I have spent the last little while learning about the City’s high-level 30-60 year development and transportation plan called Plan-It Calgary.
Plan-It Calgary is composed of two major components:
1. The Municipal Development Plan, which deals with housing and urban growth, and
2. The Calgary Transportation Plan, focused on transportation and infrastructure.
What I have found is that Plan-It Calgary is an urban design and social engineering experiment, designed to transform Calgary into a City it isn’t. Its targets are based on unrealistic and unprecedented behavioural changes which are not based in reality, nor on Calgarians choices.
How do we know what Calgarians choices are? Simple – the City has spent over $6.5 million in tax dollars on polls, surveys and research into what Calgarians want. Amazingly enough, the direction the plan is taking us focuses entirely on our very lowest priorities, at the expense of what we have said is most important to us.
Housing and Urban Growth
The housing and urban growth portion of Plan-It Calgary intends to set much higher density requirements for future development, meaning in the future, things must be built closer together and taller. Its main goal is to contain urban growth (our lowest priority according to the City’s research).
Graph: Calgarians Ranking of Municipal Priorities for Urban Growth and the Environment
The problem is around 70% of Calgarians want to live in single family detached homes, for various identified reasons including family, privacy, and quality of life. Plan-It Calgary will intentionally take that choice away from many Calgarians. By artificially reducing the amount of single family detached housing available in the marketplace, owning your own home will become more and more expensive. We will reach a point in which having your families own home will be a luxury reserved for only a small percentage.
Plan-It Calgary will control urban growth, but that it isn’t what Calgarians want, and will come at the expense of housing affordability (one of our highest priorities).
Transportation and Infrastructure Spending
Those who support Plan-It Calgary would like to see the vast majority of the City’s limited transportation dollars being spent on alternative modes of transportation that do not reflect actual usage. They would prefer to see car lanes converted into bicycle lanes, greater subsidies for public transit, and priority of snow and debris clearing from pathways over roads.
Plan-It Calgary also wrongly expects automobile usage in the City to drop, yet even if its own goals for growth are met, there will be nearly 1 million more vehicle trips per day on Calgary’s existing road network than there are today.
The plan for increased densities, and less transportation infrastructure will deliberately create traffic congestion and further deteriorate Calgary’s already poor parking situation in order to discourage you from driving your “evil” car, despite the fact that nearly all of us use a car daily for transportation to work, shopping, doctors, recreation and entertainment (do you ride your bike to the doctors office?).
What should we take away?
After reading the plan, and from what I have heard from Calgarians like you, we believe that infrastructure spending should be linked to use, and spending should reflect growth areas supported by Calgarians choices. Plan-It Calgary does not reflect Calgarians choices, therefore I do not support it.
Plan-It Calgary is largely driven by catastrophism and a need to control. It leaves little room for the creativity and innovation that Calgarians are known for.
There are political candidates who feel they need to tell us what is best for us, in order to save us from ourselves, while disregarding our preferences. Politicians selling us something we don’t need is exactly what we are trying to get away from at City Hall, and political leaders who support Plan-it Calgary are simply not listening to us.
Calgary is not New York City, and we happen to like it that way.
