Case Study: Kingsway

Kingsway is not a successful street; it could use better management.

Kingsway hosts some businesses that make it an auto hub, but several auto businesses have failed there, too. It has hosted some non-profits, and lost others, but it is not a service delivery hub. As a commercial zone, results are clearly mixed. As a residential area, realizing its potential (or lack thereof) can only rely on strategic direction from the City.

Many of the commercial buildings are decrepit, and all the better ones have consistently high vacancy rates. Because the slope is steep, the natural space on the west is unkempt. The residential properties on either side, extending to Allowance in the east, are mostly low-value, and while the single-detached housing that dominates the area would have been family-focused when built, the area now is more suited to adult or student residential.

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Given the current outrage over Division, the only conversation about Kingsway now is the demand to retain the road’s utility as a fast route out of downtown. Four fast lanes, period.

Fine. But what about the rest of the area? Twenty square blocks are enclosed in the rectangle between Kingsway, Allowance and South Railway. Taken as a whole, the area looks like an accident. Or neglect. Or opportunity.

Is this area being used to its full potential? Clearly not. Can government do something useful here? Yes it can. It can do a lot.

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Plan A: The rubber meets the road

Kingsway has Mr. Lube, Gas King, Minute Muffler and All Season as auto-based infrastructure. There’s also a solid cluster of autobody shops along South Railway, between Fire Dragon and Grit City. But Fas Gas closed a decade ago and its lot remains empty, the service bays connected to the The Leaf sit unused, the Subaru lot is a dusty memory, and Ziebart just closed, so the area’s performance as an auto hub is mixed.

The three pizza places give us a clue, though. Dominos, 73, and Papa John’s aren’t there because of the walk-in traffic, they’re there because Kingsway is a good central location from which to get food delivered to much of the city inside a 30-minute window. It sure looks like online shopping/ordering and delivery are here to stay, so what if we went all-in on logistics in that area?

Imagine the area between Kingsway and Allowance filled with pizza shops, noodle shops, burgers, Chinese, sushi and kebabs, and absolutely none of it zoned with parking requirements, because each eatery only has a couple of tables, the majority of their business being take-out or delivery.

Imagine those food businesses sharing the space with a 6-stall Amazon sorting station. And a tire shop. Imagine Brewmaster with a proper loading dock with room for two or three trucks. A little hardware store. Drive-thru ATMs. Japanese-style self-serve mini convenience stores / makeup / accessories / lottery. An unstaffed quick copy center. A filtered water refill station. Liquor and weed. Cheap smokes. Vapes. Coffee. Smoothies. Dry cleaners. M&M Meats. Dog groomers; kennels. A capsule hotel with no guest parking. Any type of business that’s drive-in/drive-out, packed in like sardines with no sidewalks, fewer trees and no parallel parking. It could be quite a little business hub, if someone were able to bring all the parties together.

And zipping right by it all, Kingsway and Allowance remain four fast lanes with no added traffic lights, few crosswalks and no accommodations for cyclists. Just like the people want.

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Plan B: College Town / Beltline

The area around our college could add tens of $millions to the local economy if anyone cared about the obvious absence: FUN. Seriously, is there any other post-secondary institution on the whole of planet earth that offers such a complete absence of commercial domain for its students? There is literally nowhere for our students to spend a dime near campus.

We could tear down the student residences on the golf-course side and put in a couple bars, coffee shops or internet cafes. Or zone it along Spencer between Kin Coulee and the post office. Or across the highway where the tourist centre sits unused, except as a septic dump.

Or…a better idea….

What if the area between Kingsway and Allowance could become THE place for college kids to eat, drink, sleep, live, shop and play? Keep all the food shops as described in Plan A, but don’t take out the sidewalks. Zone for multi-unit dwellings, ideally apartment buildings at least 3 stories tall, and insist on underground parkades with each new build (surface parking for apartment buildings is a waste, it lowers density, and it’s ugly).

The area has a pretty good tree canopy already: keep it. Keep it pedestrian-friendly and speed-limited for pedal bikes and e-scooters. Lots of stop signs. The City would actively direct development toward a Calgary beltline-type model, featuring apartment and condo housing for different income levels, from student to downtown professional. The area would have nightlife and attract residents who accept that. The commercial spaces would emphasize food, drink, fashion, beauty, fitness, small grocers, gathering places and trendy shopping. Neon lights. Maybe even (moon shot) a club.

Already in place are the Buckle, Grit City and Dayz Off. On the other hand, The Office location further up South Railway struggled for years, and other dining venues like From Scratch and Nifty Fifty are long gone. What is needed for this zone to thrive is a population base with money to spend, whether from work income or student loans. With five hundred people living in that little space, Kingsway itself would have to change, though.

A lot more buses will be using the street. More and better bus stops will be needed, wider and smoother sidewalks, more crosswalks (and safer crosswalks) to get across Kingsway. Traffic speed will have to reflect the presence of more cyclists and pedestrians using the road. The current business mix will gradually shift away from cars and low-to-mid-rent offices toward walk-in customer experiences. People getting off work downtown will come here to stay and play until evening, or late into the night - it’ll be a happening vibe. Might be a cool place for a 24-hr bakery.

Plan C: Non-Profit

Several comings and goings. Redi has a big operation here. McMan just opened a rebranded Kickstand youth centre. Be Youth had a drop-in centre, but it lost its funding. CUPE and maybe another union have had offices along here. There’s a physiotherapy centre, don’t know if it’s for profit or public, though. The overnight shelter is still there, but it’s on a ticking clock.

There’s a lot that could be done for vulnerable people in the area between Allowance and Kingsway. Much of the existing housing could be acquired or leased for use by Community Housing. Overnight shelter service, and/or warming stations for dozens of street people could be provided here. Thrift shops and faith-run clothing swaps could be operated in many of the existing commercial spaces. There is office space in the Monarch Building, in Kingsway Crossing, in the Memory Lane building, and the strip malls on the west side of the street to offer services in banking, tax filing, counselling, system navigation, free laundry, showers, job search, soup kitchens, medical clinic, microfinance, advocacy, etc. (yes, even supervised consumption) for all kinds of Hatters, housed and unhoused, who need various forms of assistance.

For this, the road doesn’t need to change a bit. Four fast lanes, in and out of downtown. Drive right past it all.

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To make Plan A work you need to recruit businesses in.

To make Plan B work you need to recruit builders in.

To make Plan C work you need to recruit non-profit organizations in, both GO and NGO, and work closely with government.

For all three you’ll need to coordinate with transit, zoning and infrastructure. You’ll need to change some bylaws. You’ll need to offer incentives. You should talk to the College, the police and first responders. For every lot you want to change, you should talk to its neighbors, and their neighbors. You should talk with the Province. And don’t forget the biggie: you need to talk to your intended clients, customers and users.

Most importantly, right from the ground floor of any process, you need to involve the citizens of the city as a whole, so there’s no surprises, and everyone knows what’s going on.

And since we’re in an election campaign with forty candidates to choose from, you should know which candidate is already the best at this: Yusuf Mohammed. He sees projects like this, decisions like this, not as a linear sequence, but as a web of interconnected moving pieces, each with its own needs and wants. His ability to see various perspectives at once, and treat them all with respect, is unmatched. Yusuf will be a high-value Councillor.

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Roads have been weaponized. When you ask a candidate “All I want to know is whether you support traffic calming?”, or you post on social media “Each candidate, please state whether you support the changes to Division, yes or no?” then you are weaponizing roads, which either ends discussion about roads, or limits it to people with thick enough armor to navigate bad-faith attacks.

When roads have become coded such that installing a little experimental traffic circle in Medicine Hat is proof positive that the WEF is trying to take everyone’s car away and fence them into urban spaces only 15 minutes across, then roads have been weaponized. It means you’re not actually talking about roads, you’re talking about something else.

When you weaponize subjects that are legitimate topics of public conversation, that are legitimate realms of governance for elected officials, then you harm democracy, because democracy IS a conversation. Where there is no debate, there can be no democracy.

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A comment about the ward system:

Something we get to do in our civic elections is cast nine votes. That lets us choose a diverse skill set, which I believe is desirable. If we had a ward system, you would get two votes: one for Mayor, and one for your alderman.

It would mean that each voter, although a citizen of Medicine Hat, would only be able to vote on a city-wide governance agenda through their choice of one person: the mayor. Their other vote would be for their neighborhood, and therefore, definitionally, somewhat at odds with other neighborhoods.

My discussion of Kingsway and the broader area between Kingsway and Allowance

was meant to highlight the difference between what a large swath of the citywide public wants (4 fast lanes in and out of downtown), and what a smaller subset of interested groups might want (business sectors / students / NGOs, etc). There can be advantages to having one politician head off to council to represent your narrow interests, of course, but let’s recognize that there are also good things about having a diverse group of people think about the city as a whole, even while making location-by-location decisions, because our city is big enough to be complex, but small enough that we all live in all of it.

This is why Danielle Smith is forcing the party system on municipal-level elections:

if you only have two votes, and every candidate is essentially forced to declare a party, then it’s easiest for you to tune out of the campaign and just vote your usual color. For us, we get to cast nine votes, and all nine votes are individual in nature but city-wide in scope - it gives you a fuller, richer voter experience to pick a team to run things on your behalf. For this, and for so many other reasons, it is very important that at the next opportunity, this city chooses to Dump Danielle.