Growth is one thing, but size is another. Yes, Calgary is growing fast, but it is still less than half of the size Denver is. (I think the City of Calgary is larger than the City of Denver, but that’s a function of how the city boundaries are drawn; Denver, as in the actual urban area, is much bigger.)
Realistically, Calgary is not going to be as big or as congested as Denver anytime soon. Irrepsective of how fast it grows, an urban area of 1 million people is not going to have the same issues as an urban area of 2.3 million people. At its current rate of growth, it would still take Calgary most of your lifetime to get as big as Denver is now. (Toronto is on another scale entirely, being more than twice the size of Denver.)
The American city that most reminds me of Calgary is San Antonio, except fr the weather.
The American city that most reminds me of Toronto is Chicago, ESPECIALLY for the weather.
No American city reminds me of Ottawa.
Easy now, that’s a prettybig exaggeration. True, along the coast of Lake Ontario, you can stay in urban areas for hours of driving. Depending on what direction you’re dring, we call it either “TorontOshawa” (Westbound) or “HamilToronto” (Eastbound)… But it’s not so much like that. It’s basically one long highway… And it’s like that in any big city I’ve ever been in, the big city and its suburbs.
And the vast majority of Southern Ontario is farmland. From the geographical centre of Kitchener-Waterloo, I can be in farmland within 5 minutes of driving (When I was crewing for hot-air balloons, this was a daily thing)
Quite frankly, I don’t understand why many people want to live in that big urbanized area… But it’s most definitely one area.
And if you do end up moving to Toronto, be warned that it seems like the rest of Canada doesn’t like you.
Rysto, I stand corrected. Thanks for the link. I’m surprised the Lynx web site doesn’t say anything, even though the move isn’t scheduled to happen for another year.
That’s a good point, though I’m not as sure about Calgary’s future size as you are. Denver metro has grown from 1.6 million to 2.3 or 2.4 in only the fifteen years I’ve been here.
Toronto is a much larger city than I am normally comfortable in. What I’ll have to decide is if the good things about it make up for its size.
When I was just out of school and looking for a job and willing to relocate, Kitchener-Waterloo and Ottawa were my first two choices for location. I couldn’t find jobs there (this was 1985–things have changed, several times, since then). I ended up in Oshawa, then escaped and kinda drifted Toronto-wards. But it wasn’t really planned that way.
Calgary has massive growth potential - Calgary, Red Deer, and Edmonton wil basically grow together at some point. It’s well on its way already - if you look at house prices in Red Deer, they are much higher than they should be for a prairie city of its size, and I credit Edmonton and Calgary spillover for that. I don’t think we’ll reach GTA proportions, but if Frank doesn’t want to live someplace with these kind of growth issues, Calgary probably isn’t the place to move.
Of course, once the easily-accessible oil is gone in 30 years, all bets are off.
Frank, I did my undergraduate in Ottawa, I love the city. But I have to give you fair warning:
It has a BRUTAL climate. It gets at least as hot and humid as Toronto (up to 40C with humidity) in the summer and as cold as Edmonton in the winter (-40C with windchill). It used to be on record as the coldest capitol city in the world, but I think that might belong to Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia now. You have at least a couple of ice storms a year, which are very pretty, but also very treacherous. Make sure you get a place that has both good heating and good air conditioning. It is not like out west where it will cool down at night.
The city is known as very “family friendly”. Which is great if you have kids, there is tons of things for them to do. But many others consider it very boring. I was never into the bar/party scene, so it didn’t bother me.
That is one of the reasons I like Eastern Canada better than the West. I grew up in Calgary and sorely miss the Rockies some times, but I can’t live in them. I’d rather the place where I spend 90% of my time be nicer than the alternatives.
I don’t know about that. It’s possible, sure, but I somehow don’t think we’re going to see an “Edmondeergary” city any time soon (as we see “HamTorOsh” in southern Ontario), unless we improve the transportation links between them.
Right now, here in Alberta, we’ve got Highway 2, and a few other, slower, north-south roads that parallel Highway 2.
In southern Ontario, there is the 401, the QEW, the 400, the 427/27 combo, and the 404/DVP combo. For those who can afford it, the 407 will get you across the top of Metro fairly quickly. All these roads can bring people from Halton, Peel, York, and Durham regions–pretty far, but as I understand it, few people drive to Toronto from distances equivalent to that between Calgary and Red Deer daily.
But yes, people do come from those distances. How? On a train/bus network that is designed to do just that–bring them into Toronto and get them home again every day. So people can come from Hamilton/Aldershot or from Oshawa, from Meadowvale, Newmarket, or Stouffville; or even from Port Perry or Pefferlaw or Barrie. Daily.
I was a child in Toronto in the late 1960s when this system started. It wasn’t as extensive as it is now, but I do remember a number of people realizing that the suburbs were no longer Etobicoke or Scarborough or other places within reach of a TTC bus. The suburbs could now be Port Credit or Pickering. Or Richmond Hill, later. Or, much later, Sutton. Heck, nowadays, there are four trains leaving Stouffville every morning for downtown. The train ride takes about an hour; the car drive in rush hour takes about two or three. Quiet little Stouffville, in the midst of farmland, is growing like crazy. Why? Because with the train, it is possible to live there and commute to and from Toronto.
This is why I say that we won’t see the huge explosion of growth in the Edmonton-Red Deer-Calgary corridor for as long as all we have to get between them is Highway 2. Make it easy and reliable to get between the three cities through a number of major freeways and/or frequent and reliable train service, and we just might. But until then, living in, say, Red Deer and commuting to Calgary daily via car on Highway 2 just isn’t something I’d imagine most people want to do.
The only way you can be an Albertan and hate Calgary is if you live in Edmonton. And even then, it’s only the Flames and Stamps you hate.
Nah, the oilfield has been crazy in that area for years and years. I never bought in Red Deer partially because of the near-prohibitive cost. There’s always Penhold or Innisfail or Bowden if you wanna live around there. I would never suggest someone used to a large city move there, though. Not without some knowledge of what Alberta is like.
Welcome to my new life. Mid-Atlantic, USA. It shocked me when I first came hear four and a half years ago (good lord, that long?!) but now I take it as normal. At least with the interstate highway system, there are trees along both sides and you don’t see it a lot of the time. I miss home and the two-hour drive through the prairies from Mom’s to Calgary. Twenty minutes in to Lethbridge, beautiful scenery, fields, coulees all the way.
Who says it can’t be gone in 6 month? “Easily accessible” is a factor of the market price of oil, there’s nothing “easily accessible” about the oil in Alberta, compared to the Middle East.
Just an example of gas prices , I filled up at a gas station just outside where i work for 73 cents, which after the gas shock of early june paying $1.30 a litre is cool, but I remember someone saying that for most of Albertas oil and gas, the street price has to be a certain amount for extraction to be economically viable.
So now that it has gone down to 70 cents a litre effectively, I can expect that a further drop in the price of street gas can be anticipated , hopefully back down to 50 cents.
However this will have implications for the oil industry in Alberta, so we will have to see if they have diversified accordingly, or will this be a repeat of the eighties with Calgarys first boom.
Calgary and Edmonton are 300 kilometres apart. A city 300 continuous kilometres long would have fifty million people in it. I don’t think there’s quite THAT much growth potential
Of course, Tokyo only has 23 million people, but it also has dozens and dozens of regional rail lines and 15 subway lines. I think Spoons and I would agree that there’s a lesson there for Calgary and Edmonton.
First, we have only Hwy #2 NOW; there’s nothing but flat land between here and Edmonton. They could have a commuter train line laid down in months if someone got a big idea (or use CN’s tracks).
Second, you don’t have to commute between cities to have them growing massively. Red Deer has lots of oilfield industry as well. But commuting between cities isn’t really that farfetched, either. There are tons of people commuting an hour or more in Calgary right now. Red Deer is an hour and a half from both Edmonton and Calgary. Like people have said, a high-speed train could change everything. And the cities don’t have to be as wide as Calgary and Edmonton - there could be small suburbs from Calgary to Edmonton, with Red Deer a big bump in the middle. Which is probably how it will go, as people move further from the core of each city simply to be able to afford a house.
Third, Alberta has lots of easily accessible oil right now (as does Saskatchewan); when I say easily accessible oil, I’m not talking about the oil sands. There’s really no good guesses right now how much oil is actually in the oil sands, but the processes to get it out are an abomination which is made economically viable by the high price of oil.
First of all, those tracks you see next to Highway 2 are CP’s, not CN’s. CP doesn’t like leasing running rights to passenger rail. That’s why what little passenger rail we have today follows CN routes for the most part: because freight is far more important to CP, and because CN is willing to lease rights to VIA. CN still forces passenger trains to yield to freights if a conflict occurs. If a VIA passenger train was to run today between Calgary and Edmonton, it would go via CN tracks through Big Valley and Stettler, bypassing Red Deer totally. Unless CP agrees to lease its tracks.
Really? How? The only reason I can see is that Calgary Transit is pretty piss-poor, and schedules don’t get people where they want to be when they want to be there. I have never spent an hour in my car getting between Point A and Point B in Calgary, even in rush hour. I have spent an hour (nearly two) going between points on buses and the LRT, though.
I hate to say it, but I come from Toronto, where the subways are frequent and buses run often when they need to. In off-peak times, the York Mills 95 ran every eleven minutes; the Sheppard East 85 ran every six (until they built the Sheppard Subway). Subway trains every three minutes in rush hour; five to seven at other times and on Sundays. What’s this “every ten minutes in rush hour” stuff I get on the Calgary LRT? What’s this “every fifteen minutes in rush hour” stuff the so-called Bus Rapid Transit (Route 301) claims is so damn good from the northern suburbs to downtown? It should be every six minutes; ten tops, all day long, and not stopping at 6:00 p.m. Sorry to sound like a Torontonian–I really do like Calgary–but there is a lot of room for improvement.
And this is what’s going to curb Calgary’s growth. The lack of viable public transit alternatives, both within and without the city. I’ve driven between Calgary and Red Deer many times. I’d hate to have to do it every day for work, especially in the winter.
We can agree on this. I would love to see a train, high-speed or not, run between Edmonton and Calgary, via Red Deer. Winter doesn’t stop it, backups on Calgary Trail at 23rd Avenue in Edmonton don’t stop it, traffic on McKnight in Calgary doesn’t stop it. If such a train was in place, then we might see growth in the Red Deer-Calgary corridor as we’ve seen in southern Ontario on the Lakeshore corridor.
Problem is, Calgary no longer has a station–it’s a convention centre now. (Beside the Palliser on Ninth Avenue.) Edmonton has a VIA station, but it’s set up to serve the east-west transcontinental trains. The most direct route from Calgary leads into Edmonton’s old Strathcona Station–which is now a bar. Where would the people board the train in each city? A lot of work has to be done before this idea becomes doable. Studies have been done (there is a full report somewhere on the 'Net in PDF form that I’m too lazy to look for now), but they all agree that it’s going to be expensive and it’s going to take time to get these things in place before any train travel between the two cities becomes possible.
