A tram rolls down 17 Avenue in front of the Devenish building.
Tomorrow’s cities are today’s challenge
Tomorrow our children will be living in the city we are building today. It is they and their children who will reap the benefits or contend with the woes of our city-building practices. Buildings roads and pipes are long-lived and once set prohibitively expensive to replace or retrofit. This longevity ties future Calgarians to the legacy we bequeath them for good or ill.
We know cities of the future will be vastly different than they are today yet we are not doing much to change business-as-usual. For example we keep planning and building auto-dependent suburbs knowing well that they — and the lifestyles they make possible — could soon be outdated. Either they will be too expensive to maintain due to peak oil or they will be outlawed for their excessive carbon emissions or both. Whatever way it happens the age of fossil fuels is drawing to a close and we will need a long goodbye to prepare for its replacement. That is why it is important to begin the transformation now and to get it right.
In preceding articles some of the benefits of returning trams to the streets of Calgary have been described. Tramlines function as major arteries for vibrant urban villages. The economic benefits include miles of enhanced opportunity for businesses along new streetcar corridors where rail infrastructure provides incentive for entrepreneurs to invest. Junctions where tramlines cross or intersect with the LRT are particularly intense nodes of commercial social activity and are attractive to business. Moreover from a cost perspective trams deliver more value than any other transit option after lifetime costs are accounted for.
Environmentally over the long term trams have been shown to be the most energy efficient means of public or private transportation. As they are electric-powered trams can tap into the same zero emissions renewable energy sources now driving Calgary’s LRT.
As part of a complete transit network trams play a role that neither buses nor LRT can duplicate as they span a variety of transit niches at local and city-wide scales. Trams connect existing transit nodes and in so doing offer extra measures of flexibility and choice to users. They provide a much more pleasant ride than a bus. They are unparalleled catalysts for economic development because they link communities and foster opportunity along the line.
Despite these advantages neither of Calgary’s two main planning documents — the Municipal Development Plan or the Calgary Transportation Plan — ever mentions trams or streetcars. To help move trams back into the spotlight we present our nominations for the first six Calgary streets of Calgary’s modern tram network:
1. 37th Street S.W.-Westbrook LRT-Mount Royal University : A no-brainer 37th Street is ripe for intensification and would make a beautiful tram street not to mention the city desperately needs to get the new university into a high-quality transit loop.
2. International Avenue-Inglewood-East Village-Stampede-Westbrook (17th Avenue and 52nd Street S.E. to 37th Street S.W.): In addition to providing thousands of working class households with dependable access to the core this line if routed creatively would link Inglewood to the city’s new baby — East Village which has no fixed transit link planned — to the Stampede LRT and the Beltline tram. As future plans envision the Stampede grounds open to normal traffic the tram line could be routed along Ninth Avenue from Inglewood across the Elbow River flank the south edge of East Village then turn south down the new Fourth Street S.E. corridor and finally turn west on 17th Avenue in front of a hypothetical new hockey arena.
3. Centre Street/Edmonton Trail loop (Downtown to McKnight Boulevard): Both were previously tram streets. Both have tremendous potential for commercial and residential intensification and for connecting transit to working-class neighbourhoods.
4. Mission loop (Prince’s Island to Elbow Drive; Fourth Street; Fifth Street)
5. Beltline-Sunalta-Victoria Park loop (Sunalta to Stampede; 11th Avenue and 12th Avenue): Together with the Mission loop this reconnects the entire southern flank of downtown with fixed transit. This route provides important connections to the LRT at the downtown Stampede and Sunalta stations.
6. The 10th Street N.W./Northmount Drive line has fabulous potential as a tram street because of the large number of schools libraries community centres sport facilities and shopping along the corridor. This route puts fixed-rail transit within a five-to-seven-minute walking distance of a major shopping mall the Kensington commercial district and the homes of many thousands of Calgarians in Rosemount Triwood Brentwood and Dalhousie.
While a highly effective transit network itself does make a resilient city no city can be resilient or sustainable without one.
Next article: The devil is in the details: Five suggestions to help us love public transit.
Geoff Ghitter teaches urban studies at the University of Calgary. Links to the research used in this article and to maps of proposed tramlines can be found on his blog at geeessgee.blogspot.com. Noel Keough is an assistant professor in the faculty of environmental design at the University of Calgary and is co-founder of Sustainable Calgary Society.
