the howls against Division Avenue
There are LOTS of people who like the changes to Division Avenue. Lots of them. I am certain the number of people who like the changes, plus the number of people who don’t much care, easily outnumber those who are opposed.
It’s difficult to speak up, though, when the conversation space is filled with people yelling “Stupid idiots! Those morons should be fired!” etc.
This is the language we’ve escalated to in the Trump era. Remember when Towne Square was built? Many online comments at the time were quite correctly negative - Towne Square was indeed poorly conceived and executed. Still, many people felt safe to say “Let’s give it a chance,” and “Don’t be so negative, it’s better than what we had before.” Actual conversation was still possible in those days.
That was then, this is now. Now the howls against Division Avenue are so loud and the language so harsh there seems no point in trying to defend it. Two weeks ago a hundred people showed up to criticize the project while four spoke to defend it. There’s a need to balance the scales a bit.
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Division Avenue as it is right now is better for Hat High and Connaught School. It is better for the Moose. It is better for Safeway. It is better for downtown. It is better for Hill Pool. It’s better for your kids, it’s better for your mental health, it’s better for your lungs, your heart, your dog and your relationships. It’s better for your diet, better for your mood, and better for your city. It will help you make better decisions in the future.
Division Avenue is better now not only for the entire Southeast and Southwest Hill neighborhoods, it is particularly better for everyone who owns a home a block, two blocks, even three blocks on either side. If you own a home within one or two hundred meters of Division Avenue, you’re welcome: the City of Medicine Hat has spent scarce tax dollars to raise the value of each of your properties by…I dunno…what do you think? I’d guess 15 to 30 thousand per home in the first block, dropping to five or ten grand per home up to three blocks away. That is free equity that we have given to those dozens of lucky homeowners, whose property values have risen thanks to less traffic, safer streets, a more walkable neighborhood, and a generally more welcoming atmosphere. The Hill has been graced, blessed even, with a generous windfall of community-building, people-friendly infrastructure that places the human experience over the commuter experience.
We should envy them.
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Incrementally reducing traffic is a win for communities.
Thirty years ago you could leave downtown Calgary on 9th avenue east heading through Inglewood, a shabby, beat-up neighborhood of decaying buildings and grungy second-hand stores with a four-lane roadway running through it. The purpose of the road was to carry commuters east to the Deerfoot or Forest Lawn, and Inglewood gained nothing from traffic that never stopped.
Inglewood now is expensive, trendy and desirable. A big part of that transformation was traffic calming. You can barely find anywhere to park there now, and that’s intentional. Inglewood is a pedestrian experience. To enjoy Inglewood, you should walk, bike or bus there.
Same for 17th Avenue and most of the beltline now. These areas are high density: there are lots of people living there and lots more people want to live there. Why? Not because it’s so easy to drive in and out: it isn’t. Driving is a nightmare in that area, but once you get out of your car, it’s the place to be. So why even ruin your experience by bringing your car? There are serious discussions going on now about closing 17th avenue to vehicles completely. This will make the 17th avenue experience even more amazing for the people who are able to access it.
Marda Loop, beltline, Inglewood, Kensington…Calgary has many examples, but you can also think of anywhere awesome you’ve travelled to for work or holiday - I guarantee that the squares, the markets, the ports, the parks and venues that you loved visiting were all places where vehicle traffic and parking were choked off in favor of creating places for real, human people. You know it’s true.
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If you need to leave downtown Calgary heading East, you can take Memorial Drive; that’s what it’s there for. The residents of Inglewood thank you. If you need to head south from downtown Medicine Hat, you can use Carry Drive, the highway, or Dunmore Road. And of course, you can still use Division. It’s not closed to traffic, it’s just been altered so that incrementally, a few more cars every day may choose to use another route, because Division has become incrementally less convenient for North-South travel.
How about Riverside? Don’t you think the people who live there would be happy to see 3rd street calmed? If you need to get to Crescent Heights or Ranchlands you can take Parkview Dr, or Brier Park Rd to 12 st. These are big, wide-lane roads built for speed. You don’t need to race through a quiet, shady little neighborhood like Riverside to get to the highway. It makes total sense to narrow that road, put in more bikeable space and reduce the speed limit. The whole stretch from 5th avenue to St. Pat’s should be a 30 km/hr lane that kids with training wheels can ride along (with commensurate increases to the value of homes in the area).
Next thing that would happen is the residents of 1st St would demand a 30 km/hr speed limit from the highway clear to City Hall. Of course they would, it would make their lives better and their property even more valuable, without costing them a nickel.
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Sidebar: “What’s a road for?”
Depends on the road, doesn’t it? The Transcanada is a national transportation artery - it is meant to move people and goods far and fast in an efficient way. Carry Drive exists to connect Downtown to Ross Glen and the Mall. Strachan Road provides the only thoroughfare to traverse Southridge. The road I live on is a crescent, and its only real purpose is to meet the access and below-ground infrastructure needs of the people who live on it.
Division Avenue is more complicated: who does it belong to; who are the stakeholders? Does everyone get an equal vote? Is the opinion of someone who lives in NECH as valuable as someone who lives across from Safeway? What if we had a ward system in Medicine Hat, and one of our City Councillors was responsible for representing the people who live along Division Avenue - when that Councillor stood up to defend the new road design on behalf of their constituents, would someone shout at them that they were an idiot and a moron?
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McBride’s Bakery is located on Dunmore Road. The majority of our customers arrive by car. Still, I would be happy to see Dunmore Road torn up and grassed over, trees planted from the funeral home to the Mall, so that a squirrel could travel the full length and never touch the ground. Paths for the use of bikes, wagons, scooters, golf carts and skates would run throughout, and Medicine Hat Transit would run electric shuttle buses or trolleys up and down.
Business needn’t suffer, because this new multipurpose space would be zoned along its length to get rid of the parking lots and redundant side roads that access the burger joints and dollar stores, and instead the businesses will be brought forward to where the people are, not where the cars are - just like every awesome place you’ve been in your travels. There would be tons more businesses, more customers along Dunmore than before. I’m delighted that there are a hundred new units at Crestwood Apartments being built right now on the corner with Southview.
Incrementally, one by one, some single lots in Norwood and Crestwood would be converted to multi-family units, and density would increase. This isn’t a plot by the UN to restrict your mobility - this is a result of supply and demand: if you make a neighborhood more awesome, then more people want to live there, and the value of property goes up, and you can make good bank building more places to live for all the people who want to be near the awesome.
But if you just want to drive from the north to the south, you can take the highway or Carry Drive. The people who live along Dunmore Road, the businesses that operate there, the kids who go to school there, the consumers who want to access burgers and beer and food and shopping and entertainment and trees and tennis courts and music and water parks and just…you know, people who want to enjoy basically everything except loud busy streets and sun-baked parking lots, THESE people, they don’t need a four-lane urban highway running down the middle of their fun. Screw that.
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Ross Glen
This area is obviously drive-in, drive-out. There’s nothing else that can be done. The lots are large and the zoning is all single-family, so the density is low. No commercial space exists south of Carry. The street pattern is winding, so there’s no easy way to use transit or even provide trailways for non-vehicle traffic. (Ross Glen has walking/riding paths, but their layout is designed for recreation, not connecting Ross Glen trail users to the rest of the city.)
This isn’t an easy fix. What I mean is, ASSUMING you want a neighborhood where kids can play outside and ride bikes and skate and stuff; and it’s nice to take a walk, and there are places near your home where you can buy some milk, or leave your drycleaning, or take a yoga class or meet someone for coffee; and you want a neighborhood that has pools and rinks and splash parks and schools and daycares and churches and community halls,…well, that would put Ross Glen through a lot of changes that might annoy some people, wouldn’t it? So maybe that isn’t much of a fix.
Maybe we should admit that Ross Glen will never be that community, that Ross Glen will only, can only ever be drive-in, drive-out, because doing anything else would mean using everyone’s tax dollars to make incremental changes to the neighborhood’s superstructure, changes that would benefit one neighborhood at the expense of all neighborhoods.
Maybe, some might reasonably argue, there is nothing to fix. Ross Glen is just fine. Ross Glen is doing exactly what it should be doing: providing safe, comfortable, reasonably valued single-family suburban housing within a reasonable drive of all the urban amenities located in Medicine Hat. Speeds on Ross Glen Drive can get pretty high sometimes, but seriously, how long IS that road anyway?
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The Division project offers something for Crescent Heights to think about. CH is a big area with a lot of straight, wide 50 km/hr roads, which obviously encourages driving, but CH also has the most useful bike trails. Crescent Heights has a few interesting little local centers of commerce, but they’d all benefit from having twice as many people living within a 2 or 3 block radius.
Think of it: if you were focused only on what is best for Crescent Heights, and you had the decision power, what would you do? The neighborhood’s layout right now is very vehicle-friendly, and I don’t blame people at all for speaking on behalf of their vehicles when car life is their only life option right now.
So I fully accept that CH citizens are going to take their cars into the rest of the city as much as they like, and that’s fine. I also think you can make a good case for making it a LOT safer for people to get around CH on bike, board, cart, or scooter than it is now. Crescent Heights needs to keep some fast roads, and I think it should consider lining them with apartment buildings, and those buildings should have underground parking. Surface parking lots for apartment buildings is wasteful and lazy. I think CH could easily grow to twice its current population in the same space, and they could have a pretty good quality of life up there, like Boomers in Palm Springs, but with lots more trees. The whole CH plateau should be covered in tall, shady trees, a city in a forest. We should get started on planting those asap.
All those people (consumers) would make it possible, indeed desirable and demanded, for many more points of commerce (small businesses) to be scattered throughout CH. Businesses that primarily served people who lived within 800 meters. Businesses that made it less necessary for people to leave CH to enjoy life. And maybe folks often get to these businesses on an electric scooter because it is safe and fast and convenient and fun, even if they’re older or slower or fatter than you think people using electric scooters usually are. And since all these people are out and about in their neighborhoods, it will make it worthwhile to put in more rinks and community centers or stuff.
Maybe the City should invest in this vision instead of Ross Glen.
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Or maybe Cassi is right. Maybe what we have here in Medicine Hat is simply Southeast Alberta local perfection; there is nothing to improve. This isn’t Kensington or Kitsilano, this is the Hat, and we don’t need those 15-minute neighborhoods you’re selling, mister. We don’t need trees in Crescent Heights, or a ramen shop in Ross Glen, or stop signs on 3rd street.
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There was a plan once called Water in the North and Ice in the South, if I remember correctly. The plan was circulating around the same time as the suggestion that Crestwood Pool and the Moose may never open again. Fitness, sport and recreation, it was reasoned, would be delivered to the population through a small number of large facilities like Big Marble, to which the citizens would drive themselves.
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We had an election on this four years ago, you may recall. The incumbent team had been making decisions for years that were car-friendly and citywide in scope; whereas the incoming administration was suggesting a neighborhood-scale approach. It seems we may have to do this all over again.
Look at Hellman: he owns a lube shop on Kingsway. I don’t need any evidence to accept that his business correlates very strongly with drive-by traffic. Hellman has every right to make Kingsway an election issue, he’s got genuine skin in the game.
But that’s Kingsway. Are we really going to hold back the Southeast and Southwest Hills from living their best life because of the few times a month we actually use Division? Is every Hatter that lives a 10-minute drive from us obligated to always be a 10-minute drive from us? What if some physical change slowed our drive to 12 minutes, but their lives were 20% better and their homes were 5% more valuable?
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Are we only going to build city-scale projects surrounded by huge parking lots? Does “fair” mean no neighborhood gets anything ever, because that wouldn’t be fair? We all get to tear around town at high speeds - this is the expression of our freedom, what it means to be a Hatter?
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If you don’t like Division now that’s ok. It’s not the greatest example in the world of what it’s trying to accomplish. I want more trees, LOTS of people want a better turning radius, everyone can come up with something that would improve it. But it is definitely a step in the right direction.