Why Is This School Not in a School Zone?

Throughout his elementary school education, my son has attended a school that has not been in designated a school zone. We are not in a small town where one might impart a Rockwellian familiarity and consciousness about a school's location and a “your kids are our kids” spirit that would make drivers pass the school with greater care despite the speed limits which fade them.  

This school, an eminent sandstone presence which has been in the neighbourhood for over 100 years, preceded the thoroughfare that was placed next to it and throughout its existence, the compromises made with regards to zoning in this area have consistently accommodated the traffic and established this artery, 14th Street NW, as a key thoroughfare in the overall grid of the city.  There are signs advising a 30km/h speed limit and no passing on the lower traffic avenues north and south of the school (8th and 7th Avenues NW) but these are less of a concern that the four lanes of traffic that stream past the school to the west.

14th Street Northwest and Hillhurst School.  Red dots
indicate intersections where left turns are illegal.

In 2020, the pedestrian overpass that crossed 14th Street between 7th and 8th Avenues and gave students west of the 14th Street safe access for their daily walk to and from school was torn down.  The possible replacement of that overpass has been linked to the development of commercial property north of the school (rather than linked to the students’ safety) and for the time being, pedestrians wishing to cross 14th Street to go east on this block are required to use a street level signal and the “beg button” to indicate their presence and need to cross safely.  There is a car-length space between the crosswalk and the stop line, but paint offers little assurance of pedestrian safety or automotive compliance.

I cross 14th Street as many as a dozen times a week, with my son and on my own, and would be hard-pressed to say that drivers self-regulate sufficiently for the circumstances in this area.  For the facilitation of steady traffic flow, left turns for any traffic at the intersections north and south of the school — at 7th Avenue and 8th Avenue NW — are prohibited, though given the frequency with which vehicles have overlooked or disregarded these signs and executed a left turn anyway suggests that the prohibition is nothing more than a passive suggestion.  The departed overpass once had two of the six signs indicating the left turn was prohibited, but those signs disappeared with the pedestrian-friendly infrastructure.  The signs that remain are to the right shoulder of the road, well out of the line of sight of drivers who are looking to complete these turns from the centre lane.

The SUV left of centre in the image taking an
illegal left

I have seen several accidents unfold, especially at the intersection of 14th Street and 8th Avenue, and seen the aftermath of several accidents on this block on a regular basis.  There was also one accident where an SUV took out the plexiglas bus shelter that was at the corner of 14th Street and 7th Avenue, covering a corner of the school playground with the glassy shrapnel from the high-speed impact.

Still, little has been done to calm traffic on this thoroughfare, despite the school's proximity and the need to prioritize the safety of pedestrians, which includes the student body of this elementary school.  As far as I know, a child has not been struck in the crosswalk yet, but I have seen too many drivers pass through this block of 14th Street intent on making the illegal left to get a convenient parking spot for yoga, to take a convenient, again illegal, short cut to get to their medical appointment or to simply facilitate a change of direction on 14th Street.  I have also seen several cars drive through the red lights needless to say.  The abundance of moving violations on this lone block of 14th Street is evidence of the utter disregard of drivers regardless of their whereabouts.  The illegal left turns may be more of an inconvenience to other drivers, but there is very low probability that drivers making illegal lefts onto 7th or 8th Avenues are respecting the need to reduce their speed to 30 km/h when their priority is to turn off without slowing the flow of traffic on 14th.  They feel overentitled to drive with disregard to the laws specific to this block and when tragedy does, inevitably, strike, drivers will insist that they did not know. The reality is that they do not care.

3 minutes, later an illegal left turn from the
northbound traffic

Drivers are a hard lot to hold responsible for their behaviour and in light of this, there ought to be a commitment on the part of the city, the Calgary Police Service and, perhaps the Calgary Board of Education as well to make a much stronger commitment to protecting the students who attend this school.  Stronger enforcement of the illegal lefts, whether by photo detection, more vigilant police presence or more assertive signage to get drivers’ attention would be a start.  Replacement of the 60-year old pedestrian crossing that was torn down just before the start of the 2020-21 school year should not be predicated on the development of the property north of the school.  The safety of these children should not be pinned to the slow-turning wheels of a development project that may have been negatively impacted by the challenges of approving and developing a mixed use project in this area.  Pedestrian safety, especially in this neighbourhood ought to receive more than lip service and a misplaced trust in drivers.

Book Review: Paved Paradise

After 10 years away from this blog (parenting, coaching, etc., not neglect or the indulgence in an old Hummer), I am prompted to at least post a brief missive here about a book I have recently finished.  I have been keeping up my walking bonafides, aspiring to do a full-day walk within the city limits and been reading regularly on walking as well over the years.  

I am currently reading Rebecca Solnit's Wanderlust which aspires to give a history of walking, but I have also recently completed Harry Grabar's Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World which easily caught my attention and, once I got into its pages, rewarded me with the author's richly-detailed, data-laden examination of parking and its impacts primarily on American cities.  Reading it has made re-engaged my consciousness about the spaces that I walk through and see in the the city, particularly in the East Village, which has promised to be an area of informed urban development, but still has remnants of infrastructure from earlier times that has sustained deep-rooted blight in that part of the city.  A couple of those blights centre around parking structures and I may revisited those places a little more critically when the opportunity arises.

Paved Paradise (2023) is all the more timely given the challenges that many cities in Canada, including Calgary, are facing with housing shortages that are contributing to exceptionally low vacancy rate, escalating rents and other challenges.  Drawing direct links between parking and housing shortages may be a challenge, but after examining the phenomena that merged with the development of the first parking a 100 years ago, the book becomes revelatory when outlining the foundering efforts to build low affordable housing for people who had been evicted from their homes.  After a protracted, decade-long process to gain approval of a residential development, one that required the replacement of parking spaces that would be taken out of use by rehousing these people on a proposed space, the costs of the additional parking to compensate for the lost parking and, additionally provide the required residential parking for the building as well, the project was scuttled when the per unit costs of the development rose to over US$800,000.  This in a country where there are, depending on the estimates, approximately 6 parking spaces for every vehicle in the United States -- a glut of infrastructure, that apart from skewing the layout and dynamics of communities, buildings and homes, is never used to more than 17% of its capacity.  Despite its abundance, however, it never seems to be where a driver wants it to be and is deemed overpriced the very moment it is not free.

The space, money and social equality squandered in the name of free parking all supports the case that there needs to be a close reconsideration of parking and the misplaced preeminence it has been given. Grabar's examination of parking is historical, architectural, urbanist and assertively insightful as he points out the thoughtlessness, hypocrisy, occasional criminality and entitlement that has been baked into attitudes about free parking for over a century. Apart from the book's ability to infuriate at times, whether outlining the City of Chicago's moronic move to grant a 75-year lease of parking meters investors lead by a Wall Street bank or the way parking codes -- which seems as informed and data-grounded as the determinations of phrenologists -- have priced people out of housing or sustainable development. It may be a book that one might designate for "parking geeks," but it is quite accessible when compared to the books and articles that Grabar refers to at times within the book.  Considering how impactful parking and the accommodation of the car is on all of our lives it is an informative, valuable read.

Mount Royal University, The Car Campus

After surveying University of Calgary's relative isolation, I was keen to have a look at the campus at Mount Royal University to determine how walkable the campus is there. With a longer history than University of Calgary, but a relatively brief period as a degree-granting university there might be some differences between the two universities. As with U of C there is a great deal of construction occurring at the Mount Royal campus and even more in the surrounding areas as well as the Currie Barracks area continues with its ongoing development.

The first indications at Mount Royal indicate that the campus is as much a commuter campus as U of C, without the benefits of having direct C-Train service to deliver much of the campus population there on a daily basis.  There is pretty substantial bus service to the campus but there is plenty of car traffic there as well. The first evidence of this is at the university gate which is some distance between the perimeter of campus and the main buildings of the university.  The first stops available are parking lots, sports fields and a parking structure which is commemorated with a plaque marking its opening in January, 2011.  This is not exactly the type of ribbon cutting moment that would be saved for time immemorial in the school's annals.

Apart from that plaque on the campus parking structure there are other signs that the school is not particularly walkable or oriented to pedestrians.  The flashing stop signs that greet the first on-campus intersection are a sign that drivers take a bit more liberty than they ought and that there is a need to tame drivers as well. The next indication is the speed trap flashing drivers' current speeds as they drive the thoroughfare between the Mah building and the Main building of the university. The street is a wide one that does not encourage drivers to slow down and gives them wide enough a berth to make a convenient U-turn to get off campus as quickly as possible.

There seems to be little about the campus to invite people there to meander around. The architecture is consistent in a manner that makes it difficult to distinguish the purpose of one building from others and there is little indication of where the main administration is.

All of the retail, which would provide a diversion from the repetition of the long arrays of windows, is indoors and the nearby neighbourhoods are a good distance away and further distanced from the university by the parking lots and athletic fields.

It is unfortunately that once again, a university campus is as isolated as it is from the rest of the city and in the case of Mount Royal, there would have to be questions about what would prompt students, faculty and staff to head outside for a walk, however, brief to contemplate their surroundings or whatever thoughts they might be having. At a time when research is indicating the intellectual benefits that can be gained by walking, it would be beneficial if the campus were altered in ways that made it more walkable, even within its own boundaries, and encouraged the benefits of walking on student life, thought and achievement.

Our Isolated University

One never risks stumbling onto the campus of University of Calgary, or the other post-secondaries in Calgary for that matter, the way one might stumble upon university campus in cities like Halifax, Montreal, or Seattle (just to name a few.)  In Calgary each of the institutions, and I refer to Mount Royal and SAIT to an extent as well, is clearly set off from their surroundings by significant thoroughfares or other barriers that somehow make them less accessible as well.

While Mount Royal has had a downtown presence and SAIT has had its location in the northwest throughout its history, University of Calgary has seemed indefinitely cordoned off by Crowchild Trail, 24th Avenue NW and Shaganappi Trail.  That fluke of geography is often reflected in people's assessment of U of C's place in the community.  Most of the people I talk to about the school say that the school does not feel as much a part of the community despite the energy put into outreach and the establishment of its downtown campus in recent years.

Some may cite the relative youth of the university as one aspect that has kept U of C from more fully integrating into the community.  There is an old anecdote about a Texas billionaire, eager to start or endow a university, asking deans and chancellors of more established school what it takes to start a great university and being told, "100 years."  Perhaps the university is gradually establishing that toehold in the city and that it is just a matter of time.  SAIT and Mount Royal each have much longer histories than U of C and they seem to have closer connections to the rest of the community as well or happen to be nimbler in responding to the needs of the community.

However, the location of the university has created a degree of physical isolation that is exacerbated by the parking lots that add another layer of distance between the school and the city.  The LRT has helped connect the university tot he city more efficiently, but a barrier still remains. Further to that, U of C struggles with the issues of being a commuter campus, which limits the extent to which the students form a campus community. There may be more incentive among the students to get in, finish classes and get out, especially if there are jobs to get to. There is a pragmatism about the school's layout and its space (inside and out) that does not invite or encourage the students or faculty to look beyond the work in front of them. There may be a few offices and classrooms that afford a view of the city surroundings, whether it is north to Nose Hill or south toward downtown, but few spaces provide such vantages.

The architecture on campus has not helped forge stronger ties whether within the university population or with the community beyond.  The oldest buildings on campus tend toward the boxiness of the 1960s and may have been put up quickly to provide the required facilities for the school rather than indulge in a longer planning process or ambitious landmark for the first building on campus. The architecture has improved during a period of exceptionally rapid growth, but there are still brutalist touches and interior darkness to even the more modern buildings, such as the ICT, that impart an inhospitable vibe.  The new digital library is an airy, well-lit space that gives people a view of things happening on campus and creates a sense of connection for those looking through the windows, but it was built at the expense of one of the better treed corners of the campus.

Things are improving, but there is still reason to ponder how much the physical space at the university has influenced the way people have worked and studied there.  To what extent has the space encouraged people to take more pragmatic approaches to their teaching, their studies and their research rather than to lift their eyes beyond their desks and the work in front of them to the take into account the community that they are in?  I do not wish to suggest that there is an attitude within the university that is averse to looking at the community involved, but that the environment at the university inhibits that outward orientation just enough to keep the university and its community contained.

The isolation reduces the chance or synchronicity that would spark and nurture ideas and people together in ways that cultivate innovation and new thinking.  The isolation also reduces the chance of people accidentally finding themselves in the university community and exposed to its potential, something that I have enjoyed encountering in Seattle and Halifax when I have been in those cities. If you go to U of C you have to make a point of going there.

The downtown campus has helped.  It is not a place where people are going to end up by accident, but it is an improved presence for the university and a place where university staff and faculty can communicate with the downtown community and interact with them more regularly.  With plans for the development of the university's West Campus looming there will be a need to ensure that the space is developed in a way the ensures that faculties are integrated more closely together and that the opportunities are created to increase linkages between the city and the university.  There are risks in not making the fullest use of this opportunity, but hopefully the development of this part of the campus will be more passionate and less pragmatic.

Brentwood's Transit Oriented Development

For a long time, the area around Brentwood Station has been dominated by strip malls and fast food outlets.  There has been some gradual evolution away from that with the University City development starting to take shape.  Two of its towers are completed and the buildings are taking residential and commercial tenants.

The location is of course transit oriented and it would be quite easy for people to take advantage of the nearby LRT station, which not only features the C-Train but also buses serving Foothills Hospital, the Alberta Children's Hospital, and University of Calgary, just to name the biggest employers in the area. The nearby strip malls, though altered slightly to make space for the development, still have two supermarkets, and other retail and restaurants within walking distance of the towers as well.

While the amenities and location will entice some people to move to the development, there still may not be the infrastructure to make a community out of what has been built there.  The abundant parking the serves the strip malls in the area will keep walking a bit more challenging than it ought to be and there will not be much through those parking lots to entice walkers to meander any.  Apart from the parking lots, the traffic on Crowchild and on the parallel roads that serve the Brentwood LRT station on either side would not entice a lot of pedestrian traffic either.

The development is still a work in progress and there is plenty of opportunity yet for the people living there to have their impact on the neighbourhood, but the longer standing businesses still make their presence known.  The ground level units in the development provide people with views of the parking lot at the Wendy's and the service area for the Jameson's pub.  The smell, sight and clatter of dumpster pick up and restaurant staff stealing out back for a smoke may not give people the sense that they are at home as much as they happen to be living in a neighbouring business's recently compromised parking.

There is further development to unfold in the area but despite the fixtures, benches and other touches to enhance the walkability and the curb appeal of the University City development there is still a chance that things do not live up to their promise.  If, as is a common problem with many condominiums, the development finds itself home to more renters than owners the area may not achieve the critical mass to help spark the momentum toward a sense of community there.  If it is left to happenstance and it becomes a matter of residents knitting together a neighbourhood out of chance encounters in elevators and hallways in the building and then in the nearby grocery aisles, cafes and pubs the development will have a chance at fostering a community.  As it stands though, it looks like it will take some effort and commitment among the people who move there to achieve this.

Parking Oriented Transit: Walkability Around 39th Street Station

Images for this blog post are located on my Flickr page with notes accompanying the images for further description and clarification.

Ideally, transit and walkability would reinforce one another but there are a number of LRT stations in Calgary that are clearly oriented toward park and ride usage.  The stations in the Northwest beyond Lion's Park Station are the clearest examples of the park and ride orientation and those stations successfully funnel riders from neighbouring communities from bus routes onto the LRT.  As the LRT turns south to serve the stations south of Stampede Park there might be some question about how the continued orientation to park and rides when there is so much more retail, commercial and light industrial business in those areas.  At Chinook Station the shuttle from there to Chinook Centre for retail customers underscores the large numbers of pedestrians that use that station and perhaps suggest that the station could have better served the area west rather than east of MacLeod Trail.

In this post, however, I'd like to turn my attention to 39th Street Station for the lack of infrastructure to support or encourage pedestrian use of the station.  There is some residential use on the opposite side of MacLeod Trail, but pedestrians might find the distance a bit prohibitive.  In the immediate vicinity of the station, there are a few car lots, a hotel, a building supplies store and municipal impound yard. Despite the large amounts of parking in the area and other aspects that favour car use, there is a reasonable amount of pedestrian traffic.  I don't have a scientific measure of the amount of pedestrian traffic, but there are places where pedestrian short cuts have beaten clear paths through grass.

The sidewalks that are in the vicinity of the station and are among the most uninviting in the city.  On MacLeod Trail, there is sufficient cement around, but the vehicular traffic on MacLeod and the lack of inviting destinations in the area undermines the walkability of the area.  (Ironically enough, crews were paving the interior of a median on MacLeod Trail on the day I took the images for this post.)  East of MacLeod the walking infrastructure is abysmal.  There are parts of sidewalks that have been unattended despite significant deterioration.  In some spots there are little to no curbs to separate the sidewalks from the road or driving areas and truncations for various driveways and railway tracks.  On 42nd Avenue between MacLeod Trail and Blackfoot Trail, the sidewalk on the south side of the street is unmaintained throughout the autumn and winter, despite it being the more suitable walking surface.  The only rationale that I can think of for this is that pedestrians using 39th Street Station would have to cross the street to get to that more user-friendly path.  On the north side of 42nd Avenue, the sidewalk has curb cuts that directs pedestrians into the oncoming traffic when it has any and there is a large stretch of the sidewalk that consists of disintegrating patio stone slabs that are being encroached upon by near by grass.  Despite the signage that the south side of the street is not maintained during the winter, (something that may suggest that the north side would be maintained) the snow removal on the north side is minimal to non-existent.

Despite the difficult sidewalks in the area, it is still used by some pedestrians.  It may not be a number that meets a threshold to require better maintenance but there is some.  Improvements to the walking in the area would not have to start with a complete overhaul of the paths on the north side of 42nd Avenue, which disappears entirely over the last 50-75 metres heading east to Blackfoot Trail.  One solution would be to put in a pedestrian crossing signal directly south of 39th Street Station to allow pedestrians to cross safely to the wider sidewalk on the south side of the street.  This would also require that the sidewalk be maintained year-round with snow removal.  The intersection of 42nd Avenue and Blackfoot may also need to be assessed to ensure that pedestrians have enough time to cross that intersection safely if their destination happens to be on the north side of 42nd Avenue.

I may be understating matters when talking about walkability.  Given some of the conditions, it may be necessary to call into question pedestrian safety in the areas where they would have to get into the traffic on 42nd Avenue because of the absence of any sidewalks whatsoever.  Hopefully the decision is not to leave pedestrians to use 42nd Avenue at their own risk until there is enough pedestrian traffic to justify giving more attention to the sidewalks in this area.

Employee Parking

I lived in Japan from 1995 to 2003 and was spoiled for transit.  While living in Kyoto, I had the option of three train lines to go to work, one of which so close to my apartment that I could slip on my shoes as the signal at the nearby level crossing sounded, take the two flights of stairs to the street and board the train at my station as it pulled up.  The other two lines were run by Hankyu, a large conglomerate that directed its traffic to its flagship department store and real estate developments in downtown Osaka and Japan Rail, the national railroad that links the entire country together and is responsible for developing and operating the shinkansen (bullet train).

The experience there comes to mind not so much because of the abundance of rail in my neighbourhood, but for one contract negotiation I had with an employer there.  It is common practice for employers to pay for their staff's rail pass to commute to work.  I had seen salarymen who had passes that allowed them to take pretty substantial daily trips via the shinkansen from home well outside the Kobe-Osaka-Kyoto metropolitan area.  From a westerner's perspective, this is a substantial financial commitment on the part of employers and of course it helps subsidize rail service as well.  At the risk of digressing before getting to the account of this one contract negotiation, there was one Japanese colleague I had worked with who was looking to sell his car after owning if for about 10 years and disclosed that it only had 40,000 km on it.

For the negotiation in question I was offered a rather disappointing raise, despite my length of service and the strong evaluations I had received.  I decided to make the case that I was cheaper than a new teacher because of the low cost the school paid for my commuting, which was 310 Yen one-way compared to the 980 Yen they would pay for a fresh-off-the-plane, prone-to-taking-the-train-west- instead-of-east, completely inexperienced teacher with a command of English grammar that risked being inferior to the students'.  Given my job performance and the difference in transportation costs, I tried to make the case that it would be more cost effective to keep me with the salary I was requesting than it would cost to replace me.  If they could pay me the savings they were making on transportation then I would stay.  They chose not to and their fresh-faced replacement lasted all of 3 weeks.

The interesting thing that transfers to the Canadian context is that we rarely have as transparent an accounting of what employers are paying for the "free" parking for staff. There are few organizations in North America that provide incentives for employees to use transit or to walk for the sake of sparing the organization the cost of providing onsite parking.  Whether it is an expanded footprint to provide surface parking on site or the cost of building, maintaining and enforcing underground parking on site the costs are rarely integrated into the consideration of the compensation packages unless they are motivated by a shortage of parking and want to entice employees to use transit to forego any tensions over on-site parking for an organization that is starting to grow beyond the space that it has for its staff.

In Calgary, a monthly transit pass is $90 a month and there are few if any places in downtown Calgary where a "free" parking place that an employer provides its staff could be built, maintained and operated for that monthly rate.  It may be worthwhile for more employers to open up this aspect of its compensation to staff and look at strategies to make more feasible use of that space.  While there are annual weeks that are dedicated to improving use of transit or bicycles or other forms of commuting to work, it may be worthwhile to look at ways to incentivize transit use or walking to work (if there is a formula to value that).  Perhaps the simple benefit of paying for a transit pass would be sufficient.  That would impact overhead that an employer takes on for providing parking and perhaps even create an alternative revenue stream by renting the surplus parking out rather than retaining it at a loss and skewing the cost of parking and the compensation that is provided to your employees by not fully accounting for those costs.