Quote:
Originally Posted by O-tacular
There was a report a couple years ago that said more people were employed in the eastern industrial parks than DT. On second thought I think that may have encompassed the NE as well though. So I was wrong.
2 things though:
-Is central area just CBD or does it include Beltline?
-The Green line would also run through the employment area of Inglewood and Ramsay Industrial, Ogden, and peripheral to Foothills Industrial park. When I said the SE I meant including the Foothills Industrial Parks. I think your numbers of 22K don't include those because I found it to be something like 78k or so on Google.
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The report you saw probably mentioned that all industrial areas have more employment than downtown, which is true. But this includes the four major industrial areas: Central (Manchester, Burns, Highfield, Bonnybrook/Alyth), Southeast (Foothills, Eastfield, Starfield, Great Plains, Shepard, East Shepard etc), Northeast (Franklin, Mayland, Sunridge, Horizon, Airport, Stoney, Greenview, Airways) and Northwest (Royal Vista). There were (in 2011) 175K industrial jobs in Calgary and 161K downtown jobs.
A note on terms:
The "central area" in the first report includes the entire area from McKnight to Glenmore and Deerfoot to 37th street (but doesn't include MRU). ~270K people work here. This would include the central industrial area. Of this, we can assume ~160 is the "centre city" employment area (from the second report) which includes Downtown and the Beltline. The remaining 110K people would work in the central industrial area, places like SAIT, Chinook Mall and the 16th avenue and Macleod Trail corridors, to name just a few.
The issue with industrial employment is that it looks so big on a map, but in fact employs very little people. You can have a storage yard that covers 2 acres and employs like 10 people. Of course manufacturing centres employ way more people per area, but overall industrial is very land un-intensive. Foothills industrial is a massive, massive area, but altogether employs probably around 50K people (both the SE and E sectors in the first report) Compare that to downtown where hundreds and sometimes thousands can be working in a single building that takes up only half a city block.
Our CBD consists of about 1.5 km2 and employs probably around 130K people (I am assuming Beltline covers around 30K, but I am just pulling this from the air. We could pull office space reports from CBRE or something and make a better guess based on comparable total square footages, but I am lazy). That works out to about 90K workers/km2.
Southeast Industrial (what most call Foothills industrial), consists of about 21km2, and employs, let's say 50K people. That works out to ~2500 people per square kilometre. That is not a density that works well for transit. Downtown is 36 times more dense in employment than the industrial area. Additionally, the vast majority of workers in the industrial areas, especially foothills, will be located too far away from the train line to walk to the station.
So yes, the Green Line will go through many employment areas, but many of these are too disperse to really create any ridership, and the overall numbers are low as well. Concentrated employment centres: the CBD, post-secondary institutions, hospitals, TOD style business parks; are good transit candidates. Industrial areas are not.
I wish these reports had better breakdowns of employment per area (which I do understand is difficult to measure).
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. In my opinion, we could afford it at the time, and the result had a very positive on our city psyche and civic mindedness, possibly even at the expense of ridership and congestion. Let that be food for thought.
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