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darwink said:
Lots of utility work (including to supply festivals with lots of on site power). Constrained site next to a water body, and very close to residential. The incremental expense of relocating programming that was typically on the plaza. Archaeology of the entire site down 2 metres. Integrating invisible flood protection. Buying the land/buying out the lease Hard Rock/Brewster's/KidsNCo was on.

May also include replacing the Jaipur Bridge? Always hard to nail down scope on these budgets versus a raft of adjacent projects.
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OK that makes more sense, although still a lot of money. I believe Jaipur Bridge was a separate project not included in this cost.
 
Albertasaurus said:
I don't want to sound like Rick Bell, but how the hell did this thing cost $47 million?
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The city spent 1 million on Jack Long park in Inglewood a couple years ago. Looks like a handyman’s weekend worth of work there. It’s typical government contracting. No oversight. Like a 50 000 $ phone line with Bow River recordings on it.
 
As we were all celebrating the new hotel proposal, a bunch of Calgary businesses are threatening to sue to stop the Stephen Avenue redevelopment in its tracks.

livewirecalgary.com

Stephen Avenue biz owners threaten legal action over redevelopment work - LiveWire Calgary

Several Stephen Avenue business owners are threatening to take the City of Calgary to court to stop the planned upgrades on the popular downtown strip. The business owners say that work is scheduled to begin on the 1 Street SE block on July 14 and continue westward to Mewata Armoury over the...
livewirecalgary.com livewirecalgary.com
 
I fully support the concerns of businesses along Stephen Ave. The two blocks west of City Hall are already a mess between the Olympic Plaza/Arts Commons construction and the Glenbow redevelopment. Tearing up Stephen Ave itself on top of all that is going to make being outside in what is typically the most vibrant part of downtown a miserable experience - and those businesses are the ones who will suffer.
 
I can see both sides of the argument. On one hand the city needs to be able to do upgrades and improvements from time to time, but Stephen ave is a very busy corridor. After seeing how long it took for Marda Loop and Eau Claire plaza I would probably be worried too.
One thing that the city can look at is maybe changing the start date from July 14th to more of the end of summer.
 
Needless to say the city has lost people's trust when it comes to executing public realm and utility improvement projects.

Speaking of Eau Claire... Looks like they're finished with the mall demolition. If the downtown portion of the Green Line were starting soon this would probably be used as laydown for that. I know they're going to start doing utility work on 2nd Street for the Green Line so they could still use some of this for that. Maybe they open it up to parking for the summer?

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Not to double post or change the subject but they're starting to put things back together at Suncor. Large beams have been installed on the southside of the block and the sidewalk is open! Good thing too because the sidewalk on the southside of 6th Ave was closed in the morning for utility upgrades to Hanover's conversion.

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In terms of Stephen Ave, the issue as I see it is that these businesses are going to push the City into repeating their past mistakes with 17th Ave and Marda Loop. In both cases the initial plan was a fast and furious rebuild of the street. Then the businesses along there complained that it would be too much disruption and asked for a slower, less intense, build process. The City relented and as construction progressed the businesses all started to realize that people hate construction whether it's minor or major and stretching out the timelines for construction make it worse... to the point where the Marda Loop businesses are now suing because of the impacts of the longer construction timeline that they, themselves asked for!

So here we go, about to make the same mistakes with Sonya Sharp cheerleading the way. I also question how much of this concern is being raised in good faith given the fact some of the businesses are complaining about parking and paving stones from Vietnam. Stephen Ave hasn't had parking on it for years and if you choose to set up a business there, it's a bit rich to complain about no parking around your business. And unless the designers have made a totally dumb decision on material choices and forgotten that Calgary is indeed a winter city, complaining about foreign made pavers being extra slippery just seems like a wedge issue and an excuse to complain.
 
outoftheice said:
In terms of Stephen Ave, the issue as I see it is that these businesses are going to push the City into repeating their past mistakes with 17th Ave and Marda Loop. In both cases the initial plan was a fast and furious rebuild of the street. Then the businesses along there complained that it would be too much disruption and asked for a slower, less intense, build process. The City relented and as construction progressed the businesses all started to realize that people hate construction whether it's minor or major and stretching out the timelines for construction make it worse... to the point where the Marda Loop businesses are now suing because of the impacts of the longer construction timeline that they, themselves asked for!

So here we go, about to make the same mistakes with Sonya Sharp cheerleading the way. I also question how much of this concern is being raised in good faith given the fact some of the businesses are complaining about parking and paving stones from Vietnam. Stephen Ave hasn't had parking on it for years and if you choose to set up a business there, it's a bit rich to complain about no parking around your business. And unless the designers have made a totally dumb decision on material choices and forgotten that Calgary is indeed a winter city, complaining about foreign made pavers being extra slippery just seems like a wedge issue and an excuse to complain.
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Yeah the "foreign-made" paver thing and the fact people will be unsafe walking near construction fencing near homeless people is where they lost me - it's a total shotgun approach to cast doubts on the project. There's legitimate construction timing and impact concerns that can be discussed, but credibility goes out the window with references like that.

More productively, one idea that I was thinking about in these street rebuild sagas is we always try to do it all at once with utilities and surface stuff. Perhaps we either:
  1. Make all streetscape projects dependent on a trigger by a utility projects (e.g. sorry your drinking water pipe is broken and lives depend on it so we have no choice - we are digging up your street. As a bonus when we put back the sidewalks they will be upgraded).
  2. Ignore utility projects altogether (all we are doing is quickly fixing the bricks and adding nice trees, we don't need to move utilities for that and save 50% of the construction time).
Obviously #2 results in extra costs that the utility coming in later and ripping everything up again, but public perception is often how this is works anyways. It's not clear that either of these would stop the complains or result in a better public realm though!

My other thought is surely construction impacts is a universal problem the world over - how do European cities maintain they're stellar/far more busy walkable public streets with centuries of utilities, metros and infrastructure needing maintenance underneath them? Is there anything to learn about construction phasing/length that can help us out?

Or is the whole world forever condemned to have construction impacts and grumbling locals - so best to just get on with it and let people complain?
 
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