Walking the Talk Ain’t Easy

As a resident of Brentwood with a recent appointment to keep up at Crowfoot, I had the luxury of leaving my wheels at home, walking to the Brentwood station and taking the NW leg of the LRT to get the job done.  But as I finished my chore and made for home, I was struck by the fact that the pedestrian route I was following was anything but luxurious.  In fact, it was rather bleak.

The first leg of my journey as I headed back towards the Crowfoot LRT station took me down an alley between Safeway and Rona.  I found myself mostly surrounded by loading docks and blank concrete walls – no Jane Jacobs eyes on this street - but at least I had a sidewalk to trudge on. 

At the end of the alley, I approached the bustle of civilization again, as evidenced by several cars and a restaurant which surely had people in it, even if I couldn’t actually see them.

Next I entered an intersection with several lanes of traffic approaching from all sides.  Although you can’t see it in the photo, on my left was a lone teenager with shoulders hunched, looking like he was enjoying the walk almost as much as me.  If you squint really hard and put your nose up to the screen, you might be able to make out the intrepid cyclist coming towards us on the opposite sidewalk.  These are the only people I encountered on the streets in my 10 minute walk.

Leaving the teenager and the cyclist behind, I now headed down a stretch where I would pass multiple car dealerships, a restaurant, a funeral home and a car wash, giving new meaning to the term “mixed use”.

I rounded a bend in the road and my destination came into view.  Another half block and I would be able to scoot up the steps to the station.

Thwarted.  The sign that’s obscured in this photo told me the steps I had spotted from a distance are for transit employees only.  Another sign in the foreground told me this area was designated for drivers dropping people off.  Idling beside it was one of those massive two storey trailers that transport automobiles.  By this time I was beginning to wonder if pedestrian access had been considered at all when the station was planned.  Doesn’t anyone walk to the LRT? 

I trudged on and spotted a pedestrian crosswalk, so clearly it had occurred to someone that the odd person might approach the station on foot.  The crosswalk is located right next to the car wash.  Of course.  What else would you find adjacent to an LRT station but a car wash?

Finally, I breached the ramparts of the station and boarded the train for Brentwood but on the way home I wondered how could it be that we had built an LRT station where the last thing anyone would want to do is walk to and from it.  This is not an environment that says “Leave your car at home, the walk will do you good”.  This is an environment that says “Are you nuts? Why would you walk when it’s so much easier to drive?”, an environment where only the most determined – or those who have no choice – tough it out on foot. 

Rapid growth that is planned around the needs of drivers in cars rather than the needs of people at street level has not served us well in Calgary.  It has left us racing to catch up, laying tracks out to suburbs that are already fully built and have been functioning for years around the automobile.  Suburbs that have, in fact, been fully dependent on those automobiles since the day they were built.  As we head into the election this fall, surely we all need to be thinking harder about the implications of that fact when it comes to building flexible, livable neighbourhoods and a resilient city as a whole.  We would do well to challenge all candidates to share their big picture, visionary thinking, not just at the mayoral level but at the aldermanic level as well.  And we all need to start looking a lot further down the road when it comes to planning how our city grows.