Julie McLaughlin

A new blueprint for Calgary’s future pitches walking, cycling and vastly improved public transit as easy ways of getting around a city that will slow its sprawl and keep growth within existing city limits over the next 60 years.

The draft Calgary Transportation Plan, released March 9, contains a transportation hierarchy that puts single-occupancy vehicles at the bottom of the priority list — a drastic shift from previous planning policy. “[We’re] continuing to accommodate the car,” says Patricia Gordon, project manager of Plan It Calgary. “But the things we do for the car shouldn’t make it harder for those walking and cycling and taking transit.”

The plan includes little road expansion, and proposes a new network of bike paths and lanes designed specifically for commuting, as well as a new “primary transit network” of LRT, streetcars and buses that would quadruple Calgary Transit’s service hours. “We’ve got to connect more places more directly,” says Gordon. “Right now, virtually every trip you take on high-speed transit has to be fed through the downtown. We want to start connecting the dots across the city — making those connections faster, making those connections more frequent, and then integrating transit into the places so they are at the centre of a place, not at the edge.”

The transportation plan’s partner draft, the Calgary Municipal Plan, calls for half of Calgary’s growth over the next 60 years to happen in existing parts of the city. (The city expects its population to more than double to 2.3 million in that time.) Under the plan, the city wouldn’t annex any more rural land, but would instead intensify development in areas with lots of employment (for example, the areas around the Brentwood/University and Chinook LRT stations). The new approach would be phased in, which means most of the city’s growth over the next decade would still be on the edges. “We’re looking at an evolution, not a revolution,” says Gordon.

Ben Brunnen, manager of policy and research for the Calgary Chamber of Commerce, says the Plan It blueprint is “quite timely and, overall, necessary.” He suggests that if the city doesn’t change the way it grows, it’ll eventually go bankrupt. “The long-term maintenance costs for new developments can be astronomical over time, whereas if we’re looking at a more densified type of approach, the long-term infrastructure costs per unit theoretically will go down,” he says. “...Ideally, at the end of the day, if the infrastructure costs decrease, then so do taxes for everyone in the city, making Calgary a more competitive place to attract businesses.”

A city committee will vote on the draft plans in May. Council is scheduled to vote on them in June. “This is one of the most important decisions we’re likely to make in this generation, if not in many generations,” says Ald. Druh Farrell. She says the blueprint is a “necessary direction,” but isn’t assuming it’ll make it past council. “I’m worried,” says the inner-city alderman. “The [development] industry is lobbying hard, and of course they help fund campaigns.”

Dennis Little, a spokesperson for the Calgary chapter of the Canadian Home Builders’ Association, says he has “grave concerns” about the draft plans. He notes that developers are already increasing density in new communities, and says land use and transportation policy is “a very crude tool” to use in making a city sustainable. “There are other ways of gaining sustainability than trying to tell people how they’re going to live, where they’re going to live, and how they’re going to use their automobile,” says Little.

While critics argue the blueprint is a form of social engineering, Byron Miller says the inverse is true. “I would actually take that argument and turn it right back at the development industry,” says Miller, director of the University of Calgary’s urban studies program. “I would argue that the low-density, automobile-dependent form of development that we have seen over the last several decades has been a form of social engineering…. Essentially, we have engineered this particular form of unsustainable development through a variety of forms of subsidy.”

Ald. Brian Pincott describes the blueprint as a “compromise,” and says the development industry will have to adapt. ”They’re either going to have to get with the program or be left behind,” he says. “And I hope for their sakes that they get with the program.”