Observation and opinion about life in Calgary.
I ventured into the city centre a couple times last week, and I thought that I would share a few of the things I thought about afterwards.
A trip downtown.
About 10 years ago I let my driver’s license expire without renewing it seeing as I hadn’t driven in years I figured why bother, it wasn’t like I was about to start again all of a sudden. It was too damn expensive and frankly, I wasn’t crazy about sharing the roads with the many fools that seem to be on them now anyway. If I need to get anywhere there’s public transit, taxicabs, or the ride-sharing option with Uber, though I primarily use the transit system. I’ve done so for the majority of my life actually, so I have had the opportunity to see the many changes that have happened in this city over the years both good and bad, though over the last decade or so most of the changes have been for the bad.
It got to the point that I no longer went downtown on transit or otherwise unless I absolutely needed to. Transit-related problems aside, the downtown core is simply not that safe of a place to be anymore, at least that is how I perceive things to be. Over the last two or three years the number of reports in the news about seemingly random attacks on people in the core has become routine. Sadly there have been fatalities, usually involving either edged weapons or brutal assaults.
Dr. Gondek’s happy LRT ride.
https://calgaryherald.com/news/local-news/calgary-transit-ctrain-safety-jyoti-gondek-ride-along
Last month Calgary Mayor Dr. Jyoti Gondek (or is it Dr. Mayor Gondek?) took to the transit system, travelling an entire four city blocks while surrounded by several members of the press and some large members of the Calgary Police Service and transit security. She was on her way to hold a press conference two stops up from city hall, where she would go on to laud the efforts made by herself and the rest of her city council colleagues to spend more money on police and security to clean up those problematic safety concerns that are being aired by many transit riders. If she wanted to see the realities of the C-Train (C for Crime, Crazy, etc.) then she ought to go incognito and ride the length of both lines at a variety of times a day. I can guarantee you it would be a definite eye-opener for her, just like I can also guarantee you that she’d never do it in the first place. As we learned (or not) with our last mayor, academics make absolutely lousy city administrators, seeming to verify the saying that “those who can, do, and those who can’t, teach.”
Another zombie at a train station.
You can see them at many LRT stations outside of the core among other locations throughout many Calgary communities now, these wretched, motionless, zombie-like individuals hunched over after smoking heroin that has been laced with fentanyl. Some stand doubled over for several minutes, unmoving, while others collapse on benches or the ground. Some will overdose, requiring emergency intervention from a naloxone injection, while others may need multiple shots of the opioid agonist to get them breathing again.
I saw just such a man on the platform of Heritage LRT Station this week, sitting hunched over and motionless like so many others who have just smoked crystal meth that has been laced with fentanyl. I continued walking by him and stood about 40 feet up the platform from where he sat. A train going south came into the station, and as the passengers began to make their way to the station, I noticed a guy who was standing near the man on the bench move over to him and grab onto him. The man on the bench was starting to slump over and was not looking in a good way at all. He was a young First Nations man with dark skin, so when I was able to see that his lips were turning blue I knew the guy was in bad shape. His pulse was racing but his breathing was very shallow, and he wasn’t initially responding when I began to pinch the back of his arm to try to get a pain response from him.
After getting no initial response I went over to the emergency call box to get some assistance, then went back to help the other guy lay the man on the ground in the recovery position. A couple minutes later a Transit Security van pulled up and as two officers walked up the platform towards us my train downtown was arriving. I made sure he was breathing before I got in the middle car, sitting by myself at the far end of the car. I was starting to think that I should probably start carrying a naloxone kit in my backpack, in much the same way that many other people in Calgary and elsewhere had started doing. I stopped off at the pharmacy on the way home and picked one up, and remembered a conversation that I had with my brother only a couple of weeks before he died. He told me that he had overdosed only a few days before and that it took three doses of naloxone to bring him around again. There are three doses in a kit.
Yahoo indeed.
If the weather is hot in Calgary with severe afternoon thunderstorms that produce damaging hail that can only mean one thing, it’s time for the Stampede, and as the C-Train made its way toward downtown it passed by the Grounds which had come to life with the midway once again being set up and the various rides assembled. If you had your eyes closed and missed seeing the Stampede grounds it would become rather obvious upon arriving downtown that it was that time of year again.
In just about every retail business and along a good part of Stephen Avenue, ubiquitous hay bales assist in the transformation from the modern day to the old west, or at least that’s the idea anyway. For ten days at the beginning of every July office workers and other professionals can shed their business attire and replace it with a western ensemble that includes jeans, a button-down western shirt, and cowboy boots which are also known colloquially as “shit kickers” in these here parts.
Free pancake breakfasts will be popping up all over the city, where people will stand in line for 45 minutes to get a half-raw pancake with a piece of rubbery bacon cooked in the middle of it. The number of people attending these events provides one with some insight into the lengths that some will go to in order to get something for free, even if it’s a subpar meal.
Being a lifelong Calgarian I had my fill of the Stampede a long time ago, having ridden the rides, seen the shows, and paid the premium prices to drink in a beer garden. I’m not really much of a crowd person either and they are estimating that 1.5 million people will be entering the gates this year, so that alone is enough for me to eschew attending. If you are going to enjoy the festivities do so responsibly, as Stampede also brings with it an increase in syphilis infections and alcohol-related visits to the emergency room.
Scourge of the summer streets.
No, I don’t mean the meth addicts. I’m referring instead to the e-scooters that are clogging downtown walking areas and are part of the City of Calgary’s “Shared Micromobility Program” which also includes e-bicycles.
https://www.calgary.ca/bike-walk-roll/electric-scooters.html
Data from other North America cities have demonstrated a wide range of benefits of shared micromobility programs including:
- Filling in the gap for the vital first/last mile by encouraging people to walk, cycle and take public transit more often.
- Saving time on short trips.
- Providing access to various transportation options for all demographics.
- Improving people’s physical health by providing transportation options that encourage citizens to be more physically active.
Their arguments extolling the benefits of the program are specious at best, and as I see it this is nothing more than another weapon the city is using in its war against cars. I’m sure that part of the thinking that went into this was to get these bikes and scooters zooming along in the bike lanes in order to create some traffic on them, or at least the illusion of it anyway.
I’m curious to know how many EMS responses and emergency room visits have been attributable to the program since its inception and will have to look into this further at a later date.
We have bike lanes why again?
As I look up and down the nearly empty (and grossly under-utilized) bike lanes throughout downtown, I can almost hear the pro-bike-lane set account for the lack of traffic by saying that I must have walked by at a particularly slow point during a particularly slow day. Mid-morning, after rush hour, on a mid-week day, in the first week of July might tend to be quieter than usual downtown, but I’ve seen the traffic on a variety of days, at different times, in all four seasons. All I can say is that it really doesn’t look much different from this picture anytime.
Driving into the core from any direction during the morning rush hour could prove to be difficult enough before the bike lanes were introduced, but afterward, it just added to the stress. The same number of vehicles would be driving in every day, only now they would have even fewer lanes to use which only made things more difficult. One of the theories being put forth in support of bike lanes was that they would encourage more people to bike to work, leading to fewer vehicles entering the core. Didn’t quite work out the way they were hoping it would.
Your tax dollars hardly at work.
This sign has been at the corner of 5th Street and 10th Avenue SW for some time now, only the last time I saw it a matter of months ago it wasn’t broken. I could never figure out how they came up with the number of cyclists that it claimed to report and frankly, I treated any information with a great deal of suspicion. To me, it was nothing more than propaganda from the municipal mind trust to justify their politicization of social engineering, and in all likelihood came with a hefty price tag.
What? The City of Calgary wasting millions of dollars due to poor planning, an incompetent lack of research, and absolutely no common sense?
The million-dollar toilet.
To be honest I haven’t been to Tompkins Park in some time so I don’t know if this thing is still there or not. Likely as not the total costs have now risen to over $1 Million since the time I wrote this article.
The Peace Bridge Calatravesty.
In July 2022 a 58-year-old homeless man vandalized the Peace Bridge, damaging eighty percent of the glass panels on the bridge with a hammer, a piece of rebar, and bricks, causing $1 Million in damage. Because the culprit is indigent there is no chance of recovering any of this from his future earnings or through the sale of assets, therefore the city will be eating the whole thing.
Frankly, I think it ought to be covered by the idiots who decided to hire an incompetent architect to build what according to Druh Farrell was “a turning point in how we perceive ourselves and how we perceive urban beauty and the fact that we deserve beauty in our city.”
Mayor Dave (King of the West sigh-eed) Bronconnier (Land speculator extraordinaire.)
Bob Hawkesworth (private sector)
Druh (The Shruh) Farrell (failed NDP candidate in last provincial election)
John Mar (Unknown)
Joe Ceci (NDP MLA and former cabinet minister)
Brian Pincott (private sector-Winnipeg)
Linda Fox-Mellway (unknown)
https://theculturetrip.com/europe/spain/articles/santiago-calatrava-architectures-biggest-scandal/
Perhaps Calgary should join Venice et al in holding the Spanish slouch financially responsible for his ineptitude.
I only wish Calgary voters were able to do the same for their municipal leaders.
The Advocate-Equalizer 