I love Tom Campbell Hilll as a park, but imagine the cool developments that could be built on the side of the hill.
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- Thread starter Surrealplaces
- Start date
DougB
Senior Member
Tom Campbell's Hill isn't really a hill. It is landfill as is the zoo parking lot. Building would be a bad idea.
gsunnyg
Senior Member
If only that train stopped in the middle of Bridgeland then it would have been a full on proper TOD. Still great to see the area boom into a dense node.
I don't believe the hill portion was ever landfill. The hill was always there. The city had a landfill around where the zoo parking lot and and extended to around where the Memorial/Deerfoot interchange is.
CCF
Active Member
Calgary does TOD very poorly, instead opting for an approach more akin to Transit-Adjacent Development (TAD).
Hopefully we see better results through the Green Line than what has materialized on either the Red or Blue.
Silence&Motion
Senior Member
I've always thought it was a huge missed opportunity to build the Telus Spark where the zoo parking lot is, which would have allowed easy access to the LRT station. Instead, it's a punishing 15 minute walk through parking lots and industrial land to get from the LRT to Telus Spark.
Beltline_B
Senior Member
That’s correct. In old photos you can see the hill was always there. Back some years ago after the zoo stopped using the hill, there was talk of making it into an industrial park. That’s right , an industrial park! Thankfully it was opposed and left as a park.
I like it as a park, but if anyone ever wanted to develop the bottom 40 or 50 feet of the park I’d be OK with that.
I like it as a park, but if anyone ever wanted to develop the bottom 40 or 50 feet of the park I’d be OK with that.
darwink
Senior Member
A full remediation of the landfill would have been nice, allowing a masterplan of museums radiating from the plaza to be developed over 50 years perhaps inspired by the Seattle Centre model. Alas, budgets and all that getting in the way.
Mountain Man
Senior Member
Never knew there was a landfill there, interesting...
CBBarnett
Senior Member
Agreed. I have probably ranted about this before but we do terrible institution planning in this city from a connectivity and location perspective for anything other than cars. We could blame it on the provincial-city relationship - which certainly hasn't helped - but it seems deeper where the folks that make these decisions - politicians, fundraisers, institution leads, developers - perhaps don't have an "anti-transit" attitude, but its at least "transit oblivious". And of course there is lots of local specific factors that aren't always obvious at a glance (e.g. old landfills dictating development, logistic or circulation reasons etc.) and the tons of rules that get in the way (e.g. parking minimum requirements). Much like our heritage building challenges, the timing of our peak-growth in auto-crazy post-war 1960s-2000s certainly didn't help.
Regardless of the reasons and level of intention, the outcomes are the same: our institutions are wildly anti-transit.
Location issues:
- South Calgary Health Campus: there was an interesting discussion on this forum a while back about how the proposed land switched from a South LRT adjacent parcel to Seton back in the 1990s. The result is an enormous auto-oriented employment centre located far from transit, ironically the very existence of it is one of the primary justifications for another enormous project in the Green Line.
- Peter Lougheed Hospital: frustratingly close to LRT, but with terrible connectivity and complete auto-orientation otherwise. The LRT was well in the works when this was built in the late 1980s.
- Alberta Children's Hospital: auto-oriented as far from LRT as possible, built in mid-2000s well after LRT was established. Helpful that University District and Max lines change this, but from an institutional planning perspective transit adjacency was clearly not valued.
- Telus Science Centre (as mentioned)
- Calgary International terminals: built far as possible from the city centre 1972, still without rapid transit (48 years). Even if we kept the runways in the same location you could save 10km off the average trip if you put the facility at the SW corner rather than the NE corner.
- Mount Royal University only recently got rapid transit access (in theory, not yet in practice) in the form of the MAX routes in 2019. It's been at it's current campus location since 1972 (47 years).
- Looking past the physical locations, all hospitals and universities are incredibly auto-oriented. Part of that is a feedback loop (i.e. why make them less auto-oriented when we put them in auto-oriented locations). But part of it is that "transit obliviousness"
- SAIT: while arguably the most transit-oriented institution on the city, prior to the New Central Library - it was completely auto-oriented, only improving slightly with the late 2000s expansion and remodelling. That expansion remains remarkably car-oriented for $500M of spending by late-2000s post-secondary standards compared to other universities.
- Foothills Medical Centre: while it's location can't be faulted alone - Foothills predates the existence of modern rapid transit. However it's continued expansion has some of the most inaccessible sidewalks and connections of any institution anywhere. Connectivity is a complete afterthought to parkades and vehicle circulation.
- Telus Science Centre (as mentioned, particularly on the sidewalk connections to the LRT being ridiculous for something built in the last 10 years when we should have known better).
It's going to take a lot of transit expansion, but also a major change in how these institutional places think about their relationship to transit and the wider city to see any significant change on these issues over the coming decades.
1875
Senior Member
- Calgary International terminals: built far as possible from the city centre 1972, still without rapid transit (48 years). Even if we kept the runways in the same location you could save 10km off the average trip if you put the facility at the SW corner rather than the NE corner.
Silence&Motion
Senior Member
I've raised this issue before. Someone said that that terminal itself needed to be a certain distance away from the city centre due to noise pollution issues (because of all the taxiing).
MichaelS
Senior Member
Adding to CBBarnett's list, I would include almost every (all?) major rec centers in the past 15-20 years. The most appalling example is the Rocky Ridge YMCA in my mind. Two that are sort of okay are the Quarry Park YMCA, and the Seton YMCA. Quarry Park, as it now has Max Teal service and will be kind of close to the Greenline LRT station. Seton as it will be close to the Greenline station.... in however many years/decades it takes to reach it.
Even the transit adjacent ones are very car oriented in their designs. The Shawnessy YMCA is a prime example, making sure the surface parking lots are the closest thing to the C-train station.
Even the transit adjacent ones are very car oriented in their designs. The Shawnessy YMCA is a prime example, making sure the surface parking lots are the closest thing to the C-train station.
Silence&Motion
Senior Member
The Jubilee Auditorium has always bugged me for these reasons. It's supposed to be the city's premier performance venue, but it's basically in the middle of nowhere. It did subsequently get an LRT stop, but you have to cross a surface parking lot and pass the loading docks to get into the building. I'd love to see a new theatre built at some point either around City Hall/East Village, or as another anchor for the arena/entertainment district.
CBBarnett
Senior Member
Totally forgot - yes all of the recreation centres are high on my list! And it's hard to blame inter-governmental alignment issues on those ones, they are firmly in the City's area of control. These recreation sites must be a product of bias baked-in from the beginning to end up like this. Rockyridge YMCA is the recreation equivalent of a 1980s ex-urban mall approach to development and it was built in like 2016. We essentially built West Edmonton Mall but with a fancy roof.
When I say bias is baked in, what I mean is we build giant car-oriented recreation multi-sport centres because we have always built giant car-oriented recreation multi-sport centres. We talked to our car-oriented stakeholders from our existing car-oriented recreation facilities and they say parking is a challenge and there should be more amenities, making our next site requirements even larger and more car-oriented. We don't ask for parking relaxations because our current giant facilities with giant parking lots have parking problems. We feel no pressure to change this as people say we do a good job when we deliver more amenities for less, not the same amenities but more accessible to more people.
The process is so clearly driven with one mindset - recreation amenity creation - that it completely ignores stuff like accessibility, transit, sustainability etc.
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