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.

A Walking Habit

I must confess that it has been an inordinately long time since I've added anything here.  There was a period when I thought other people were covering this topic better than I was from post-to-post and that the walkability of Calgary neighbourhoods was something that I may have been a repetitive voice on.

At the risk of being a repetitive voice I'm going to resume in earnest because there are so many thing that connect to the topic of walking rather than just the appeal or walkability of our city and its neighbourhoods.

At this point I'm going to reflect on why I'm the walker that I am because it is something that puzzles me as much as anyone else, unless it is simply a matter of being that stingy.  I have purchased a car since I last posted anything here, a red hybrid that was purchased for the purpose of ferrying our newborn around and something I occasionally refer to as my mid-life crisis car, it being red and all.

Despite the purchase I will still insist on using transit or foot to go to or from some of the destinations I go with my son.  On Saturdays I often walk the sleeping lad home some 8 kilometres after a constitutional pizza lunch with friends.  It exposes me regularly to some of the drearier and more poorly equipped stretches of the city but I also get a chance to stroll through Mission, downtown and Kensington as I return to home as well and let my son take in some of the sights as we roll through the city.

The long walks go back to my teens, however.  I grew up in the greater Halifax area and from ages 10-15, I lived in a suburb or subdivision outside of Dartmouth and every once in a while I would head to the nearest library, if the bus wasn't on schedule, I would never bother to wait for it and just head off on foot.  It was about a 5K walk one way and the uphill return trip was somewhat daunting but it never phased me.  The only year I had to take the bus to school during that time was in Grade 6 and the walks to school (what a novel concept) were never particularly long either.

The walk was a chance to leverage some adolescent independence and have a bit time to my introverted self.  The impulse to get on the bus and go further, to a mall for one, never appealed to me as often.  At a time that predated the walkman there was nothing to entertain me along the way other than my thoughts or the movement of traffic around me.  I still don't know what it was that compelled me to walk as much as I did other than that small dollop of independence.

To this day it remains.  Other than the walks with my son that fill many of my Saturdays, it is remarkable to say that walked to and from work for near 6 of the last 9 years and when pushed I've resorted to transit rather than commuting in my own car.

Going back to those walks alongside a 4-lane highway to get to the library, there has been little that has deterred me from heading somewhere on foot.  Walking along MacLeod Trail has never been appealing or discouraging for that matter, but I have done it - often to the surprise of the drivers who seem to find a pedestrian out of place.  With my walks to work on 14 Avenue SW there is probably a similar emphasis on the vehicle over the pedestrian but there are more kindred spirits walking on that route.

The benefits are numerous, from the simple movement of my feet and chance to burn calories (or in my case eat that many more without ballooning) to the state of mind that a good walk instills at the start of the day.  For me it probably staves off a restlessness that would not be slaked by sitting in a car for a commute to work.

More thoughts to follow.  Promise.

The Appeal and Opportunity of Walkability

In the last few posts here, I have critiqued the architecture and utilization of the downtown area to point out areas where the streetscape fails to motivate people to continue walking in a certain direction. Looking back at the brutalist buildings north of 7th Avenue Southeast the case I was trying to make was that the limited purpose of the buildings and their lack of visual appeal discouraged people from walking in those neighbourhoods.

Today, on an early evening that evokes the warmth, poetry and idyllic shade of golden light that we associate with the word "Indian Summer" my wife and I walked from our home to Calgary City Hall. I'll eschew the architectural commentary. Suffice to say we stay close to the Bow River until it was absolutely necessary to turn south to walk down MacLeod Trail. The trail and then the streets were alive with joggers, cyclists, commuting pedestrians and families that were enjoying the space around Prince's Island and Eau Claire to play with their kids. The green space along the river was an opportunity to absorb and honour the passing of the seasons and simply check out from our desk-riding 9-5 routines.

We did not consult with Google Maps for the quickest, directest route. We had plenty of time to get where we were going and didn't mind which way we went and allowed ourselves to follow our whims, sometimes even deferring to the traffic lights to determine what direction we had to take to keep going. We became more familiar with the neighbourhoods, imprinting on our thoughts a Vietnamese restaurant that looked like it did good subs. It was closed by the time we got back - a small price for dawdling - but we have committed it to memory and we will have another reason to pass through Chinatown a little more slowly and make that corner mom-and-pop part of our routine, city and life.

The motivation to walk in your neighbourhood and do it repeatedly is something that has countless benefits. A year and a half ago when my wife and I lived in Rocky Ridge, the nearest coffe shop was a 55 minute walk away and there was little else in the neghbourhood to motivate us to walk. If we walked it was for the discrete purpose of getting exercise, nothing more. In a more walkable neighbourhood it is an opportunity to get the exercise by happenstance while en route to the supermarket, the movie theatres, hit the book store, the library or whatever else happens to be nearby. It might even be motivation for you to take in your surroundings and take possession of a slightly bigger portion of the city that you live in.

Brutalism in Downtown Calgary

Anyone who is familiar with downtown Calgary is familiar with streets where the appeal of walking evaporates or turns from pleasant to sinister with a couple of steps toward a blank wall that avails itself to nothing more than a garage door. If one was going to try to dissect the downtown area and root out the source of the cancer and decay the first impulse might be to target the Cecil Hotel or the Calgary Drop In Centre (DI) as sources of blight that has drifted west.

There is an argument to be made that the Cecil and DI are problems with the downtown fabric but the issues run a little deeper than two buildings and the population that hover around them. Arguments about the east-west appeal of downtown Calgary have been cited earlier but at this point I'd like to discuss the architecture that straddles the northernmost stretch of MacLeod Trail.

Brutalism evokes images of a certain form of violence but the term came from a style of architecture that made extensive use of raw, exposed, unadorned concrete and strong repetitive lines. The connotations of the term seem quite fitting, however. In the case of many of the buildings north of the Central Library in downtown Calgary, namely the Calgary Board of Education's (CBE) Kremlin-tribute offices, the Harry Hayes Building that houses so many federal government offices and many of the buildings around them, there is little to invite people to walk in those neighbourhoods.

Part of the issue with the lack of curb appeal is the limited purposes of those buildings but even with the "Family of Man" sculpture there is little that is pleasing to the eye or invites people to linger for more than their cigarette break. Some of the other public art is of a nature that jars notions of aesthetic and gives one a very clear reminder of how absurd notions of modern were a generation ago. While buildings like these may have evoked some bizarre notion of what the future would look like, today they are inert and perhaps even despotic in some way.

There is potential in this neighbourhood as Bow Valley College undergoes expansion and renovation of its campus, plans are being unhatched for a new Central Library and the CBE plans to vacate its offices in 2011. There is little chance that anyone else would want to call those offices home, so hopefully plans will be put together to use that space in a more civilized manner.

Repeling Calgary's Downtown Pedestrians

A few years ago the administration at Kansai International Airport, a gleaming engineering achievement on a man-made island near Osaka, Japan, was refused to reduce escalator operation by controlling them with a motion sensor that would shut them down when not in use rather than running them around the clock. Their argument? They were an elite, world class airport and to their mind, world class airports just don't do such things. Never mind the fact that airports don't sink into the Pacific Ocean either, saving energy by stopping the escalators just didn't fit with the image they wanted to portray.

I start with this anecdote because it is something that comes to mind when walking the streets of downtown Calgary. Stephen Avenue is a blessing for pedestrians and an aimless wander is rewarded with iconic public art, a variety of architecture, street vendors restaurants and the opportunity to people-watch over a beverage or witness whatever events someone has tried to concoct. Going south from there the reward as there but intermittant. Eleventh Avenue SW has a great appeal and anyone looking to weave and wander their way toward 17th Avenue or 4th Street would find plenty of reason to keep walking.

North of Stephen Avenue, however, there is little to attract pedestrians. The office towers are there and people will make their way too and from work but to walk west to east along any of the Avenues between Stephen and Prince's Island doesn't offer a lot. Block after block of the avenues consists of blank walls or - just as bad - glass facades that give the public a view of the tower elevator bank and security desk. While the newer office buildings are a more attractive sheen, they do little to make it a more appealing place to walk. The glass facades at street level are just a more modern version of the cement surfaces from past generations. There is little reason to walk there unless one absolutely has to.

This is where my reference to Kansai International's grandiose sense of airport-self comes in. It would take very little for these newer buildings to increase their interaction with the streetscape by giving pedestrians a little bit more to interact with as they walk by. Cafes, mom and pop restaurants, convenience store are all in a position to thrive given the traffic passing through 9 to 5, Monday to Friday but with many of these buildings there is no sign of them at street level.

Why do the owners or architects of these towers resist opening up ground level retail space? Is it a matter of reinforcing for passers by - usually their employees or tenants - the eminence, liquidity or market capitalization of the company with the skyline beacon? It might be the only reason I can come up with. It may, of course, also be a matter of profitability for running businesses in those locations. A major part of the problem is that most of the downtown area between Stephen Avenue and Prince's Park is devoted to either office towers or parking. Other cities would have downtown areas with a variety of buildings and enterprises with pubs, churches, shopping and hotels mixed in to the urban fabric.

This is not to say that these isn't any variety in downtown Calgary, but it is not enough to generate and sustain pedestrian traffic. Once pedestrians get a few blocks north of Stephen Avenue the sights or curb appeal diminishes pretty quickly. The Avenues seem to be dedicated first and foremost to getting cars in and out of the parking lots, whether underground, street level or blight of visual blights, built above ground.

Building the variety into the downtown business district will take some time but with additional public art and more access to amenities other than office elevators there will be greater reason for pedestrians to make the walk. Perhaps someone will have a creative idea or two the next time the decision is made to fill a parking lot with a new building.

Dead Space in Calgary's Core

One of the more puzzling and irritating, not to mention ignored, parts of downtown Calgary is the NW corner of the intersection of 7th Avenue and 2nd Street SW. It is by name, though not intent, a park, but one that is uninviting and underutilized, despite being at the core of the downtown area, right next to a C-Train station. Eve

At the moment, like much of 7th Avenue, access to the park is limited by construction, but the issues with the park existed long before the construction began.

The most unappealing things about the park are the brutalist waist- or chest-high planters and the Plus 15 pedestrian bridge casts a shadow over the area. These elements alone make it as welcoming as a chain link fence. Whenever I have visited the area, I have encountered no more than one person, and it has usually been a homeless person hiding out or napping off the warmest part of the day. If people tend to have this same experience on a regular basis, it would emphasize the fact that the large planters provide a great place to hide if one has criminal intentions. There are buildings in downtown Calgary that have cozier smoking areas outside their doors.

As if the design of the space was not enough to discourage people from using it, a sign indicates "Private Property, Restricted Access."

Regardless of the label, it is and ought to be a public space and one used to its maximum potential, especially in light of its location. Too much of downtown Calgary has surrendered itself to being a staid business district and devoted itself to the efficient movement of people from their sheltered parking to their offices and back all in the comfort of the great indoors. Ironically enough, the Devonian Gardens is just across the street and an elevator ride away.

Not only is the park a blight in itself, though the Plus 15 hinders its potential, it detracts from the visual and pedestrain access to the buildings just north and west of it. A great improvement to the area would start by removing the barricades along 7th Avenue. Those bulwarks in the image above are not required to protect the area from an errant vehicle from plowing into the park. Opening up the park to the sidewalk would definitely encourage people to come in and use the area. If I were to dream a little I'd go further and remove everything made of that brutalist cement and a variety of materials. Those planters would look far better if they were made of wood or even - I know, I'm dreaming - planted right into the ground.

While it is only a part of one block, this "park" is just one of many elements of downtown Calgary that discourage people from walking around the city. Complement this park with the parking garage on the east side of 2nd Street and there is not much to encourage people to meander the core.

I'll take up other issues with downtown shortly.

Mayoral Candidate Vows More Parking

New mayoral candidate Joe Connelly definitely has the pulse of the city's drivers as he announced that as mayor he would increase parking in the downtown area and avoid controversial projects such as the Peace Bridge across the Bow River downtown. Connelly's out-of-the-gate promise of more downtown parking is an impractical approach to civic building and belies a lack of knowledge about urban design and Calgary's current efforts to make the downtown core more accessible to transit users.

The promise of expanding parking in the downtown area might respond to the heavily reported brouhahas, fusses, and schoolyard variety spats that Calgary's City Council has regularly gotten itself into over parking in the city as evidence accumulates that less parking is a goal that ought to be pursued. All Joe Connelly's promise assures at this point is that if he were mayor, Calgary City Council would sit down again in the fall with a new cast of faces to fine tune the parking problem that has had more than its fair share of the council's agenda.

The suggestion of expanding downtown parking in Calgary is regressive. Cities in the United States such as Columbus have made the decision of late to reduce parking in order to revitalize the downtown area. For Calgary to make such a move would fly in the face of emerging best practice of establishing a strong, interesting urban community. Downtown Calgary is undergoing a significant amount of construction at the moment and the street life of the downtown core is in the process of being redefined with the new projects and renovations. It would be a good time to provide more parking and a number of the new projects that are being built will provide underground parking. Does the city need more than that or would the new mayor be content to lay claim to a kept promise.

A visit to the downtown area on the weekend would find the area quiet, save for a few tourists clicking their cameras at Calgary Tower and a few downtowners seeking out an unhurried coffee. The parking lots, however, are virtually empty save for the spots occupied by the construction workers in the area. Downtown Calgary is hardly used to its maximum potential. It is strictly a business district and there is little to attract people outside of office hours. It is hard to insist that there is a need for more parking when the acres of asphalt the fill up downtown only reach maximum capacity for 60 hours a week at the most.

Hopefully, Calgary's voters know better than the most recent candidate to offer a vision for how the city ought to be run.

How Walkable is 7th Ave and 8th Street?

I'm launching on a tangent with a Steven Wright quote of all things. The comedian famous for the puzzling word- or mind-play of his one liners once commented on the challenges of being a stand up comedian with a comment that was both Wrightian and insightful, saying, "The silence of 8000 people is a lot of silence."

I'd like to take a turn on that and suggest that "The neglect of 8000 people is a lot of neglect."

During my forays to and around the old 8th Street SW Station on 7th Ave in Calgary, the running of the gauntlet was a challenge that invited you to simply keep your head down, and keep your wits about you for anything untoward that might approach or occur. The station was infamous as the site of a manslaughter when a woman pushed a young man into the path of the LRT and in my own experience, it is where I had to make the only 911 call of my life. I had to report the stabbing of someone who stumbled into one of the language school agencies to fluster the Asian staff and student-tourists who were inside.

Now that the station has been torn down, it is time to re-examine that block. It remains an unwelcoming, perhaps even forbidding, dark stretch. The block is still darkened by a large overhang that discourages people from stopping by and makes it a challenge for anyone to maintain a business there. For some reason, someone even dared to open a daycare there despite the reputation of the neighbourhood. With the train station torn down, there is even less to connect this block with the street. The pedestrians that disembarked and left the block as quickly as they could do not even bother to go there now.

The majority of the traffic on this block is likely the rush of apartment residents in and out of the building and the occasional pedestrian heading to the ethnic restaurants on the west end of the block.

Those who still frequent the block, likely divert their eyes and pick up their pace rather than make any effort to involve themselves in it. How would they if they wanted? The residents in the apartment building have little to motivate them to look out for one another and it is an attitude that spills into the streets as they head out each day. This, however, is not the fault of the residents, but the design of the building. The building has never been connected with the street and it has created a void that has fostered the drug crime that occur in its shadows.

Other buildings on the block, namely the McDonald's and Mac's to the east, are apparently targeted for demolition or retrofit to further revitalize the neighbourhood. The ideal target, however, ought to be the looming tower that dominates. Replacement with a smaller more interactive, street-friendly structure would be a much wiser move.

Ah yes First Snow in Calgary

Actually it was the second significant snow fall of the winter and the City says it was ready. I am posting at 9:55pm and my wife still has not made it home from work because of road conditions. A visit to the city's website, which features and snow and ice control page says that the city was launching into proactive responses but there is little indication that much was done or is being done with the weather conditions.

I'm sure this page will be altered or updated so here is a pdf of the site I printed at post time.

I am astonished on the eve of my 7th winter in Calgary that this same fiasco has to be revisited. Somebody with the city has to come up with an explanation why the city cannot even do what paltry snow removal they offer in a timely manner. If the answer is that the city cannot afford it, or doesn't want to overtax the citizens for it, then again it has to look at its priorities and the sustainability of its planning.

Sidewalks and Jaywalking

Today's post is not going to be one of my better efforts, more of a rant really, but I'm hoping to get myself back into the routine with the blog.

Recently, I started work in the Marlborough area, a block west of the LRT station and the behemoth divided thoroughfare that straddles the trainline. There is an array of strip malls, bigbox stores and car dealerships and a few light industrial enterprises. All indications are that it is a car-oriented neighbourhood, despite the fact that there is an LRT.

I walk in this area and it is a bit of a struggle to find sidewalks in the area. The only one runs on the south side of 9th Ave NE for one block. That gets me past the car dealership but there is still a bit of distance to cover to get to the office. If I am going to get to work it is necessary to walk on an area that has no sidewalk nor is mandated to be cleared when it snows. I could try to negotiate my way on the road itself but that would be even more dangerous than walking on the icy slopes. The best option is to jaywalk and find parking lots to cut through for a less treacherous walk. Taking my life into my own hands I judge the traffic, look both ways and make my way across to parking lots.

On one of these occasions I happened to cross the path of a patrol car driven by one of Calgary's finest. She stopped and honked for my attention and instructed me to cross at the crosswalk at the intersection. It was true that I broke the law by not crossing in the between the white lines, but it was in an environment where the lack of sidewalks makes jaywalking the safest option available.

Hmm, yeah, I'm ranting a bit. Hopefully I'll get back into the routine with something more constructive.

Critical Mass Bike Protests in Downtown Calgary

As I was heading down 14th Street in Calgary on Friday night, there was a rather substantial peloton of cyclists going south in a substantial pack. The group was large enough to merit some consideration as a group of some sort and I wondered what they were cycling for. There were no colours, pamphlets or other indication of the cause they were cycling for. After a bit of research though I made the connection between yesterday's group in Calgary with a growing series of protests that are held on the last Friday of every month by a group called Critical Mass. Vancouver has also experienced these cycling protests, which have been leading to concerns in there about violence between car drivers and the cyclists.

Will the movement peter out in Calgary each winter? Will they actually find a route that draws them more attention? Hard to say. The movement has actually been in action for five years and they have managed to sustain a bit of momentum through the winters, believe it or not. Drivers seemed to be patient with the group during the ride on July 31, but they were not riding the busier thoroughfares of the city. It will be interesting to see if anything comes to a head between the cyclists and their four wheeled brethren.

Sigh: Calgary's Bridge Debate

The city of Calgary has decided to go ahead with approval of a pedestrian bridge across the Bow River. The ongoing debate over the bridge, its expense and design have already exhausted the patience of many Calgarians has probably been exhausted by the drawn-out process that has gone on at City Hall. The caterwauling of many of the aldermen has helped make the issue a bit more opaque than it ought to be.

Expense: The current price tag on the bridge is $24.5 million. Several engineers and architects around the city, with the university, the city and other organizations have said that the project is reasonably priced. Some have even gone so far as to say that it is a bargain and it has been cited as cheaper than bridges recently built or about to be built in London, Winnipeg and Edmonton.

Necessity: This is where things get a little muddied. Several people have said that the bridge is there to serve roller bladers, a pejorative spilling of ink into the debate that suggests that the expense is merely for recreational use rather than a part of the transportation system that the city uses. There is a large population living in the downtown area and there are a large number of commuters who would use the bridge on a regular basis. There are two other pedestrian bridges in the immediate area: one connecting Prince's Park Island to Memorial Drive, another under the LRT bridge parallel to 10th St. For argument sake a third bridge could be noted running under Crowchild. All three of these bridges are relatively narrow and it is a struggle at time for cyclists, pedestrians and stroller pushers to negotiate the space on any of these. The current bridges are at capacity.

Calgary needs infrastructure, but that does not require infrastructure to be limited to highway construction. The expense of the pedestrian bridge would easily be dwarfed by the expense of the ringroad, if not a budget overrun on the ringroad. It will be pretty easy for the people using it to have a front row seat to the bridge's progress

Design: A valid point of contention. There is a risk in the design of the bridge as many city in North America have fallen over themselves to sign up a starchitect to use their city's landscape as a canvas for their faulty interpretation of how our environments should look and respond to us. The design does not impress me and architect Santiago Calatrava does seem to have the body of grandiose or impractical work that would brand him a starchitect. I'm sure there are architects in Calgary who could have provided compelling designs for the city to consider and silence one group of dissenters over the bridge. One thing that will certainly reignite the bridge debate would be the project going over budget. Calatrava's projects are notorious for this and while it may be a problem for project managers to take the blame for people in Dallas for instance are not so sure. If the city could be faulted for anything, it would be a lack of due diligence before signing on Mr. Calatrava. Wait, see and hope it turns out more solid a structure than London's Millennium Bridge.

The Name: A bridge by any other name... The name has become far too much of an issue and there is little about the actual visual design of the bridge that indicates an homage to fallen vets. Slapped on at this last minute, yes, but hardly reason to sustain the debate the way some Aldermen have attempted to do.

How about the Urban Walker Diet?

Barely 3 1/2 months after moving to the inner city from the suburbs, I am happy to report that I am 12 pound lighter than I was in April, despite the new plethora of dining options that are suddenly outside my door and my constitutional two pizzas a week with "the guys." Granted, the coming of spring has contributed to the dent in my waistline, but a few other factors have contributed to this. I am now walking to and from work just about everyday - even the rainy ones - and I get a few more walks in tending to the dry cleaning, groceries and even walking to the cinema as well. I now have four cinemas within a 45-minute walk, a far cry from the lone coffee shop that was within a 55 minute walk from my previous digs in the 'burbs. (I will not even attempt to count the coffee shops that are within 45 minutes of my door.)

So big deal, right? It would be obvious that living in a more walkable neighbourhood would help contribute to a healthier lifestyle and that car-reliant lifestyle in suburbia would eventually turn your T-shirt into a gut-sling.

Fritz Steiner, in an article titled "We Knew It Along" in Planning magazine, makes a direct link between the design of automobile dependent communities and the increase in obesity. It is a long overdue acknowledgment of the connection between the communities we live in and the habits that we form. Steiner goes on to add a few suggestions to create communities that will encourage more active living.

It all fits together...

Marda Loop and Garrison Wood: Permeability and Liveability

In the great discussion of what shape Calgary ought to take in the future Marda Loop and Garrison Woods have often been cited as examples of how the city could develop itself.

The first thing that I noticed was the complete absence of borders separating one neighbourhood from the next. There is little visible separation between Altadore, Mount Royal and Richmond and that borderless permeability from one community to the next has to be part of its charm and liveability.

The word permeability continues to echo as so many aspects of the Loop and Garrison Woods added definition to the concept in a way that sharply contrasted to suburbs like Rocky Ridge, Royal Oak and Tuscany, which are all separated from one another and from their closest amenities.

A walk down 33rd Avenue SW saw residential neighbourhoods blend into a pleasant commercial and retail area. For the most part the businesses were local rather than parts of chains. The few chains that were represented were usually fastfood outlets that were tamed from putting their most garish signs in the middle of the streetscape. As I got closer to Crowchild Trail, there was a Petro Canada and a turn south took me into Garrison Woods.

Among the pleasant touches in GW were the way the Safeway and its parking lot were hidden from view by a small commercial/retail strip. (I should add that "strip" does not do that building justice.) I have nothing against supermarkets, but their parking lots create a bit of dead space, no matter how full they happen to be. The placement of the retail space allowed it to share the parking with the Safeway rather than distance itself from the sidewalk with another parking lot of its own. The neighbourhood was quite busy with pedestrians for a Friday morning. The coffee shop was a convenient place to get the kids out for a walk and a snack before plotting the rest of the day or weekend. People knew one another on only a casual basis but were willing to reintroduce themselves and maintain or build connections.

Getting beyond the tonier new businesses in Garrison Woods, it was interesting to see how others had transformed a handful of houses from another era into quaint boutiques. Too small to suit modern appetites for space, a string of houses have found extended life as business establishments selling crafts, pet supplies, and such, preserving a bit of the neighbourhood's heritage and diversity while providing new entrepreneurs a toehold in the area.

That diversity again brings me back to that theme of permeability. There is no appearance of an insisted-upon standard to assert an ideal of what the neighbourhood ought to be. There are homes that immediately conjure thoughts of gardening grandparents and others a block away that suggest that young urbanites have found their suitable starter infill. If they wish, the diversity is such that if they are inclined to move to a bigger home as their needs change, they can do it without looking too far away.

The various diversities in this neighbourhood, with the age, style and purpose of the architecture, types of businesses, age groups and income levels of people are ample reason for it to be the example that it is for the rest of the city to consider.