Saturday morning on Eighth Street S.W. Downtown resident Paul Fairie says sometimes the city core can feel like an ‘ambiguous, empty space.’ (Jim Brown/CBC)
So, what radical strategies are the city contemplating?
“Maybe radical is not the right word to use, but the public that’s moving into the downtown is different than the public that was there,” said Thom Mahler, the director of the city’s downtown strategy.
Mahler says the Greater Downtown Plan, approved by city council in 2021, provides a variety of options to turn the downtown back into more of a neighbourhood-focused place, removing some of the historical emphasis on the business function of the core.
That includes changes to everything from streets to public spaces and other civic amenities.
Making changes to downtown streets, particularly the wide, one-way avenues that bisect the city from east to west and essentially create an after-hours dead zone between Eighth Avenue in the south, and the Bow River to the north, will be a priority, said Mahler.
“What do you do long-term with Fourth, Fifth, Sixth Avenue? Ninth Avenue? Those are the four biggies,” he said.
“How do you reimagine what those can be in the future?”
Something that makes this easier, he says, is the realization that those streets no longer need to do the things they did in the past, when everyone came downtown at the same time, and left together, resulting in incredible peak-traffic volumes.
“With the change in the way people work, we typically now only have a peak on maybe Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. But even then, people don’t all arrive at the same time and leave at the same time as they used to,” said Mahler.
Flexible streets
The city is now assessing just how much of that extra-wide pavement is required to meet the new demands.
“Where that settles, you can start taking bits away and adding to the public spaces for those other types of mobility, like bicycles, better transit facilities, but also programming lanes of traffic that aren’t used during peak times,” he said.
One of the options being considered is flexible streets.
“So, maybe we use a lane of traffic during the day, or certain days of the week, but other days of the week it can actually be repurposed for temporary parks or for hospitality patios,” said Mahler.
Sandalack agrees that something needs to be done about the one-way, east-west avenues.
“They’ve completely screwed up the function of that part of the city as an urban area,” she said. “It transforms it into freeways, and there’s real difficulty trying to insert a neighbourhood back into that. So structurally and functionally, they’re really a problem.”
But she doesn’t believe reimagining uses for lanes of traffic goes nearly far enough. She calls it “tinkering.”
“All that tinkering, it’s like coming across somebody who’s got a few broken bones … you don’t just buy them new clothes,” she said.
“When I think about something really radical, an option has to be: do we tear down most of it and start again? To me, that has to be on the table as an extreme option.”