Chapter 9
Traffic and Parking
Bill Milne was very active in the first oil boom of the 1950s and 1960s, relentlessly and effectively championing a modernist Calgary. He wrote, in a preface to a study of Calgary’s increasingly congested downtown core:
Along with a good number of Calgarians, I have become increasingly concerned with what is happening to the downtown business district.
The traffic, transit and pedestrian problems, and the new outlying shopping centre, all represent threats to the survival of the city centre. The Architect is in a little different position than most people in this respect. Firstly, he has access to information describing what is being done throughout the world regarding these problems, and secondly he has the planning and design background to suggest solutions that suit local conditions.[1]
Figure 9-3. How it works: “Free pedestrian movement in parking malls, slow moving traffic in parking malls. Kiosks in street intersections used as news stands ticket booths, telephones, fire alarms, waste paper disposals, information booths, mail boxes, etc. Ornamental street lighting only — no unsightly overhead wires in parking malls. No stop lights or parking on five lane ring road freeway.” Total possible parking: 2,650 cars.
Provincial Archives of Alberta, Accession Number 2008.0411.
These two paragraphs could have come from any year since 1960, when it was written. This is the ongoing dilemma for downtown Calgary: there are bigger draws in the suburbs — schools, shopping centres, malls, parks — than the downtown core itself. Yet, all traffic corridors funnel into the downtown, the LRT lines fan out from the core, and the centre is visible from the far edges of the city, a little wedding cake of tiers and towers, dense and intense, clearly the physical heart of the city. Although parking is expensive, it does not act as enough of a disincentive to driving to work, despite the light rail transit and the bus system. Rush hour starts at 6:00 a.m. and again at 3:30 p.m., traffic jams its way in, and nine hours later rams its way out.
Milne complained that there was a traffic light at every intersection in the downtown core, that no one could get anywhere fast and people had to battle cars at every turn. His thesis was that pedestrians and vehicles should mix with one another as in modern shopping centres, with the tempo geared to pedestrians. The entire downtown should be like a shopping centre while curb parking was doubled to 18,000 spaces, resulting in faster traffic. This is all so contradictory that it appears completely mad; however, it deserves unpacking.
This plan is based on two main propositions:
1 The Belt Highway, a counter-clockwise ring road that acted as a giant traffic circle without traffic lights stopping and starting the flow of cars. This would leave the downtown free of east–west crosstown traffic.
2 Cross Streets, made very discouraging by forcing drivers to take a zig-zag route from north to south with none of the streets as through-routes. This would have been so enraging that most drivers would have avoided the downtown completely. These cross streets then could have been used for parking.
The economics of this plan have a certain beauty: an alternative eight-hundred-space parking structure would cost the city $1.2 million and the parking would not be distributed evenly throughout the core. Rather, in Milne’s proposal, angle parking and a re-designation of existing roads would provide the extra eight hundred spaces needed, and at ground level. The new parking meters would pay for the new curb cuts, which would press the cars into the sidewalk, widening the driving lanes.
The biggest problem would be getting pedestrians across the current of the Belt Highway into what Milne predicted would be a “pedestrian kingdom.” The solution is pedestrian overpasses, which, he believed, “would have a spirit of adventure to them,” adding that “citizens walking over the bridge could watch the traffic passing underneath.” Less expensive would be synchronized walk/don’t walk lights on the Belt Highway. These would probably have had more adventure in them than the overpasses.
Streetcars — or their soon-to-be replacement, electric busses — would circle the core on the Belt Highway, pulling off into any of three bus loops for loading and transfers. There would be a maximum of a two-block walk from anywhere in the downtown core to one of these loops.
The absence of honking, idling, polluting, stop-start traffic would allow the cross streets to be largely pedestrian, full of kiosks and year-round vending stands. In this, Milne refers to the mayor’s idea of a pedestrian mall, which did come to pass with the pedestrianization of 8th Avenue in 1967. It does indeed have kiosks and vendors, benches and pedestrians, safely isolated from traffic. The difference is that Milne’s plan would have spread that easy-going walking street scene throughout the whole downtown core.
Milne’s two sketches that accompany this proposal are a delight: he clearly didn’t like traffic, but loved cars.
Figure 9-1. This drawing is looking west down 7th Avenue. The Hudson’s Bay Company is on the left, its skywalk to the parkade is over the street, and close on the left is Central United Church. Milne has introduced a fine grain of diagonals throughout the city, including angled parking and cross-intersection pedestrian paving with kiosks and planting. It turns a fairly indifferent grid into a series of intimate block-long islands.
Provincial Archives of Alberta, Accession Number 2008.0411.
Figure 9-2. A Beltway overpass separating traffic from pedestrians. Milne thought these overpasses would be quite exciting. His drawing is a bit odd, scale-wise, with only nine or ten steps up and a sloped ramp over the road, where tiny buses and cars have been drawn. In reality, any overpass would be more like the scale of the ones found at LRT stations, with two storeys up, massive construction, and safety standards. This is a lovely image, however, illustrating the thought that traffic could be an entertainment and pedestrian bridges could be so minimal.
Provincial Archives of Alberta, Accession Number 2008.0411.
[1] W.G. Milne fonds, Provincial Archives of Alberta, acc. no. 2008.0411.
Chapter 10
The Calgary Civic Centre
In terms of major revision of downtown ordering, we can start with the 1978 plan by Harold Hanen and Raymond Moriyama for the Calgary Civic Centre, the future of which was decided by a public referendum. This was a major architectural project for a new municipal building and a reworking of several blocks around it. Documentation for this project as it was presented to the Calgary public was unusual, consisting of a booklet that lays out the environmental, climate-related, social, and historic conditions for building a new civic centre. These design conditions were theoretical, illustrated by diagrams, and essentially sound. Hanen’s interest in winter cities began with this project, leading to his involvement with the Winter Cities Association.
Figure 10-1. In broad strokes, the proposed civic realm wrapped around a large open plaza, which corresponds today to Olympic Plaza. On the south side of the plaza was a theatre and night-life district with a major hotel. This was the zone that became the Calgary Centre for Performing Arts. Office and commercial building are lightly dotted into the northwest corner. The tiny cross-hatched shape centre top is the old City Hall; clearly, the new civic realm was meant to extend well into east Calgary.
Harold Hanen fonds, Glenbow Museum and Archives, M8906-261.
The proposal