrete barriers is a bit tough to scale.
We are going left!
Finally a generous sidewalk for most this route. Good thing I am not visiting my friend in Meadowlark Park as that would require yet another 2 stage crossing with beg buttons, a long wait, and there's only a sidewalk on the southside of the Mall access road for some reason. On this mall trip, I only have to contend with a generous wide curve for drivers and no stop or yield sign right ahead of my final cross walk to get to the mall itself. I hope the traffic entering the mall and beginning to search for parking sees me and yields!
Across the last loading dock crosswalk and random semi-trucks and we made it! All the way to The Bay's entrance. I hope it's unlocked!
Here's the summary of the 5 Street SW route from this development to the mall:
- 6 crossings of the roadway
- 3 signalized waits for crossing, 2 of those beg buttons
- 2 unprotected crossings - 1 slip lane, 1 parking access road
- 1 loading ramp crossing with infrequent semi trucks
- Straight line distance: 310m
- Walking distance: 520m
- Most of those minutes with 70+ decibel highway traffic roaring nearby at any time of day, everyday.
- Hope the weather is good too - many of those minutes are firmly in the splash zone of high speed traffic.
- What do we think the snow-clearing regime is on this route? Think those sidewalks are clear in a few hours after a snow fall?
But there's always hope - the Macleod Trail Route! I'll save that for my next post when I get the time.
Attachments
Last edited:
Kōsō
Active Member
^^^ Great investigative report CBBarnett. You did a great job concisely laying out the real perils of walking in this neighbourhood! We need you in the city planning department NOW!
CBBarnett
Senior Member
Following up on my previous post on walking from this development to Chinook Mall using the 5th Street SW, let's try the other way - the MacLeod Trail Route.
We run into a problem immediately - I don't think this is a sidewalk on the direct route I mapped above. There's no signs or barriers from this direction but the random enormous highway traffic sign is a clue:
Looking back from the MacLeod Trail side towards this development site, a helpful road engineer put up this sign. Thanks for thinking of me (in one direction at least)!
So we need to modify our route and turn south on 4A Street SW, here's the new plan below. It always sucks to walk in the opposite direction from the destination, but let's try to stay on the sidewalks as much as we can:
4A Street SW is interesting. Immediately across from the development site is this candidate for Worst Bus Stop award, on Route 81 MacLeod Trail S. Note the bus stop sign isn't even in the right place - the bus would stop back from the sign, on the random gate/curb cut ramp section of this abandoned lots. Of course, all this is against several decades of policies, rules, best practices and standards about bus stop placement, road design etc.
Apart from a flurry of dedicated 3-1-1s and emails to your local Councilor, I don't know the mechanism where simple/cheap things like this are corrected.
This got me curious, perhaps this Route 81 MacLeod Trail S is a solution to my walking woes? I grabbed the route map - yikes. I guess the Macleod Trail name is just a general theme, this is a circuitous mess of a route that rambles back and forth across the pedestrian hellscape that is Macleod Trail. I annotated where this bus stop is. Some other useful info:
It dawned on me that the only reason you'd really ever design a bus route this inefficient is an attempt to plug the gap in just how brutal the pedestrian network is around here. It's essentially just a shuttle of last resort to drop people off at horrible, inaccessible bus stops across the canyon that is MacLeod Trail because there's no other ways to cross the corridor. Interesting that our system produces this shoddy result as a "solution" rather than just higher quality sidewalks and pedestrian priority that would make this route unnecessary in the first place. This route is another symptom of the problem.
As it's a Sunday, the bus isn't an option even if I lined up my walk to with a 33 or 45 minute frequency. So back to walking!
EB on 67 Ave SW is fairly boring - a narrow sidewalk with the occasional curb-cut sloped ramp cutting across the sidewalk. It's not icy yet so annoying but passable.
Now we come up to one of Calgary's most remarkable feats of prioritizing cars over pedestrians - the Glenmore and MacLeod intersection. In addition to 2 always dangerous slip lanes on the north and south sides, amazingly, we decided to combine a long unprotected crosswalk with a Glenmore Trail u-turn route. Let's really break down how unnecessary and dangerous this is.
Note the tire marks creeping into the crosswalk from repeated traffic crossing the thin white line. The yield sign is only to remind drivers that they should yield to other turning cars, nothing about the pedestrians in harms way. No curbs or barriers of any kind to separate this turning pattern from pedestrians using the crosswalk.
To me the most brutal part - this bizarre, unconventional and dangerous u-turn/crosswalk's only purpose is to provide a redundant circulation for cars to access the mall. Remember my 5th Street / Glenmore intersection and why that was so terrible as a pedestrian from the last post? The reason 5 Street SW was inefficient and unpleasant, was because my needs as a pedestrian were trumped by the needs to provide the exact same high capacity car access to every destination this u-turn option does. As we have seen over and over again, multiple, redundant, wasteful car circulation options are just standard - but a single protected crosswalk is unimaginable.
Lucky for me I crossed northbound and didn't get clipped from behind on a car doing this u-turn route. Made it to the north side, and now am looking back south to the pedestrian refuge between the WB Glenmore access and the turning slip lane.
A few things to note in this one:
Moving on - finally we are on the Chinook Centre block! Here's the last part of the route:
First hiccup is no ramp in the direction of the sidewalk at the Chinook parking access road, so have to backtrack a bit to the ramp to go around with my stroller. As a result now I am crossing 2x the distance across the wide, sweeping turning vehicle lanes than if I had a ramp right at the efficient, narrower point of crossing. Not only is this out of the way and inefficient to walk, it's also an accident waiting to happen as drivers look to traffic and not to the pedestrian crossing due to the wide, sweeping geometry.
I continue down the narrow sidewalk on the north side of the parking access road and meet the last insult of this walking experience a few metres from the door. Which route should I go?
Left the sidewalk becomes just a place for trees for some reason. I can go straight across the little parking lot, but that's a lot of cars and terrible sight-lines so easy for a collision to happen. I decided to go right towards the chapters as it's the only real sidewalk access, but is narrow due to poles and trucks. Hopefully another person with a stroller isn't passing in the opposite direction or we won't be able to pass each other.
Here's the summary of the MacLeod Trail route from this development to the mall. Some of the same issues are repeated:
Final thoughts:
We successfully have created a true worst case scenario for walkers here - it's not just that walking is inefficient and indirect, it's also that it's completely unsafe and entirely unpleasant. In some other areas of the city we have grown accustom to accept poor pedestrian efficiency, in return for taking a longer route on a quieter side streets or a circuitous path. That's not even an option here at all.
All of these pedestrian issues are the result of trading off basic pedestrian circulation for a systemic over-designing for vehicles to access everything, using multiple, redundant routes at as fast of speed as possible.
Density and intensification doesn't yield any benefits if people aren't actually any closer to the destinations they are trying to access. I wouldn't be surprised that over the 50 - 75 year life of this building at least some of the people living there will be hit, injured or maybe killed walking on either of these two routes.
We run into a problem immediately - I don't think this is a sidewalk on the direct route I mapped above. There's no signs or barriers from this direction but the random enormous highway traffic sign is a clue:
Looking back from the MacLeod Trail side towards this development site, a helpful road engineer put up this sign. Thanks for thinking of me (in one direction at least)!
So we need to modify our route and turn south on 4A Street SW, here's the new plan below. It always sucks to walk in the opposite direction from the destination, but let's try to stay on the sidewalks as much as we can:
4A Street SW is interesting. Immediately across from the development site is this candidate for Worst Bus Stop award, on Route 81 MacLeod Trail S. Note the bus stop sign isn't even in the right place - the bus would stop back from the sign, on the random gate/curb cut ramp section of this abandoned lots. Of course, all this is against several decades of policies, rules, best practices and standards about bus stop placement, road design etc.
Apart from a flurry of dedicated 3-1-1s and emails to your local Councilor, I don't know the mechanism where simple/cheap things like this are corrected.
This got me curious, perhaps this Route 81 MacLeod Trail S is a solution to my walking woes? I grabbed the route map - yikes. I guess the Macleod Trail name is just a general theme, this is a circuitous mess of a route that rambles back and forth across the pedestrian hellscape that is Macleod Trail. I annotated where this bus stop is. Some other useful info:
- Frequency is every 33 minutes weekdays 5:30am to 7:15pm
- Frequency every 45 minutes on Saturdays, 7am to 6:45pm.
- No Sunday service at all.
- Community shuttle bus only - not usually accessible for strollers.
It dawned on me that the only reason you'd really ever design a bus route this inefficient is an attempt to plug the gap in just how brutal the pedestrian network is around here. It's essentially just a shuttle of last resort to drop people off at horrible, inaccessible bus stops across the canyon that is MacLeod Trail because there's no other ways to cross the corridor. Interesting that our system produces this shoddy result as a "solution" rather than just higher quality sidewalks and pedestrian priority that would make this route unnecessary in the first place. This route is another symptom of the problem.
As it's a Sunday, the bus isn't an option even if I lined up my walk to with a 33 or 45 minute frequency. So back to walking!
EB on 67 Ave SW is fairly boring - a narrow sidewalk with the occasional curb-cut sloped ramp cutting across the sidewalk. It's not icy yet so annoying but passable.
Now we come up to one of Calgary's most remarkable feats of prioritizing cars over pedestrians - the Glenmore and MacLeod intersection. In addition to 2 always dangerous slip lanes on the north and south sides, amazingly, we decided to combine a long unprotected crosswalk with a Glenmore Trail u-turn route. Let's really break down how unnecessary and dangerous this is.
Note the tire marks creeping into the crosswalk from repeated traffic crossing the thin white line. The yield sign is only to remind drivers that they should yield to other turning cars, nothing about the pedestrians in harms way. No curbs or barriers of any kind to separate this turning pattern from pedestrians using the crosswalk.
To me the most brutal part - this bizarre, unconventional and dangerous u-turn/crosswalk's only purpose is to provide a redundant circulation for cars to access the mall. Remember my 5th Street / Glenmore intersection and why that was so terrible as a pedestrian from the last post? The reason 5 Street SW was inefficient and unpleasant, was because my needs as a pedestrian were trumped by the needs to provide the exact same high capacity car access to every destination this u-turn option does. As we have seen over and over again, multiple, redundant, wasteful car circulation options are just standard - but a single protected crosswalk is unimaginable.
Lucky for me I crossed northbound and didn't get clipped from behind on a car doing this u-turn route. Made it to the north side, and now am looking back south to the pedestrian refuge between the WB Glenmore access and the turning slip lane.
A few things to note in this one:
- the general poor pavement condition of the sidewalk area likely is bad enough to prevent some mobility aides and wheelchairs from using efficiently.
- Missing paint and general lack of pedestrian wayfinding or delineation of space.
- Memorial flowers on the street pole. Given the timing of this Google photo, best guess is it's from this tragedy from 2021 where 3 pedestrians were struck by a vehicle while waiting to cross SB on the crosswalk/u-turn route. 1 person was killed, child in stroller and second adult in critical condition https://calgary.ctvnews.ca/charges-...run-where-3-pedestrians-were-struck-1.5566984
Moving on - finally we are on the Chinook Centre block! Here's the last part of the route:
First hiccup is no ramp in the direction of the sidewalk at the Chinook parking access road, so have to backtrack a bit to the ramp to go around with my stroller. As a result now I am crossing 2x the distance across the wide, sweeping turning vehicle lanes than if I had a ramp right at the efficient, narrower point of crossing. Not only is this out of the way and inefficient to walk, it's also an accident waiting to happen as drivers look to traffic and not to the pedestrian crossing due to the wide, sweeping geometry.
I continue down the narrow sidewalk on the north side of the parking access road and meet the last insult of this walking experience a few metres from the door. Which route should I go?
Left the sidewalk becomes just a place for trees for some reason. I can go straight across the little parking lot, but that's a lot of cars and terrible sight-lines so easy for a collision to happen. I decided to go right towards the chapters as it's the only real sidewalk access, but is narrow due to poles and trucks. Hopefully another person with a stroller isn't passing in the opposite direction or we won't be able to pass each other.
Here's the summary of the MacLeod Trail route from this development to the mall. Some of the same issues are repeated:
- 6 crossings of the roadway
- 1 signalized waits for crossing
- 5 unprotected crossings - 2 slip lane, 3 parking access road crossings
- Straight line distance: 200m (to the door)
- Walking distance: 700m (thanks largely to the block to the south detour due to a missing sidewalk)
- Most of those minutes with 70+ decibel highway traffic roaring nearby at any time of day, everyday.
- Hope the weather is good too - many of those minutes are firmly in the splash zone of high speed traffic.
- What do we think the snow-clearing regime is on this route? Think those sidewalks are clear in a few hours after a snow fall?
Final thoughts:
We successfully have created a true worst case scenario for walkers here - it's not just that walking is inefficient and indirect, it's also that it's completely unsafe and entirely unpleasant. In some other areas of the city we have grown accustom to accept poor pedestrian efficiency, in return for taking a longer route on a quieter side streets or a circuitous path. That's not even an option here at all.
All of these pedestrian issues are the result of trading off basic pedestrian circulation for a systemic over-designing for vehicles to access everything, using multiple, redundant routes at as fast of speed as possible.
Density and intensification doesn't yield any benefits if people aren't actually any closer to the destinations they are trying to access. I wouldn't be surprised that over the 50 - 75 year life of this building at least some of the people living there will be hit, injured or maybe killed walking on either of these two routes.
Last edited:
Cowtown
Senior Member
Very sad just how bad the connectivity is around Chinook Centre. A pedestrian bridge at 4a street crossing over to Chinook would be a big help.
YYCguy
Active Member
When I first moved to Calgary, luckily I lived just a few blocks north and west of Chinook centre so walking there and back was a breeze. But there were no (and still no) non fancy, inexpensive grocery stores (ex: not Sunterra) within easy walking distance of my former home. I had to take a train to get to Coop or Walmart. I’m super surprised that there isn’t a grocery store on the Chinook Centre site or across Macleod closer to Chinook Station (which still wouldn’t help future residents of these new buildings going up south of Glenmore).
Stephen Ave
Active Member
They need to bulldoze the Home Depot and Staples, and replace with a development consisting of 3-4 high rise towers and a couple urban format stores like the EV Superstore, or the Beltline CDN Tire.
A pedestrian overpass crossing Glenmore Trail at 4street, similar to the one that crosses as McLeod would also be nice.
A pedestrian overpass crossing Glenmore Trail at 4street, similar to the one that crosses as McLeod would also be nice.