thommyjo said:
I mean, it’s a forum where few of us are claiming to be experts, but we all like to engage in sharing ideas, opinions, critiques, etc.

You can disagree with my critiques of blatchford and claim dunning Kruger, there’s also endless of critique of blatchford by many of the leading voices in the development space. So idk who you want me to agree with. You, or lots of other people who are also experienced and trained in development and share the same sentiments I’m raising.
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I mean if we’re going to reduce things down to “sentiments” and general vibes, sure.

In which case, hey, I have absolutely shared your sentiment in abundance. I have in the past held a generally negative opinion of Blatchford (probably from inception until early 2024 with a bit of reserve negativity until my soil test results came back). There would have been a variety of reasons over the years, like the initial proposal just being a hot mess, the Metro line and what could charitably be termed its teething issues, the entire surroundings of the airport lands, the inevitable issues with remediation, the plan that eventually emerged having timeframes that were wildly optimistic, and from COVID onwards I wasn’t really keeping up with progress and was just kind of going along with the general vibe of the media landscape. There are certainly legitimate criticisms that can be made and things which could have been done better over a decade ago. And now of course I have no shortage of frustrated sentiments stemming from being a homeowner in a constant construction zone and trying to figure out how to garden in soil that I could bake into stoneware.

The specifics of your ideas, however…

thommyjo said:
And please feel free to show alternative facts to my last post. I felt it was pretty fair and reasonable. A big chunk of blatchford and its density will be beyond what’s considered at all reasonable for transit use. That feels like a miss. Do you disagree?
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Of course I disagree. As I’ve repeatedly explained, nothing about what you have been saying seems to be reality based except if we pull way out to an extremely general level. I can get all mumbly and concede that like any project of this area there would be better transit access than others, especially if we assume a hypothetical where buses don’t exist.
thommyjo said:
Is the current design the only possible option, or could other layouts have better outcomes for our goals?
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There’s always “options”. But one of your big complaints is that it’s not going fast enough. Revising the “layout” at this point is a great way to make it go much slower.
 
Coprolite said:
I mean if we’re going to reduce things down to “sentiments” and general vibes, sure.

In which case, hey, I have absolutely shared your sentiment in abundance. I have in the past held a generally negative opinion of Blatchford (probably from inception until early 2024 with a bit of reserve negativity until my soil test results came back). There would have been a variety of reasons over the years, like the initial proposal just being a hot mess, the Metro line and what could charitably be termed its teething issues, the entire surroundings of the airport lands, the inevitable issues with remediation, the plan that eventually emerged having timeframes that were wildly optimistic, and from COVID onwards I wasn’t really keeping up with progress and was just kind of going along with the general vibe of the media landscape. There are certainly legitimate criticisms that can be made and things which could have been done better over a decade ago. And now of course I have no shortage of frustrated sentiments stemming from being a homeowner in a constant construction zone and trying to figure out how to garden in soil that I could bake into stoneware.

The specifics of your ideas, however…



Of course I disagree. As I’ve repeatedly explained, nothing about what you have been saying seems to be reality based except if we pull way out to an extremely general level. I can get all mumbly and concede that like any project of this area there would be better transit access than others, especially if we assume a hypothetical where buses don’t exist.


There’s always “options”. But one of your big complaints is that it’s not going fast enough. Revising the “layout” at this point is a great way to make it go much slower.
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I certainly don't think changing the layout of lakes is an option at this point. That's more of a general planning criticism that I think has hurt the potential transit usage of this community. I suspect if the lakes were able to be "swapped" with Blatchford west, more residents would use transit (especially the northern lake and NW blatchford high density node, less of a concern, for the more southern area). There might be a really critical reason of why the lakes are where they are related to drainage for the entire area, pipes, ground conditions, etc. But if they could have been shifted, I think it was a mistake. We've made the lakes the things most people are closest to in this design, when imo, it should be transit always.

I don't think that an extremely general claim that's not based in reality. The best practices for TOD are well thought through and studied and we know there's a "threshold" of where people stop walking to transit due to distance. Blatchford seems to have not prioritized this thinking.
 
Good planning considers the future. Sticking to density targets will bring in higher tax revenue long term. The City recently released the fiscal gap report highlighting the long term fiscal challenges the City is facing. Sticking to density targets in Blatchford and other parts of the City will help get us there. Likewise, some people will drive, some will take transit. Some people may choose to not have vehicles.

Many of the critics in the development space are in the private sector, which operates on a profitable model. Someone said several pages back that Blatchford is a policy decision by the City to have a certain type of development, which is absolutely correct. That doesn't need to be a bad thing though. The City, like other forms of government has the ability to eat costs that the private sector can't. In addition, Blatchford is competition to the private sector, so of course they are going to critique it. The market can only absorb so much housing at any given time even with the high growth rates that Edmonton has. People choose to live close to where they work. Commercial and industrial development isn't all concentrated in central Edmonton, so market absorption is going to be spread across Edmonton including greenfield areas. It isn't a secret that south of Edmonton and northeast are developing industrial far greater than Edmonton is. The private sector also has Bonnie Doon redevelopment, Strathearn, Jasper Gates, Millwoods TC - none of which have gone anywhere in 10 years despite solid plans and proposals. While the private sector has wins too, there are plenty of shelved large scale redevelopment projects. Given the remediation required in Blatchford, I'm not convinced the private sector would have done any better due to the upfront costs.

Several medium density lots are in the planning stages right now, so hopefully we start to see some denser buildings over the next 12-24 months. Some of the failed projects previously mentioned were condos and those failures aren't unique to Blatchford. The entire market has shifted to rentals and for developers that aren't Westrich, etc, it takes longer to pivot and change financing, etc.

There are a lot of people that lurk here in the Real Estate sector, but many stay out of conversations because there are definitely a lot of laypeople posting questionable things about development. The posts here really show that off sometimes.
 
thommyjo said:
I certainly don't think changing the layout of lakes is an option at this point. That's more of a general planning criticism that I think has hurt the potential transit usage of this community. I suspect if the lakes were able to be "swapped" with Blatchford west, more residents would use transit (especially the northern lake and NW blatchford high density node, less of a concern, for the more southern area). There might be a really critical reason of why the lakes are where they are related to drainage for the entire area, pipes, ground conditions, etc. But if they could have been shifted, I think it was a mistake. We've made the lakes the things most people are closest to in this design, when imo, it should be transit always.

I don't think that an extremely general claim that's not based in reality. The best practices for TOD are well thought through and studied and we know there's a "threshold" of where people stop walking to transit due to distance. Blatchford seems to have not prioritized this thinking.
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This would be the very rough edit of the map I would think could make a big difference to transit use. Might be reasons it wasn't possible, but I do wonder.

1.jpg
 
thommyjo said:
I certainly don't think changing the layout of lakes is an option at this point. That's more of a general planning criticism that I think has hurt the potential transit usage of this community. I suspect if the lakes were able to be "swapped" with Blatchford west, more residents would use transit (especially the northern lake and NW blatchford high density node, less of a concern, for the more southern area). There might be a really critical reason of why the lakes are where they are related to drainage for the entire area, pipes, ground conditions, etc. But if they could have been shifted, I think it was a mistake. We've made the lakes the things most people are closest to in this design, when imo, it should be transit always.

I don't think that an extremely general claim that's not based in reality. The best practices for TOD are well thought through and studied and we know there's a "threshold" of where people stop walking to transit due to distance. Blatchford seems to have not prioritized this thinking.
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While you're correct that they can't easily be moved at this point (it's doable under leadership willing to light money on fire and add many years to their timeline), there's kind of a very convergent evolution-y reason why these things tend to end up quasi-central and shifted a bit towards the areas with the highest drainage demands. Or alternately they bracket a development, or are distributed through at regular intervals (but again, shifted by weight). Remember, these things are not cosmetic features and are there to account for the fact that the downstream storm drainage lines have finite capacity to handle the runoff of our ever growing city and are a requirement of drainage plans. Their ability to buffer drainage capacity works better when they are close to what needs draining, so if you've pushed it out west, you're now limiting the drainage capacity of the overwhelmingly densest part of the plan.

But presuming you COULD shift it all out to the west without impairing function, now you're committing that having to run the storm drain system out from there to anywhere you want to build. You just made it a lot harder to build in the east along the LRT line because your site servicing for drainage (and district heating/cooling because their exchange network for that is under the drainage pond) now has to work its way east and a bunch of demolition has to be carried out to make way for those particular subsurface utilities. And, you've just pushed land transfer to what was always the single largest confirmed customer and one of the key driving forces for this development years down the line.

This was always going to be a challenging site to service with the "best practices for TOD" because of where the Metro Line came in and where it would exit were more or less locked in (barring access to the money fire hose and the SimCity bulldozer button to generate vastly more freedom to route the Metro Line through already built areas of Edmonton during its planning). The planners behind the original concept attempted to solve this by way of a tram line running along Alpha Blvd down to Blatchford Market and then down 109 Street to downtown, which was a nice idea from a hypothetical standpoint of the platonic ideal of a TOD. And I do very much love a good Straßenbahn. In the real world, it would've competed for funds from all three levels of government with the Valley Line and the planning for Blatchford would have had to start several years before it did for my house to exist.

Side note: there's some other "best practices for TOD" out there other than "have everything immediately next to the stations". Like you get more catchment in more walkable/bikeable locales and can extend your catchment much further when every corner doesn't have a traffic light on it. Or you have an effective bus connection (interestingly Alpha Boulevard seems to be getting built with bus stop pads along it). And, of course, the density of units and destinations in this project plan is overwhelmingly in the east right along the rail corridor while the "high density" of the west is a potential strip of 7-10 story buildings on rather small footprints, so it's not like the best practice of trying to put people where the stations are was thrown out the window.
 
inclusion said:
The private sector also has Bonnie Doon redevelopment, Strathearn, Jasper Gates, Millwoods TC - none of which have gone anywhere in 10 years despite solid plans and proposals. While the private sector has wins too, there are plenty of shelved large scale redevelopment projects. Given the remediation required in Blatchford, I'm not convinced the private sector would have done any better due to the upfront costs.
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I do tend to think of these exact projects when people bemoan Blatchford for going to slow. And to be clear, these private sector projects aren't necessarily going slow either. It takes a lot of time to get anything of this scale from bright shiny happy architectural concept drawing to ground breaking. So much of the process is front loaded. and it's not just because of regulatory stuff but because oopsies when things are underway tend to get expensive and time consuming. So there's a lot of choreographing all of the details about how absolutely everything is going to be done once it gets underway, and that's not a visible process from the outside.

(Edit: I haven't checked to see what the latest is on any of these. It would just be HIGHLY surprising if they were already breaking ground. But I had forgotten that last year we had news that Bonnie Doon's redevelopment was on pause and was calibrated for a 25 year timeframe for a MUCH SMALLER redevelopment.)
 
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thommyjo said:
This would be the very rough edit of the map I would think could make a big difference to transit use. Might be reasons it wasn't possible, but I do wonder.

View attachment 655704
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So, I'm not a drainage guy but you might've just seriously stripped the east side of storm drainage capacity and dropped a bunch of capacity down where it isn't actually needed.

I AM however a dirt guy, and I can tell you that this place is even after remediation a clayey mess that doesn't exactly soak up moisture well.
 
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Coprolite said:
So, I'm not a drainage guy but you might've just seriously stripped the east side of storm drainage capacity and dropped a bunch of capacity down where it isn't actually needed.

I AM however a dirt guy, and I can tell you that this place is even after remediation a clayey mess that doesn't exactly soak up moisture well.
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Appreciate the discussion. One thing that I think would help is a future city bike share (not private lime/bird/etc) or secure bike parking at the LRT stations. That can definitely help with the first/last mile challenge.

Here's hoping we see some exciting movement along the tracks the next few years!
 
thommyjo said:
Appreciate the discussion. One thing that I think would help is a future city bike share (not private lime/bird/etc) or secure bike parking at the LRT stations. That can definitely help with the first/last mile challenge.

Here's hoping we see some exciting movement along the tracks the next few years!
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Yes. Both a bike share hub and secure bike parking would be very useful in this area. I suspect that such a thing would be attractive not just for accessing the LRT, but for accessing NAIT.

Scooters and bike shares from the usual suspects do show up here, but in somewhat small numbers especially considering the proximity of NAIT.
 
MattPT said:
What 800m looks like in blatchford. Very good coverage. If they add in safe secure bike parking at the stations even better. Otherwise Kingsway ave has busses dropping you at the royal alex in a few stops. Also opens a lot of possibilities for infill/density in Westwood along 107st. And also, this alignment was chosen for where it will cross the rail yard and continue north along 113a ST.View attachment 655216
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I'm returning to this map more for the sake of general geographic analysis than to critique anything you've said here.

The extreme western-most portion of the development might not be the most attractive for people who want to walk to catch the LRT, but it's close enough to NAIT that it's in the threshold where if you work or study there it becomes an attractive notion to just walk or bike to campus and not have to deal with campus parking (or catching a bus, for that matter), especially since the only spot where you will be held up for traffic by a signal is crossing the LRT line. Walkability takes on a different character when it's literally your entire trip and you aren't walking somewhere to wait for a train to take you within walking distance of your destination at the other end.

While transit access is a big part of the overall plan, I can't emphasize enough that proximity to a major institution of higher education is a much bigger deal.
 
^nice. but unit B1 (2 bedroom) has no front door unless you count a sliding patio door that opens directly into the living room with no closet for coats and a second bedroom with no closet. probably appeals to someone I guess.
 
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