When I went to Winnipeg for the International Downtown Association conference, I attended a session on place-making and urban design. I ended up having a good chat with one of the urban designers from MTL and asked him to look at our Imagine Jasper pilot and provide some feedback:
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Thanks Ian, something to chew on. So just at a quick glance, these Jasper changes could be a transformative project, particularly if paired with some zoning to encourage minimal setbacks and ground floor retail going forward, and maybe even some creative tactical urbanism work to bridge some of the gaps in the retail space along the corridor.
So just at glance without looking at turning movement volumes, the traffic volumes are generally fair low for how many lanes you have here, and the fact that you’re dealing with a grid indicates you could have even more room to play with in certain stretches of the street if the city decided that economic benefits outweighed free flow of traffic. On Jasper, the closer you get to downtown, the more pedestrian oriented it is, so that might be a place for extra focus on peds/transit and less on cars since there are alternative routes. It depends on where in the city you want to focus on retail and walkability. I’d also want to look at the APC ridership reports for the buses going through there, as transit priority could be helpful if the passenger numbers are high. Some transit priority can improve the pedestrian experience as it puts the bulk of the traffic further from the sidewalk. All of that, of course, depends on how progressive your location transportation leaders are. Also I can see there’s work going on over on 102 avenue for the bikes so that’s helpful too.
In terms of pedestrians, I would be interested in doing a study of where people hang out currently in order to inform the streetscape you develop. Counterintuitively, it’s the people who are not walking through that gives a community buzz and “vibrancy.” Looks like you’re still a few steps away on that though I do see some sidewalk café action starting to develop. Basically this kind of study I do is like people watching on steroids, and it gives you a visualization of how people use the street. This can tell you where to put seating, where to put shade trees, where to put places to lean and bike parking, where to build safer driveways, crossings, and the like. You’d have detailed opinions on all that and data to back them up. In other words you can maximize your vibrancy with the new design, which is of course what a retailer looks for when locating a business.
Also helpful in these conversations can be intercept surveys to determine how shoppers are getting to the area—particularly if you have business owners reacting to the removal of their parking. Understanding their customers better could potentially get them on board for transit/bike/ped improvements.
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"The destructive effects of automobiles are much less a cause than a symptom of our incompetence at city building" - Jane Jacobs 1961ish
Wake me up when I can see skyscrapers
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