Abstract Manager

The City of Edmonton’s Neighbourhood Renewal program reconstructs residential roads, streetlights, sidewalks, curbs and gutters one neighbourhood at a time. This comprehensive and integrated approach gives the City a unique opportunity to plan networks at the neighbourhood level, completing missing pedestrian links, implementing traffic safety measures, and building out the cycling network at the same time - neighbourhood by neighbourhood. 

As the program moves across the city through different eras of planning, the typology and associated challenges and opportunities change, requiring neighbourhood-specific planning to achieve the same network goals. From 50’s grid neighbourhoods to suburban loop and lollipop neighbourhoods, bringing neighbourhoods to ‘modern standards’ requires different strategies to create complete networks. Grid neighbourhoods can rely more heavily on local street bikeways, while retrofitting on-street bike lanes or shared pathways on collectors in suburban neighbourhoods may be required. Implementation of these facilities have drastically different considerations and trade-offs.

This presentation will use case studies to discuss network planning across several neighbourhoods originally constructed in different time periods, discussing the planning process, how policy and public feedback is used to shape technical decisions. It will also include an analysis of how the allocation of space to different modes has changed over time, and how different network types have varying implementation and operational cost impacts.