MB provided this moving comment to “Seniors …” It deserves foreground treatment:
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My mother lost her independence in 2003 and has required top-of-the-line care ever since. One day her church bought her an electric wheelchair (I suppose there should be a payback after 30+ years of paying tithes) and it was quite liberating over the next decade.
The most serious limitations to her mobility remain the deeply suburban location of her care facility in Calgary, a city that must still undergo light years of evolution despite relatively successful ridership rates on its C-Train network. Its HandiBus service is inconvenient at best, excruciating at worst, and she has stopped using it due to its inadequacies dealing with long milk runs through excessively sprawling subdivisions. Snow on the sidewalks and streets is a transportation killer to octogenarians – with or without electric wheelchairs — and perhaps the majority of them stay cooped up all winter, even on nice days.
It all gets down to measuring urban accessibility. There she is, 530 meters from a light rail station, yet it might as well be on Mars due to its inaccessibility from the surrounding neighbourhood even on the finest summer day. One of the profound lessons Calgary is just beginning to learn is to bring the light rail system to where people live, work and shop. Decades of experience should have taught transportation planners and urbanists there to stop placing LRT on the most convenient and cheapest freight rail corridors or in the centre median of major roaring arterial corridors isolated blocks distant from jobs and homes.
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In an ideal world my mother’s care facility could have been built in a mid-rise at Chinook Centre (above), a suburban mall encompassed by hundreds of acres of open tarmac screaming for high-density development and a direct rapid transit link if there ever was one. (The current Chinook Station is located on the CPR corridor in an industrial park 440m from the Centre with its thousands of jobs. The potential reminds me of Vancouver’s Oakridge.) How satisfying it would be if a disabled octogenarian grandmother could access a couple of kilometres of “indoor streets” in the Centre and then the entire city via a universally accessible rapid transit system simply by pressing an elevator button.
It is very painful for an urbanist to see a disabled loved one being denied access to her family, social network and community outside of the care facility simply because the community was suckered into building a city for cars instead of humans. The widely-accepted suffering imposed on the mobility-challenged in our cities should become a matter of human rights sooner or later.
I think the most poignant note is that the city was built for cars rather than people.
Trying to insert LRT into an already built environment requires expensive grade separation (tunnel or overhead guideway) or making use of whatever space the built environment has left available for the purpose. Old railway corridors are perfect for construction, but are often unsuitable from an accessibility standpoint. I wouldn’t be too hard on Calgary for wanting to build something at reasonable cost, using an available right of way and then trying to adapt the built environment to fit. That’s exactly what we’re doing in Burnaby. The Expo line runs along an old rail corridor and the Millennium line runs along a highway. Both are the type of hostile pedestrian environment MB has decried, but over time the industrial rail lands and highway oriented retail will be transformed into something far more friendly and transit focused. The hostile elements of the environment are being tamed, albeit slowly. I expect the same thing to happen in Calgary. There’s nothing a developer likes more than vacant land in a sea of already developed properties. Sadly the lady at the centre of this story will probably not live to see Chinook transformed into a transit oriented hub, but we should not give up hope that it will happen eventually.
“The widely-accepted suffering imposed on the mobility-challenged in our cities should become a matter of human rights sooner or later.”
While I agree in principle, the practice is what matters. In the USA the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) imposed a duty on transit agencies to provide accessible services. Lifts on high floor buses have been the most frequent response. Specialized door to door services like HandyDART here (or Handibus in Calgary) are only required in the area served by conventional service a fixed distance from the route. This results in a much more restricted service area than in Canadian cities. Some people get HandyDART in areas not served by conventional accessible transit. In the US the “right” only extends to equality with able bodied people who live in places where they can get to a bus stop relatively easily.
I visited Calgary while researching how eligibility for Handibus compared to HandyDART. As a result of the City of Calgary being responsible for both transit and social services, I thought their system then superior to ours but incapable of transfer to our situation.
As always, refusing to provide adequate funding for transit service while “investing” in roads is the real problem. Cuts to the already inadequate HandyDART budget being the most egregious example of this “concentrate on the costs, ignore the social benefits” approach.
Are there care facilities in close proximity to facilities other than “the mall”?
i.e. in another neighbourhood within downtown or near a community centre, etc.?
It seems like the choice of a care facility “in the suburbs” is part of the problem.
As David notes, sites like this are changing…
In 2013, the parking lots between Chinook Centre and MacLeod Trail were rezoned with substantial increases in height and density with the allowance of upper storey office, hotel, and residential uses. The new zoning also includes extra height and density for residential uses, including bonus density for the provision of affordable housing, and requirements for the creation of new publicly-accessible open space.
The whole area between the mall and the LRT station is also covered by the Chinook Station Area Redevelopment Plan, which provides for transition to a more intensive mix of uses in a more urban format. The main road between the LRT and the mall actually sees the highest pedestrian volumes outside of Calgary’s centre, and has major (pedestrian/public realm) upgrades funded within the next ten years.
So while the market may not catch up in time for MB’s mother, it’s certainly moving in the direction MB is advocating…
Zoning: http://www.calgary.ca/PDA/pd/Documents/Direct-Control-Districts/2013/2013d72.pdf
Plan: http://www.calgary.ca/PDA/pd/Documents/Publications/chinook-sap.pdf
The plight of seniors is a major challenge. In Ottawa, we have formed a committee of seniors and agency reps, the Ottawa Seniors Transportation Committee, with subcommittees dealing with walking, hospital parking, older drivers, transit, and rural transportation. The latter subcommittee has succeeded in getting Paratransit to expand beyond the boundaries of the urban-only fixed-route system, and in reducing rates considerably or an awkward and confusing “zone” system. For regular transit, Wednesdays are free for seniors and cash fares have been reduced, compared to adult fares. The walking s/cttee is doing neighbourhood walkability audits, and our older-drivers s/cttee is developing a “driving-retirement” educational component. The hospital-parking s/cttee has got the main hospital (three campuses) to develop a “bookmark” parking brochure for visitors/clients, and to deal with high parking costs (the Province endorses high rates, to help with budget shortfalls), we are working on a park-n-ride proposal that would provide both parking and a short-term bus pass for 40 percent of what the hospital charges for 90-minutes-plus of parking.
I would be interested in hearing of any other similar committees/groups in other cities.
Chris Bradshaw (hearth@ties.ottawa.on.ca).