I have to admit, my first thought when the vaunted CalgaryNEXT plans were shared with the world had nothing to do with finances. Heck, they barely had anything to do with the plans themselves.

As somebody who is set in their ways and doesn’t like change, my first thought was Why do they have to leave Stampede Park? While hardly perfect, like many Calgarians I have grown to love Stampede Park as the hub of sports and entertainment activity in the city. So why couldn’t the Flames organization figure out a way to stay in the same general vicinity that they’ve always been?

Well, after doing some digging, my conclusion is that it just didn’t fit their wants, needs or desires.

McMahon Stadium opened in 1960. The Saddledome opened in 1983. Both are showing their age, and both are comparably inadequate facilities compared to the other buildings in their leagues. Based on the life-spans of similar buildings and their ages compared to their counterparts, both are near (or past) the end of their life-span and it’s probably cost-prohibitive to keep things status quo.

Based on the organization’s operations (they own four teams and share some staff) and a desire to keep costs of replacing the two buildings at a minimum, it’s probably easiest – if we presume both buildings need to be replaced – if the two buildings are built together in a complex. And given the difficulties we’ve seen in Phoenix and Ottawa, downtown buildings are probably the way to go – ideally with public transit options available.

Based upon those premises, there are basically two possible spots: Stampede Park and the West Village.

The CalgaryNEXT website has this fancy drawing with the footprint of the proposed new facility. For the sake of making comparisons between the West Village space and Stampede Park, I approximated it with a wonderfully high-tech red rectangle.

Here’s the same rectangle, plopped down into Stampede Park and rotated. I’m operating under my presumption that they’d want to retain the BMO Centre and everything on that north end of the park, so the logical thing to axe would be the Big Four Building.

It doesn’t quite fit, and is a bit too tight with Weadickville (on the north) and the river (on the south) for my comfort. There’s a bit more space further south and east towards the Elbow River, but we’ll get into why that’s probably not an option – aside from the presence of the Grandstand and the chuckwagon course – in a little bit.

This is arguably Stampede Park’s biggest strength. See the above map? See all the wide open spaces? The majority of them are parking lots. According to the Calgary Herald, the Saddledome’s present location features 4,000 parking stalls – presumably including the parkade behind the building. Even if you plop a building down in one of the blank spots on the map, it’d only knock out a few hundred parking spaces – maybe a thousand, tops.

According to the calgaryNEXT website, there are roughly 1,500 parking spots planned for that project. One the one hand, the layout for the West Village doesn’t really lend itself to the types of parking options you see in Stampede Park. But given that you’ll have 19,000 and 30,000 fans attending hockey and football games (respectively), having fewer parking spots seems like a weird idea.

Stampede Park is technically closer to more stops, with the main Victoria Park LRT station connected to the ‘Dome via +15 walkways and the Erlton station located to the south. Granted, Erlton’s a bit of a hike from the south end of Stampede Park, but it’s not horrible. And when you’re daunted by the number of people at Victoria Park station after a game and don’t feel like waiting it out to get on the train, it’s actually not that far of a walk up north to City Hall station, where you can pick and choose between trains going in any direction you choose. Because of the proximity to Macleod, there’s a decent amount of different bus options, too.

Now, the Sunalta LRT in the West Village is likely much closer to the proposed new arena/stadium site than Victoria Park station is to the Saddledome. Granted, it’s weirdly elevated, but it’s in a good spot. However, let’s presume that station gets all backed up – as Victoria Park does after games. Fans would need to hike back into downtown, past the Kerby Centre station all the way down to 8th Street station in order to avoid the bottleneck (or to get to a north-bound train). The bus options in the west end of downtown aren’t great yet. You could charitably call the West Village under-developed for transit options right now.

You can approach Stampede Park from the South on Macleod and the West on 12th Avenue, and from the East via Inglewood and the North via a few roads that feed into Olympic Way. Traffic becomes a nightmare on the way in and out, though, and there’s been a ton of construction lately which backs the whole thing up. (And the bike lanes don’t help.)

With the West Village you can only really enter from Bow Trail from the east or 9th Avenue (via Bow Trail) from the west. from either direction. There’s a few different north/south approaches (such as 14th Street and Crowchild Trail), but they all flow into the same basic east/west flow.

Neither are amazing, but without significant road work, the West Village is much more congested than Stampede Park. Add in the lack of parking options in the West Village plan right now, and things bunch up pretty badly.

I’m not an expert, but I’ll take their word for it – it’s images from the province’s flood plans. But when you consider the absolute nightmare of a year the Flames had in terms of logistics when they moved heaven and Earth to get the Saddledome up and running after the flood. If you can’t put the arena/stadium complex on the west side of Stampede Park beside 17th Avenue, you almost have to abandon that location as a site because of the flooding possibilities on the eastern slopes.

Sure, you could divide up the buildings and put the new arena where the Big Four is and put the stadium/fieldhouse where the Grandstand and chuckwagon course are – presuming you can find alternate venues for the rodeo and chucks – but even then, the risk of one of these big, shiny, expensive buildings flooding is enough to probably scare designers into favouring the West Village and it’s lower flood risk.

The West Village is the only suitable place for the new Flames building if you accept three basic and fundamental premises:

Even though Stampede Park is better suited to the type of vehicle and human traffic that would follow along with the new developments, the combination of higher flood risk at that location and the seeming necessity to place both structures together effectively cements the West Village as the better fit.

Granted, neither option is close to perfect, but the West Village – expensive creosote contamination and all – suits the needs of the proposed project better than Stampede Park does.