From the Calgary Herald – May 8, 2008

Let’s go back to the McKnight-Westwinds LRT station. This time, let’s turn our attention northeastward, to where the C-Train is being expanded, using the worst possible design. Just across from us is the community of Martindale, a typical northeast neighbourhood. Contrary to popular belief, “typical northeast” means a household income of about $59,000 in 2000 (higher than the Calgary average), safe, quiet, pleasant and diverse. The good news is that they are getting their own LRT station. The bad news is that the station will destroy the quality of life in their neighbourhood.

Indeed, if you were to walk down the main drag, Martindale Boulevard, about 46 metres from the elementary school, you would see two houses in the middle of a block with about a lot-and-a-half of space between them. The LRT will be crossing at-grade between these two houses, complete with signal gate and bells. In fact, one of the stations will back on to the side of one of the houses, about two metres from the wall.

From there, the train will cut through backyards and alleys before emerging in Saddleridge. There will be two more at-grade intersections, with signals and bells, within a two-kilometre stretch, meaning one would probably be able to hear all three at once. (By comparison, there are five at-grade intersections on the entire proposed west line, two being negotiated away).

A poster on forum.skyscraperpage.com estimates that bells will be ringing for 20-30 seconds every 90 seconds at capacity. So, we have the train cutting an existing neighbourhood in half, crossing a residential street five houses from an elementary school, and having bells ringing every couple of minutes from 4:30 a.m. until 2 a.m. each day.

Who needs more than two hours of sleep? And we need to cut the population of school-aged children in the suburbs anyway . . .

The area alderman is fine with this, saying the community association agrees. Like with all community associations in the city, Martindale has incredibly hard-working volunteers who are passionate about their neighbourhood, but let’s get real. There are seven members on the Martindale board of directors (and five vacancies) and to pretend they are representative of the entire community is folly.

For the rest, there have been a couple of cursory open houses where designs were presented as a fait accompli. Info on the city’s website is almost impossible to find and nothing is available in Punjabi, the primary language of many of the residents.

Proponents of the design say that it has been planned since 1984, and that people should have known. I don’t disagree, but it is worth noting that a document on the city’s website from 2005 suggests that this extension would not be built for at least 20 years. I think we can cut the homeowners some slack on this one.

Further, just because an awful design has been on the books for 25 years doesn’t mean we have to build it. Hopefully, we’ve learned something about transit and neighbourhoods in that time, and we can make this work, either through a trenched line (no need for a full tunnel) or a re-routing along 64th or 80th Avenues.

It’s fascinating to contrast what’s happening here with the huge furor over the west LRT. There, a group of community activists called the Best West LRT has been organized and is fighting to bury the LRT through Scarboro and Sunalta. Cost is anyone’s guess, but numbers like $150 million have been bandied about (that would build a spur line to Mount Royal College, by the way, or complete the tunnel needed to connect to the airport).

You may remember these folks — they were also involved with the halfway house affair, in which residents spent $35,000 hiring outside consultants to keep it out of their neighbourhood. But never let it be said they’re NIMBY. No, no, as they say on their website, they are “architects, engineers, entrepreneurs, scientists and professionals who care deeply about our city and its future.”

(Apparently, they’re artists, too. Their website features hilarious renditions of what the elevated west LRT would look like. Ignoring the fact that the “before” pictures are pretty ugly to begin with, adding one more bridge to the Crowchild/Bow spaghetti will seemingly bring graffiti, homeless people and drug dealers. The only things that are missing are garbage can fires and robot police.)

One would be forgiven for asking why Martindale is ignored while Scarboro/Sunalta (average 2000 income $79,000) gets so much attention, and Christie Park ($102,000) doesn’t even have to argue — its C-train station is automatically buried. (Perhaps I answer my own question.)

Naheed Nenshi teaches nonprofit management at Mount Royal College’s Bissett School of Business.

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