Crowchild Trail study from 1978 highlights road's lack of progress
'Why didn't we touch this for 40 years,' says councillor as new study gets underway
While the Crowchild Trail study chugs along what is going to be a long and winding road, the city recently posted a document on the web which not many Calgarians may have ever seen before.
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It's the 1978 functional planning study for Crowchild Trail north that lays out a $60-million multi-stage plan for the future of Crowchild from the Bow River to the northwest city limits.
It called for a six-lane expressway — something that Crowchild essentially has become with the exception of the often congested stretch between Kensington Road and 24th Avenue N.W.
The best reflection of the car-centric 1970s view in the functional study can be found in what's called Stage 1 — the free-flow fix between the river and University Drive.
A huge interchange would be developed in the Crowchild Trail, Memorial Drive and Kensington Road area. Fifth Avenue would be closed off to Crowchild, or as an alternative to link the communities on either side of the expressway, and perhaps a flyover could be built.
Of all the recommendations in the report, Stage 1 was projected to go first and to be completed by 1983. It was never done.
Lack of funds, for years
Recently retired Dale Hodges, who was first elected as the alderman for Ward 1 in 1983, recalls that the reason Stage 1 never happened was a lack of money (hello, early 1980s recession and National Energy Program).
But after Calgary won the right to host the 1988 Winter Olympics, other stages of the Crowchild plan moved up the priority list. Those other stages included getting the C-Train built along Crowchild so the LRT could reach Olympic venues at McMahon Stadium and the University of Calgary.
When plans emerged a couple of years ago for a fix to the congested stretch of Crowchild from south of the river through West Hillhurst, then Ward 8 alderman John Mar famously declared "over my dead body" when it was revealed dozens of houses would be lost to the plan.
That plan hasn't been talked about since.
City council ordered a full stop and asked the transportation department to return to the drawing board. In fact, one councillor says the city has gone further back than that — apparently it's talking about the shape of the drawing board.
The 1978 study was presented two years before current Ward 8 councillor Evan Woolley was born. He was intrigued to see what it included.
See before and after views of Crowchild Trail
Crowchild Trail study underway
"The question for me is not, 'Why didn't you do Phase 1?' Usually, we do re-iterations of planning documents on roads all the time. The question is, 'Why didn't we touch this for 40 years?'" Woolley said.
Crowchild still needs changes and that's why the current Crowchild Trail study is being done. Crowchild has always been contentious.
Indeed, the 1978 study includes a brief from a citizens' group called Mighty Effort Needed Against Crowchild Expansion, or MENACE for short.
Chief among the group's concerns is a list that sounds like it was drawn up in 2015: noise, impact on property values, vibrations from trucks, poor pedestrian access, ugly noise walls and loss of access.
However, many of the issues of 1978 remained unresolved in this stretch of Crowchild. Woolley says he's realistic about what changes are needed but there's still a lengthy public consultation to come.
"I have a recognition that Crowchild Trail is a very important north-south connector for goods movement and for public transit movement. The interesting thing about the argument: 'Oh my God, why are we building a city for cars?' Well, actually our bus systems aren't working properly there, and our goods movement,... these are things that matter to our economy," said Woolley.
Non-expressway alternative?
There's been talk that fulfilling the long-held vision of Crowchild as a six-lane expressway will cost hundreds of millions of dollars. There's also been talk about finding a non-expressway alternative, one involving bus lanes and better cycling infrastructure.
No matter what vision you believe in, the fact remains that Calgary is currently dealing with some 1960s transportation infrastructure in West Hillhurst that isn't functioning terribly well 50 years later.
Woolley is willing to follow the years-long Crowchild process that the city has embarked upon.
"Do I wish we had made, our forefathers, had made better decisions to invest earlier? Yes I do," said Woolley.
For one thing, the environmental toll of congestion or drivers' frayed nerves aside, the cost of fixing Crowchild has only gone up significantly from 1978.
No matter what the current study finds, the massive cost of any proposal to change, fix or repair that clogged stretch of Crowchild Trail is still not currently in the city's budget plans.
- See a portion of the Crowchild Trail study from 1978