Banff Council Votes Down Proposed East Intercept Parking Lot

For decades, Banff’s transportation challenge has been simple to describe and hard to solve: too many vehicles funnel into too small a town, especially in peak season, with limited space to park them and limited appetite to let them keep circulating downtown.

So the idea behind intercept parking has always been tempting. Build a lot at the edge of town. Catch arriving cars before they reach the core. Then move people into downtown by shuttle, transit, or foot.

“Intercept” is the key word. It is parking designed to stop vehicles at the perimeter so streets downtown do not have to absorb them.

Banff has one version of that model already, at the train station, a lot that is relatively close to the core and walkable for many users. What the town does not have is the other half of the decades-old ambition: an intercept facility on the east entrance, where the bulk of visitors arrive from Calgary and the highway corridor.

At a Dec. 9 town council service review meeting, staff brought forward what they described as a proof of concept. The proposal, framed as a pilot, would test an East Intercept Lot at 111 Hawk Avenue inside Banff’s industrial compound, on municipal land near the Roam transit facility.

The pilot carried a multi year price tag. Year one included roughly $400,000 for design and permitting, followed by an estimated $3.1 million for construction in year two.

Council rejected it quickly.

In a discussion packed with blunt language, councillors from across the table rejected the proposal as too costly, too awkward, and too risky, especially because the site sits on the “wrong side” of the railway. The motion was defeated unanimously.

“This has been a project that has been on your radar for over a decade,” Director of Planning and Development Darren Enns told councillors as he introduced the idea. He traced it back to a long-term transportation study that recommended “a thousand stalls at each location” at both entrances to town, built over time.

On the west end, he said, the town has made progress. “We have a sight line to a thousand stalls currently,” Enns said. On the east, he added, “we’ve had zero movement.”

The reason, he argued, was not a lack of intent. “This relates primarily to the availability of land, not from the desire of the town not to do this,” he said. “It’s just we are very land constrained at the east entrance.”

The pilot, Enns explained, would attempt to move forward on land the town already controls. It would be a surface lot, envisioned as a low-cost, low-commitment build. “We were envisioning a gravel ski hill-style parking lot,” he said, describing it as an incremental step toward an operational model “that doesn’t leave us over-committed.”

But from the start, Enns also acknowledged the proposal came with problems.

The biggest was geography and rail.

When a lot is not within a reasonable walking distance of downtown, it relies on transit. And when it sits across active tracks from the townsite, it creates a safety risk that is difficult to manage with signs alone.

“That’s one of the challenges with this parking lot, is it’s on the wrong side of the railway,” Enns said. “It’s just the simple way to put it.”

That railway constraint bleeds into almost every other part of the plan. Enns said it could create “conflict with users” and challenges for shuttle operations because the town would be “at the mercy” of the rail operator, Canadian Pacific Kansas City.

Council members quickly zeroed in on the practical consequence: if people park there, they will try to get to town, even if they are not supposed to.

Councilor Ledwidge said he could not support it because “people will inevitably cross the tracks on foot.” He described a likely scenario: visitors walking toward the Legacy Trail corridor and crossing where there is no safe intersection. “There’s no plan for an intersection there because there isn’t one,” he said.

Councilor Ram raised the same concern more directly, saying the town would need to create a safe way to “get people to park here and then safely cross,” and she did not see that as workable.

Staff agreed that walking was not part of the design.

“This lot location is not a walkable location,” Enns said. “It needs to be serviced with a shuttle system.”

Roam’s recommendation, he added, was to set up a dedicated shuttle instead of extending Route 1, which sometimes travels into the compound. If Route 1 were extended, Enns said, the bus could fill up too quickly, reducing service for riders along the rest of the route.

Instead, staff described a shuttle running every 10 to 15 minutes from the intercept lot to downtown, an added operating cost that would need to be factored into the project.

And it would have to run late enough to be useful.

“We certainly don’t want to encourage the illegal crossing,” Enns said, acknowledging the safety problem. He said peak hours in summer generally run until around 9 p.m., with service starting late morning. Those operating hours would likely need to align with that pattern.

Council’s skepticism was not only about rail. Several councillors questioned the basic cost-benefit of piloting a lot in a location they viewed as far, hidden, and unfriendly for visitors.

Councilor Standish said he would not support keeping it alive even as a no-year capital placeholder. “I think we’re really wasting our time on this,” he said. “There’s just too many negatives to keep this in a no year identified project. So I won’t support it just because to me it’s dead in the water.”

Councilor Pelham echoed the point, calling the pilot “illogical” given the distance to town and the “visual obscurity” of the lot. Councilor Fullerton said he did not see it as viable and described it as a “waste” even as a pilot, referencing a cost estimate in the low millions.

He also pointed to history.

“They could have implemented it better, but Parks tried the intercept parking there at Minnewanka and it, in my opinion, failed miserably,” he said, referring to a previous shuttle-based intercept approach near Lake Minnewanka that ended early in the day and struggled with uptake. Enns, earlier, had offered a similar example, noting that the Minnewanka intercept finished around 5 or 6 p.m. and “had some challenges with success” due to location and distance.

Mayor DiManno framed the staff presentation as a useful exercise, even if the answer was no.

“We sent administration on a mission impossible to try to find an east intercept lot that was on town land and that would be able to host several hundred stalls,” she said, thanking staff for bringing something concrete forward.

She also said the discussion helps the town respond to a familiar refrain from residents and visitors alike.

“I think it’s easy sometimes for the community to say, ‘Well, just add one on the east side,’” she said. “And it’s like, ‘Well, where?’”

DiManno contrasted the proposed site with what makes Banff’s train station lot work: it is intuitive and within walking distance of the core. “That is not the case with this lot at all,” she said.

For DiManno, the proposal raised a deeper question about what problem intercept parking is meant to solve and what tradeoffs it creates. In theory, intercept lots reduce congestion downtown by shifting parking to the edge. In practice, they can also add parking supply and encourage car trips if they are not paired with stronger disincentives for driving into the core.

“We’re creating more space for cars, but what we’re hearing is we want less cars in the community,” she said. “And so those two thoughts are at odds with one another.”

She suggested an east intercept could only work if it were paired with measures that make driving to key attractions less appealing. “This could work if it were in conjunction with some disincentives to being able to access Sulphur Mountain attractions by personal vehicle,” she said, pointing to Lake Louise as an example of a model where access is shaped through stronger controls.

But those disincentives do not exist in Banff today, she said, leaving the pilot with little leverage to change behavior.

She also flagged timing. DiManno said the town needs to go through its human use management process first, before “we start to put money behind projects of this scale that interact with how people come to Banff and move through Banff.” She mentioned that future passenger rail discussions could also conflict with a major new intercept facility.

In the end, DiManno said she was prepared to remove the project entirely, especially as Roam’s needs loom in the same area. Enns had warned earlier that the site sits adjacent to a transit facility that is already “space constrained” and likely to require future expansion, potentially on or around the same land.

“I already know I would certainly want this land to be used for that kind of purpose rather than this purpose,” DiManno said, referring to Roam’s future needs.

The vote made the point even more bluntly.

The motion was defeated unanimously, leaving Banff’s east intercept vision where it has been for years: widely discussed, repeatedly constrained, and, for now, unresolved.