Quote:
Originally Posted by freeweed
This isn't a "to be fair" comment. THIS IS THE WHOLE ISSUE.
Denver is 2.5 larger than Calgary, period. It's the same reason Vancouver and Montreal feel much larger and more vibrant than Calgary - it's because they are several times our size.
"City proper" is a mostly meaningless measure that only affects property tax calculations and elections.
I don't have anything constructive to add at the moment, but don't underestimate the Unicity effect - it's very easy to compare Calgary to "smaller" cities all while missing out their huge population bases.
It's like the hypothetical situation where Airdrie was a city of 2 million people, separated from Calgary proper by a 4 lane freeway. Something tells me we'd have a larger downtown, with taller high-rises, and a lot more activity.
That being said, what's Denver like after office hours? I find most large US cities have even less activity after hours in their core than we do, because everyone flees to the suburbs which are much further away than in Calgary. But I've never spent much time in Denver unfortunately. To me, that's a huge measure of vibrancy.
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Well the comment about the 2.5 million and not to underestimate it is actually
constructive.
As far as after hours, this I have a decent feel for as I was in training until 5pm each day, so I only got to experience it after office hours, and only on week days, and I would say the pedestrian mall, and the Lodo area were busy each evening. I fully expect the CBD was likely pretty slow. For example though, there is an electic bus that stops each block on the pedestrian mall, and 7-9pm on a wed night any time we got on it was almost full, and I'd say there were 12 of these busses in use on that one strip at any given time.
I think the arenas helped a lot as the Denver nuggets NBA team was in the playoffs, and several times a week there were baseball games, so fans of both teams generally were walking through one of those two areas to get to and from the arena/stadium. Imagine if McMahon was also by downtown, and between McMahon and the saddle dome was the stampede entertainment district, plus a more entertainment friendly warehouse district, that alone would be huge.