constance_chlore
Active Member
This is supposed to be our most important street. We should have some "decorative widgets."
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- Thread starter Daveography
- Start date
TAS
Senior Member
Not to mention trees and greenery.
An important part of walkability is making it pleasant and inviting and an environment people want to stay around in, not just a smooth concrete path to quickly get from A to B with loud traffic noise and fumes as a bonus.
YEG imagineer
Active Member
it seems much faster this portion compared to the 109 to 114 St section which I think took two construction seasons to complete. Hopefully this continues as they go further west on Jasper that the crews keep improving with repetition.
trevorhayden
Active Member
South side of that section will still get done this year
itom987
Active Member
Decorative widgets can be bolted to the sidewalk which takes much less time than forming with concrete, and much easier to maintain. TAS, what you are saying is what parks are for, I agree that trees should be planted but Jasper Avenue is NOT a park. It is a busy street with lots of traffic, it was never designed to be a park and should not be converted into one. I am actually shocked that none of you agreed on the pressing need to develop vacant lots, or the fact that extremely long construction times can kill business creating vacant CRUs.
No tourist tells their friends about how great overly decorated sidewalks are in a city they have been to. They don't care if the sidewalk is made of brick or concrete, so long as it is smooth and predictable. They do complain when sidewalks don't exist, or are a miss match of different versions that don't work together. Canada has never had that problem because our standards for the most part are already consistent. There is no need to reinvent the sidewalk!
No tourist tells their friends about how great overly decorated sidewalks are in a city they have been to. They don't care if the sidewalk is made of brick or concrete, so long as it is smooth and predictable. They do complain when sidewalks don't exist, or are a miss match of different versions that don't work together. Canada has never had that problem because our standards for the most part are already consistent. There is no need to reinvent the sidewalk!
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constance_chlore
Active Member
Uh, what about La Rambla, the Champs-Élysées, the Paseo de la Reforma... (need I go on)?
itom987
Active Member
La Rambla is a pedestrian only street, not a good example. Champs-Élysées and Paseo de la Reforma are even wider than Jasper Ave and those cities are 10x larger than Edmonton. But sure…. carry on.
constance_chlore
Active Member
Irrelevant to the point. They're all streets that are designed to be beautiful and are, indeed, filled with "decorative widgets."
itom987
Active Member
That doesn't make my point wrong, you can pave a street with gold but it won't be worth anything unless the street has occupied buildings on both sides. That is a common feature seen in every example you provided.
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constance_chlore
Active Member
Yeah, alright, sure. How are you going to encourage development if you produce a bare minimum utilitarian street? We're already ripping up the street no matter what. We might as well take the opportunity to make it nice.
Offworld
Active Member
Jasper Avenue hasn't been downtown's most important street since the 70s, or around 1982 at the latest. It's been left to rot due to civic indifference and businesses have largely evacuated it.
Important streets no longer exist downtown. Well, 104th Ave. maybe but west of 109th Street it's largely a slightly more dense version of Baseline Road.
constance_chlore
Active Member
Yes, hence "supposed to be." And if we don't act, it'll be guaranteed to stay as dead as it is today.
archited
Senior Member
The ++ action is happening by degrees -- more so than in my memory going back to the '60s. Edmonton is a City of "possibilities" so denigrating it as circumstances change do nothing in terms of a causal fixation. Movie theatres have died -- that takes care of the Paramount. WEM happened and the convenience embodied in that underscored DT demise. It is easier to order online for almost anything you care to name -- there is a double whammy here because a large segment of the population can't afford alternative sources that involve a pick-up vehicle. But -- on the positive side -- two Universities are making a play to make downtown happen; ICE is a beacon for live entertainment (as much as people grumble about the City subsidizing the ventures associated with that entity) and there is a movement afoot to pedestrianize downtown so that there is more activity there -- the Art district is expanding. Again, there is no snap-of-the-fingers solution but, all considered, I think things are moving in the right direction.
constance_chlore
Active Member
Yes, I think the important thing about this is that absent the rare sort of situation where a government pours money into a city to renovate it completely (think Haussmann in Paris, or Franz Joseph I building the Vienna Ringstraße), change is always incremental. In the 80s, much of Montréal's Plateau was seedy enough that the narrator of a Dany Laferrière novel described the area around Square Saint-Louis as "un quartier de clochards" (a neighborhood of beggars). Yet here we are 40 years later and it's one of the most desirable areas in Canada for people interested in arts and culture—and frankly, at risk of becoming too bourgeois. We need to keep pushing in the right direction persistently over the course of decades, and we can't let ourselves get impatient.
itom987
Active Member
Doing it nice should not take so long, 4 years is too long for most businesses to stay afloat, it also puts any investment by businesses looking to set up shop on hold. Like I said before, a street is only as good as the services available along the street. There is no need to shoot ourselves in the foot.