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Cars are everywhere, and our cities seem to be built more for them than for people. For example, when I walk to work from the Beltline, I typically cross 9th Avenue at 11th Street SW. The lights allowing car traffic to flow into the downtown core keep pedestrians waiting for several minutes at a time. When the lights finally do change, pedestrians have a very short period of time to make the crossing before preference is again returned to motorized vehicles.
Another example can be found in CTrain overpasses along MacLeod trail. Pedestrian bridges have been built that span eight or more lanes of traffic, which connect CTrain stations to the far side of MacLeod Trail. These bridges allow people to pass over top of the traffic. I think that this only heightens the priority given to cars. It seems to me that we don’t want cars to have to deal with the inconvenience of pedestrians at street level, so instead we send them long distances over top of the priority traffic to get to their destination. The inconvenience is placed on pedestrians, not on drivers of cars. I think that this only adds further incentive to drive.
Perhaps if we gave more priority to pedestrians and offered them real and convenient options, more people would choose mass transit and walking over driving.
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barriers
Calgary has erected kilometers of sound proof walls to shield sprawl neighborhoods from having to listen to noisy traffic roaring past at all hours of the day. These walls in my opinion only serve to isolate communities from the city and further reduce foot traffic. They are also an eyesore in my opinion.
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Building and maintaining road infrastructure must cost Calgary a small fortune, especially as we extend this infrastructure further out each year to new communities. For example, costs for labor and materials to build roads, street lights and traffic signals, overpasses and bridges, signs, paint, manhole covers and sub-road infrastructure must eat up a fair portion of the City’s revenue. Then there are the social and environmental costs associated with roadways: isolation in private vehicles, traffic accidents, road kill, paving over the environment, plus all of the pollution generated by the cars that use the roads. It would be great if we could instead spend all of this public money on initiatives like better mass transit.
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What if we were to put more emphasis on reducing our city’s geographical and carbon footprint? If we could apply Japaneese approaches to density and mass transit to a city of Calgary's size and area, I think that we would no longer have to keep a thirty year supply of land on hand for future road and housing expansion.
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