Well, this hype bubble popped rather quickly. There goes another potential TOD. Legit, Calgary is still stuck in the 80's with their malls. It's so frustrating to see.
When will we ever see something like this?
I posted my lack of confidence in Northland a while back, the developer's media article confirms it - a big case of design culture barriers if the loss of Whole Foods pivots your whole scheme from urban to suburban power centre. Of course economics and other barriers helped lead to this poor outcome
Link
I think this example is a good one to dive into the role of transit as the "T" in TOD. I think that transit (or lack there of) is a bit of a red herring in TOD discussions but wanted to explore more with some rough numbers. Plenty of good high density places exist without them being built directly integrated into transit (as great that would be, such as the Brentwood Town Centre example). So what does transit really offer development?
Comparison Vancouver: Brentwood Town Centre to VCC Clark
To dig into this comparison I looked at everyone's favourite TOD example, Brentwood in Vancouver. I mapped out travel times and distances using Google between two stations 5 stops apart on a single line so there's no transfers required.
Here's the details, all times by google:
Comments:
- The car travel times are highly variable and longer than a Skytrain, pretty much at any time of the week except early Sunday mornings.
- A resident at Brentwood would save a few minutes to up to 23 minutes (!) to do this pretty short commute by Skytrain than car. Not to mention, the amenities on site for Brentwood are huge - most things you wouldn't need to leave for anyways.
Comparison Calgary: Brentwood to Sunnyside
As Northland Station obviously doesn't exist, I moved up a stop to get a reasonable comparison - our very own Brentwood! By driving and transit the distances are reasonable similar to the Vancouver example, with the same number of stops. I excluded the map but it's the same idea as the Vancouver example. If anything, I think the Brentwood to Sunnyside route unfairly favours transit, because it's much shorter distance than take Crowchild and is largely grade-separated. Here are the results:
Comments:
- The LRT is competitive only marginally faster in weekdays when traffic is at it's worse, despite being relatively much more direct.
- Even if we had a hypothetical upgraded LRT system with Skytrain level frequencies and speeds, the LRT is still mostly only competitive in peak hours because the car travel time is so low and not nearly as variable due to congestion.
Conclusion:
After doing this, my main takeaway is that it's not the lack of Transit that preventing good TOD. The lack of TOD is due to car-orientation of everything in the area.
Local to the Northland site, car-orientation ruins all the edges with all sides being large, arterial and car-oriented roads. Every walk is longer than it has to be, every intersection is harder to cross than it has to be, every future LRT bridge is larger and more expensive than it would have to be - all because the car infrastructure is so enormous and dominating in the area. In such conditions it's not hard to see why developers struggle on their own to achieve anything more walkable or transit friendly. The catering to cars reduces the local location value from poor connections, poor aesthetics and inefficient land uses - all this gets in the way even of the visions on a distance future redevelopment plan.
But more broadly - car-orientation results in a lower location value gradient between hypothetically better locations with transit (like Northland) vs. just anywhere generically in the NW, LRT or not. This gradient in the Vancouver example is so much higher it's dominating - not because the trains are faster, more frequent and more reliable (they are of course and it helps) - but because the car trip is so much less reliable. 20+ extra minutes saved by train each way sometimes is wild. Anyone would consider living in TOD if that was the case!
Why so? Pretty obvious I think - Vancouver hasn't dumped a billion or two dollars onto Broadway to freeway-ify it so it's Vancouver's Crowchild. Vancouver famously has no future plans to expand any roads at all, while this silliness below remains on our long range plan and was only drafted in a few years ago. This is billions of waste that might hold our car trip times relatively flat but won't improve them, all the while eating enormous amounts of land and reducing TOD potential everywhere by subsidizing the distance penalty from car-oreinted development farther away.
Sure - faster, better, stronger trains would be a huge benefit and would help build ridership and transit culture. But the real problem with our lack of TOD is cars and our investment in their infrastructure, not transit itself.
