Calgary aims at “livability”

I spent a few days earlier this month in Calgary. It was my first visit to the city since 1991. I had also been there in 1975.

Calgary has been a pioneer in three areas of concern to this blog—[1] light-rail transit; [2] off-road trails; and [3] central-city densification—and I tried on this trip to take a close look at recent developments. I ended up being quite impressed.

[1] Light-rail transit. Calgary was apparently the first North American city since World War II to put light-rail transit on surface streets downtown. The initial line opened on 25 May 1981. Many other North American cities were thinking of establishing rail lines in this period but hesitated for many reasons, among them a sense that subway lines cost too much and that surface lines would degrade the environment. Planners were (perhaps inevitably) thinking of the noisy elevated lines in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago. To avoid this problem, Edmonton, Alberta’s capital, had built an elaborate (and expensive) downtown subway for what is now known as the Capital Line; it opened on 22 April 1978, three years before Calgary’s CTrain. The suburban portion of Edmonton’s line was also sited to cause minimal offense. It ran almost exclusively along CN tracks (which meant that it did not serve the most densely populated suburbs). The suburban parts of Calgary’s first line were similarly located along a lightly used Canadian Pacific branch line that was mostly bordered by industrial buildings. But Calgary boldly saved a huge amount of money by running its CTrain downtown along 7th Avenue, closing the street to most motor vehicles. Such an act was nearly unprecedented at the time.

It’s true that trains on 7th Avenue cannot run very fast. Train drivers have to watch out for pedestrians and stop for red lights. But, far from degrading the environment, the addition of surface rail to Calgary’s downtown seemed to add a certain charm to a district that in the 1980s was mostly devoted to office buildings. It also brought more people to downtown sidewalks. The stations (all improved greatly since they were first built) have become major activity centers.

Very few people in Calgary have regretted the installation of light rail, and the system has continued to grow in the years since its inception. It’s now up to 60 km in length.¹ Here’s a map showing the extent of the current system:

More than twenty North American cities have added light-rail or streetcar lines to their downtown streets since Calgary did. Some of these lines are quite short, perhaps designed more to please tourists and to suggest a city’s status as a place with rail transit than to move people where they might want to go. But several cities—San Diego, Portland, Dallas, Denver, and Salt Lake City—have built quite elaborate systems that are now larger than Calgary’s.²

None, however, has attracted more riders than Calgary’s light-rail transit system, which appears to have higher passenger loads than any other light-rail system in North America.³ Pre-Pandemic, the CTrain was carrying something like 313,000 passengers every weekday (in an urban area of something like 1.6 million). Not only was this more than twice as many riders as on the larger systems in the larger urban areas of Portland, San Diego, Dallas, and Denver. It’s also more riders than are carried on the older (and at this point smaller) light-rail systems in densely-populated Boston, San Francisco, and Philadelphia (all of which of course also have heavy rail, whose ridership is larger). Cynics have argued that Calgary’s high ridership is a function in large part of the fact that downtown parking has been made scarce and expensive. That suggests to me that the government agencies that have had some role in determining the availability and price of parking in downtown Calgary have been doing their work well. But, in fact, it looked when I was in Calgary as though there was no shortage of downtown parking. There are huge, mostly empty lots on the eastern edge of Downtown.

I made a point of riding on all Calgary’s CTrain lines on this trip. The three lines (to the northwest, northeast, and south) that were in existence when I was last there in 1991 have all been extended, and a new line has opened to the west. I was particularly impressed by the latter, which includes a substantial elevated portion (created in part because Calgary’s western neighborhoods are up on a kind of plateau), a short subway (with the CTrain’s only subway station), and a long section in a culvert. As a result of all this grade separation, Calgary’s new line to the west may be a little faster than the three initial lines.

All the trains, even those I rode on a Sunday afternoon, were at least moderately full. There were numerous standees on some rush-hour trips. It could be argued that, given the passenger loads, the 15-minute off-peak headways are not very generous.

In so far as I can tell, passengers included people from many social strata.

Calgary’s success in attracting riders is particularly noteworthy given that, like other cities in North America’s Great Plains and Prairies, it isn’t very densely populated. Most of the stations on the three newer lines are located in the middle of or next to major suburban arterials in parts of the urban area that were built to be moved around in by automobile. Some riders arrive by car; there are park-and-ride facilities at many stations. But numerous riders get to the stations by bus or on foot. Many stations come with bridges over nearby busy roads, but, once over the bridges, passengers face a pedestrian-unfriendly environment. The fact that Calgary’s CTrain has as many riders as it does is the best proof that there is that rail transit really can play an important role in a low-density North American city.

[2] Off-road trails. Calgary has also created a substantial off-road trail system. This system is rooted at least in part in the city’s favorable geography. Calgary is more or less bisected by the Bow River. Three affluents of the Bow—the Elbow River in the city’s southwest, Nose Creek in its north, and Fish Creek in the south—also cut across substantial parts of the city. In addition, there are several smaller streams in the area. Much of the water in the Bow and certain of its affluents comes from the Rocky Mountains, whose foothills lie just west of the city. Flow is quite irregular. During periods of substantial snowmelt (which occurs especially in the late spring) and after thunderstorms (which mostly occur in the summer), watercourses in Calgary can contain huge amounts of water. There have been several damaging floods in Calgary’s brief history. Settlers learned early to avoid building in the rivers’ floodplains. Some of this land was used for parks as long ago as the 1920s. But there were also places where railroad lines and industries were constructed close to the rivers. Most of these were abandoned or moved in the years after World War II, as the desire to rationalize railroad networks and modernize industry worked together with a preference for avoiding risk. This change in land use freed up a great deal of additional space that in many cases was acquired by the city government for additional parks.

Trails through these parklands were probably first established informally. In the 1960s and 1970s, as more and more people took up walking, running, and bicycling, the city started to pave long-established trails, with a considerable amount of support from the local Devonian Foundation and other non-government bodies. The Bow River Pathway was officially instituted in 1974 as a Centennial project.  By the early 1990s, Calgary had come to have one of North America’s most elaborate off-road trail networks, which has grown considerably in the years since, in part along the lines suggested by the Urban Park Master Plan (1994). The latter (220-page!) document was probably one of the first detailed plans for an off-road trail network compiled by a North American city.

Some sources claim that Calgary now has 900 km of off-road paths. I don’t know exactly how this figure was computed. I suspect it’s a bit high. It probably incorporates some sidewalk segments that fill gaps in the off-road trail system. The map above shows the approximate extent of Calgary’s trail network.⁴

These days, official Calgary seems quite proud of its trails. Tourist literature mentions them. The trails have become important to many of Calgary’s residents, who use them on quite a large scale, at least when the weather cooperates.

One thing that struck me was the variety of people on the trails. Calgary, like other big Canadian cities, has a substantial immigrant population, and it’s clear that immigrants make up a notable portion of trail users.

Calgary’s trail system is still being developed. One of changes in recent years has been the creation of separate pedestrian and bicycling paths along a substantial portion of the Bow River Pathway as it passes through the central city.

Maintaining these trails is now definitely felt to be an important government responsibility. I was struck as I walked along various trails at the number of places where improvements were under way.

Trails are not limited to the river valleys. In recent years, government agencies have been building short trails in parks, along highway rights-of-way, and on odd bits of vacant land throughout the city. Unlike the river trails, these don’t necessarily form part of a coherent network, but I’ll bet they are nonetheless useful to local dog walkers, runners, and others.

Calgary’s off-road trails are not perfect. Even in the Bow Valley, there are places where users are diverted onto neighborhood sidewalks for short distances. There are also many areas where the trails run uncomfortably close to major highways.

Most other North American cities have also been building off-road trails over the last several decades. Several of them—Ottawa, Washington, and Denver—have developed networks of trails that, in proportion to city size, are roughly as impressive as Calgary’s. Others—Atlanta and Boston, for example, which do not have conveniently available floodplains or canals or large numbers of abandoned rail lines to build along—have not done as much. But there has been some effort everywhere to build such facilities. Calgary was a pioneer in this effort, and its trail network remains one of the most substantial anywhere.

[3] Central-city densification. Calgary has managed to turn more of its inner-city neighborhoods into dense, bustling places than any other essentially 20th-century city in North America.

It’s important to remember how young a city Calgary is. It wasn’t incorporated until 1884, and it remained a miniscule place until well into the 20th century (its population in 1901 was 4,091). The 1946 census was the first to report a population of 100,000. Calgary’s urban-area population today is more than 1.6 million. In other words, more than 90% of Calgary’s population growth has occurred since World War II.⁵

The fact that so much of Calgary’s growth occurred so late had a direct effect on the nature of its built environment. Except—perhaps—for a small area around Downtown, virtually all of Calgary was constructed to fit the automobile. Most of Calgary’s land area is made up of post-World-War-II subdivisions of detached houses. In 2016 58.3% of its housing units consisted of such structures. Among Canada’s larger cities, only Winnipeg had a higher percentage. Although Calgary has had an active city-planning apparatus since World War II, until fairly recently there was little resistance to the pattern of private firms adding subdivisions to the city’s edge.⁶

Attitudes did begin to change as long ago as the late 1970s when the CTrain was being designed. Even then, plans called for higher density close to Downtown.⁷ But, over the last twenty or thirty years, Calgary’s planners—and, to some extent, public opinion—underwent the same kind of changes seen in urban areas throughout the Western world.⁸ Automobile-dependent subdivisions at the urban edge, which had been thought of as places where “normal” people aspired to live, started to be associated among a substantial part of the population with air pollution, overcrowded highways, long commutes, the blandness and anomie of suburban life, and “sprawl” (a word with a vague meaning that was never a complement). Denser, more “urban” places to live began to seem more desirable.

The result in Calgary was a very slow change in what got built where. Numerous new and often tall apartment buildings were constructed around Downtown, and the places where they were thick on the ground came to be referred to with neighborhood names that had a strongly positive connotation. Examples include the East Village, Eau Claire, and the West End, which surround Downtown proper on its eastern, northern, and western sides respectively. These days, the downtown skyline has nearly as many residential towers as commercial ones (most are, I’ll admit, shorter).

South of Downtown, that is, south of the Canadian Pacific tracks, a substantial area traditionally called Beltline, which was somewhat ragged and poor as late as the early 1990s, has undergone a slow process of gentrification. Of course, there were no genuinely old buildings to renovate, but some buildings from the 1920s were fixed up, and there was a huge amount of new residential construction.

Certain streets in Beltline—17th Avenue SW and 4th Street SW—that had sidewalk-adjacent commercial frontages dating from the streetcar era acquired restaurants and shops that came to be visited by people from the entire urban area.

The area also became known for its street festivals.

Across the Bow, areas like Kensington, Sunnyside, and Rosedale, which had never really undergone downward filtration,⁹ experienced less extreme gentrification and densification processes.

Here’s a map that suggests some of the shifts in Calgary’s population over the twenty-five years between 1996 and 2021:

Population density in 2021 was as high as 17,901 people per square kilometer in a small part of western Beltline. That’s an enormous figure for a city of the Great Plains. Here’s a map:

I was struck as I walked around Calgary’s inner-city neighborhoods at the extent to which pedestrian life was thriving. Of course, on a world scale, healthy pedestrian life in close-to-downtown neighborhoods is not exactly rare, but, in U.S. cities whose growth occurred mostly in the second half of the 20th century, it’s actually not usual at all. Consider that the Calgary area has approximately the same population and age as Oklahoma City, a place where pedestrians are pretty scarce. I’m sure that the neighborhoods surrounding downtown Calgary have a much more active pedestrian life than comparable neighborhoods even in much larger urban areas like Dallas, Houston, and Atlanta. It’s possible that there were more pedestrians on the most crowded blocks of 17th Avenue SW on the late Saturday afternoon when I was there than there normally are in the entire downtowns of Dallas, Houston, and Atlanta combined. Of course, I acknowledge that Canadian cities, despite their similarity to cities south of the border, have some widely discussed structural advantages when it comes to their ability to support what might be called traditional urban life. These include: (1) the near-absence in Canadian cities of neighborhoods (and population groups) that are widely felt to be dangerous; (2) the fact that city-planning agencies in Canadian cities have generally had more power than their counterparts in the United States and have sometimes used this power to nudge the built environment in the direction of greater density; (3) the fact that Canadians have generally been a little poorer than Americans (and hence more likely to live in apartments than in usually pricier detached houses);  (4) the fact that interest on mortgage loans is not tax-deductible in Canada (this lowers the incentive to spend as much on real estate); and (5) the higher proportion of recent immigrants in Canada’s urban populations (many of whom seem to lack the North American preference for living as far as possible from neighbors).

I don’t want to overstate my case here. Calgary’s inner-city, “walkable” neighborhoods occupy only a tiny fraction (maybe 2%) of the region’s area. The ten contiguous tracts around downtown with densities of more than 5000 people per square kilometer had a population in 2021 of 49,828, a little more than 3% of the region’s total. Only 6.3% of Calgary’s housing units were in apartment buildings of five stories or more in 2016, and 21.1% were in apartment buildings of any height, and—this is Canada—many of the apartment buildings are in not-so-walkable neighborhoods in the outer city.¹¹

Still, a small but substantial part of inner-city Calgary has become an agreeable place for people who prefer to live in dense urban environments. Many low-density U.S. cities—Dallas and Phoenix, for example—have wanted to create such neighborhoods, hoping that they would be attract younger, well-educated people, but they haven’t found it easy to do so for all sorts of reasons. Calgary has actually to some extent succeeded.

The cities of the Canadian Prairie Provinces—with their extreme temperatures and relative remoteness from established cosmopolitan places—have tended not to have a very positive reputation. Calgary has been seen by some as an exception to this generalization at least since the Winter Olympics were held in the Calgary region in 1988. The city’s agreeable inner-city neighborhoods—and its reasonably good public transportation and its abundant off-road trails—have been widely noted. These features have been at least indirectly responsible for the city’s being deemed to be among the most “liveable” cities in the world according to the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Global Liveability Index. In 2023, Calgary ended up in 7th place, ranking between Geneva and Zürich, ahead of Toronto and of several other urban areas that typically do well in this kind of poll. In earlier years it had done even better.¹² I’m not sure how easily any of Calgary’s attractive features could be replicated in the United States, but this is surely a possibility that’s worth thinking about.