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Are those Texas donuts? wow. I guess it is sorta swampy.

lol, I thought that at first but at closer inspection they're just couches in an amenity area, thankfully.

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If I recall they were pitched as kind of like Barcelona super blocks. That outline plan / concept won some Mayors Urban Design Awards I think. Let's hope it turns out as envisioned. So far, no construction yet in that area.
Loved staying in the old Olympic Village ones in Barcelona. We had a pool in our courtyard. So much street life
 
Grade Separation... interesting. I assume they can't do something simple like they have at 42 Ave because of the freight (future passenger ;)) tracks.
These engagements like the 50th Avenue Study are always kind of funny to me - isn't it really only about cost? Grade-separation is always preferred by all users, but super expensive and probably differently expensive between an underpass v. overpass to the point that we should pick the cheaper option of the two. So asking the public for their preference is nice, but don't know what it would add here.

Interesting is the assumptions that aren't being asked for opinions. Our love for arterial medians continues to be immune to public input:
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Again, land seems free in this analysis - we are already baking in a wider right-of-way before we get started. Surely a tighter design would be sufficient?
 
That is interesting. I live near 50 Ave SW (but west of Macleod), so I drive the short stretch east of Macleod quite often. I never considered that the city would fill in the missing pieces, and ultimately build a continuous road from Elbow Drive to 52 St SE (or even the eastern city limit in the future). This will involve bridges and/or underpasses in a few places. Seems against the usual policy of chopping these secondary roads up to avoid having to interface with expressways, railways, and the river. This removes an interruption to the grid, and will make some trips far less meandering, and make modes other than driving more feasible.

Too bad about the dirt bike track, or whatever that loopy thing is that this will cut through. I'm not involved in motorsports myself, but I feel like facilities like that are always on borrowed time.
 
I remember reading about that, but it was really more of an alternative idea for what would eventually become Glenmore Trail. Glenmore even lines up with 50 Ave near 37 St SW.
There's been a half-century push to figure out better arterial access across the inner city, most of which as part of the highway-building post-war era. You can go back to older city plans and reports from 1960s, 70s and 80s that were all trying to figure out better east-west access for vehicles. Usually - and usually for the better - they were all unsuccessful or got about half-way through an implementation and a particularly corridor was half-built before fading from popularity and never being finished.
  • McKnight / John Laurie - weirdness of a curve of a quasi, but not quite a freeway.
  • 16th Avenue N as a weird hodge-podge of highway/urban corridor/highway.
  • Downtown's many interpretations
    • Memorial drive as a parkway or freeway? or Urban Street? Or all three? If the 1970s engineers would have won that battle, it would have been freeways entirely and no river pathway system (or much of Sunnyside/Kensington and other neighbourhoods).
    • Downtown penetrator failed scheme
  • 25 Avenue S - A particularly interesting one as it successfully built that widen, suburban style boulevard in Manchester, but never got momentum to connect directly over the rail lines to Blackfoot. Result was that strange traffic circle with the train tracks through it in Inglewood
  • 50th Avenue - the past freeway schemes, the current suburban arterial design proposal bubbling along to connect east-west fully
  • Glenmore - successfully a freeway after the mega-scale 2000s era Glenmore - Elbow - 5 Street SW project
The remnant of all these efforts was thankfully few unredeemable east-west car sewers, but also a lack of connectivity. Pedestrians and cycling connections were generally ignored during all these attempts (historically, now planning is much better), although some connections became possible as the roadway was never built and a pathway eventually was added.

This inner city east-west car corridors, is an interesting but under-reported long-term thinking about Calgary's evolution. It doesn't really live anywhere in modern plans, but remerges from time-to-time on one-off projects like this 50th Avenue idea. It's why these ideas seem to appear "out of nowhere" as they really don't exist much in official plans, but have been percolating since the 1970s - which is why they also seem to have been thought out despite no one knowing about them.
 
I really wish one of 16th Ave. or McKnight-JLB would have become a full freeway to provide a free flow route for the TCH and provide cross-town mobility for the north side of the city.
 

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