North Downtown Development

When the City of Saskatoon first released details of its proposed North Downtown Plan, I had a few issues that I tried to get clarified. I could not find any reference that the City or its Planners had even briefly looked at joining Warman road to 1st Avenue. Since that is pretty much a straight line and is the site of so much congestion, I would have expected the minimum is that they looked at this but had a good reason why it was not feasible. I could get no answer from the City on this element. The developer I was doing work for found it interesting and insisted that the City grant a meeting on this with me in attendance. At the meeting, a City Planner and a Traffic Engineer tried to spin that no one would ever drive through from Warman Road through downtown to the freeway beyond, but instead would come down Warman Road, make a right hand turn up 33rd and a left hand turn on to Idylwyld Drive to come down and to cross the Sid Buckwold Bridge southbound. They seemed to forget that First Avenue directly connected to the freeway on its own and that while the City bought up and leveled a bunch of houses at the north end of 2nd Avenue for some future improvement to that bottleneck, that no improvement has ever been accomplished.

I brought up the park design which was proposed to traverse the rail lines there. Quickly, the Planner returned that this is done in many jurisdictions around the world including the reclaimed upper platforms in New York City along the subway corridors. I acknowledged this but asked the Planner if they had ever been close to or directly above a diesel train while it was running. A blank look and no verbal response was what I received in return. Most of their examples were based on electric trains obviously and the one diesel example did not actually have a park above or anywhere near where trains run beneath!

Having been around heavy diesel equipment and also having done active ground searches in some steep Kootenay mountain valleys while trains passed below, I can personally attest that whether you realize it immediately or not, you end up smelling like you are soaked in diesel. And no person would remain in that entire park regardless if one or more diesel locomotives happened to briefly pass under, or worse, if they happened to temporarily stop while directly under the park. So much money spent on a design whim with little to no oversight or common sense started making me look further at anything City related as it came to my attention.