A station like Sunnyside still have the potential to become a complete TOD because the station stops right in the heart of the community, Unfortunately the extreme NIMBYism of the locals in the area has prevented the area from seeings its full potential. We need more buildings like Annex being built. I also hope the Safeway lot is redeveloped into a denser development with the retail better integrated with the station. Westbrook station is another one with potential but I've almost given up on it. On the flip side, Im stoked about the Green line because theres quite of few stations integrated into the communities rather than stopping in the middle of a highway or an isolated parking lot/plot of land.
I am most excited to see the low/mid-rise TOD keep improving (Sunnyside, Bridgeland, and now Shaganappi Point on the board with a few TOD-oriented apartments) while we struggle with the larger scaled projects (Banff Trail, Brentwood, Westbrook etc.) The smaller scale walk-up oriented TODs have had much more success, but again much has to do with the fundamentals of the design and layout and lack of TOD-thinking in our development culture. Let's dive into Saddletowne for an example of what not to do it what could have been another awesome low/mid scale TOD.
Saddletowne is actually a fairly logically TOD built in 2012, well into the periods when the benefits of TOD and transit are widely known. The neighbourhood was built somewhat before that (early 2000s) however had the LRT planned in from the beginning. Unfortunately no material parking relaxations (in practice), a weird 3 lane one-way road loop, and rigid adherence to the standard box store design were also baked in early - effectively negating reasonably smart macro-level planning and turns it into another TOD wasted opportunity.
For comparison, here's a Dutch suburban neighbourhood in the city of Almere - about 25km outside the city centre of Amsterdam (similar travel time to downtown Calgary from Saddletowne). Pretty much the same land uses and density (low-mid residential, grocery, parking lot, schools, parks). It's slightly older - the station opened in the late 1980s when the neighbourhood was being developed.
Here's Saddletowne adjacent to the station in the bus bay:
Here's the neighbourhood in Almere adjacent to the station from the parking lot:
Ignoring the Dutch example is just a nicer and greener place, the TOD-thinking is just so much more advanced (even in the 1980s) at this small low/mid density scale. Most of these are just choices: they don't cost any more money to make things "fancier" (they might actually be cheaper), they are just bad designs and ideas that undercut our TODs before we even start. I should qualify - it's not because of a lack of interest, expertise and passion people have to get it right here, it's that the compromises, priorities and accepted designs are far less transit-friendly than anything you'd see in places with the culture to put TOD first.
Some examples:
- In the Dutch example, while private vehicles can park adjacent to the station, no major roads are within 200m, and even then "major" road is a two-lane road with dedicated bicycle paths and sidewalks on either side. Compared to our 3-lane, highway scaled circle road directly next to the station in Saddletowne complete with slip-lanes to allow for high-speed turns (for some reason)
- Both examples have a grocery store. The Dutch one (Albert Heiji in the labelled picture) has it's entrance directly at the train station on that diagonal covered walkway. Saddletowne's Safeway is just off the aerial photo to the right, faces the other way and towards a big parking lot of it's own like any Calgary suburban store, near a train or not.
- The Saddletowne example aerial has a straight worn out dirt path cut around the north side of the park because of our weird love of curvy pathways that leads to pointless deviations that many people would rather walk in the dirt rather than follow the path. Relatedly a bunch of unnecessary fences, the random narrowing and widening of the sidewalks and no alignment between the path and the ramps occur throughout Saddletowne's example across the roads, parking lots and bus bay. In the Dutch example, there are no dirt path desire lines because the pathways are straight and efficient direct to destinations (hell, even the grocery store has a diagonal access carved directly through it to the station).
- Given there are 3 lanes in the Saddletowne example, I am surprised we even needed the bus bay at all. The inside lane of the 3-lane road could easily be bus parking and the pointless road-adjacent green strip could easily be used for shelters and other needed amenities. The Dutch example has a bus-only BRT that is the bus bay, put directly next to the station on the right side (before another bicycle only facility). Note the straight lines and no provisions for bus parking or passing as it's not needed.
- All the regular critiques not-TOD specific apply as well (Calgary's ultra-wide/overbuilt car lanes, wild amounts of fencing preventing logical straight-line movement, surface parking all over, buildings facing away from the station or where a person would walk, random sidewalks that just end at parking lots, no bicycle infrastructure etc.)
My conclusion:
We do TOD expensive and wrong, largely due to caring more about things that are actually antithetical to TOD such as big wide roads, curvy pathways and way too much parking. Our best stations and the ones seeing the most development - Sunnyside for example - has none of those things thanks to it's traditional grid of streets, no parking and design compromises that actually favour walking and transit. We should be more like Sunnyside and less like Saddletowne at the low/mid scale.
