Dutch students pitch solution for Calgary train tracks
Stephen Hunt | CBC News | Posted: March 9, 2018 11:45 PM | Last Updated: March 9, 2018
They would move them to the city's east side, and reroute them around instead of through Calgary
It's no secret that Calgary is divided by its railroad tracks.
Now, a group of Dutch students who sat down for five months and analyzed Calgary have devised a radical, long-term solution that's positively utopian.
The answer, according to a professor and a Dutch student who appeared Thursday on The Homestretch, is to move the tracks to the east side of the city and re-route them around it.
It's all part of a program put together by Safer Calgary — a coalition of concerned citizens and groups interested in decreasing the potential for preventable harm and death in Calgary — which has teamed up with a classroom of Dutch urban planning students for six years now.
They discuss innovative solutions to Calgary's urban dilemmas, as a means of stirring up the debate, said Safer Calgary's executive director, Greg Hart.
"They are always encouraged to take really radical approaches, so they can expand the imaginations of people working here," said Hart. "And I would say this project qualifies as being a pretty radical approach."
The approach was devised by the class working 40 hours a week, for nearly five months, trying to solve a problem that has vexed Calgarians for a long, long time.
"If you see these train tracks, from a historical perspective, it's quite logical that they're there — because they're one of the reasons why Calgary exists in the end," said Paul van de Coevering, the Dutch professor who supervised the project.
"But nowadays," he added, "is it still logical to have these trains with all the dangerous goods running through these centres (of cities)? That's one of the challenges the students took up. I think it's possible to remove it."
Neighbourhood analysis
The students started by analyzing Ramsay and Inglewood, and their fraught relationship with the freight trains that transport material through their neighbourhoods.
"Then we looked further, to Calgary, and we thought those train tracks are the big barrier in the city," said student planner Juul Doggen. "Let's try to remove it and see what happens if we do. And what cost it will be and how long it will take to do it?"
Doggen answered her own questions.
"It would take 35 years to remove it," she said, "and to rebuild on the east side of the city, going around instead of through. And it will cost about $1 billion."
Doggen acknowledged there was no easy, fast or cheap solution.
"That's why it takes 35 years," she said. "Because you can't quit the trains. They have to keep running through. So It's like a big puzzle, of building, and removing … to get all the tracks out of the city."
'A linear park connecting 21 neighbourhoods'
What would the students replace the tracks and rail yards with?
"We plan to make it into a linear park that would connect 21 neighbourhoods in Calgary together by a park with a bicycle path instead of the train tracks," Doggen said.
"It would become a connector, instead of dividing neighbourhoods in the city."
The linear park would be 59-kilometres long.
One of the prototypes of such a notion, albeit on a smaller scale, is the High Line in New York's Chelsea neighbourhood of West Manhattan.
Judging by the property boom that the High Line has inspired since it opened a decade ago, Hart says there's an argument to be made that such a development could conceivably pay for itself.
"By liberating all this land, you actually liberate an enormous amount of value," he said. "If you look at the intensity of development around the High Line, land values and everything else, this is — without question — it's a net positive in terms of the economics around this, without question."
As far as various stakeholders go, the students did discuss the idea with residents of Ramsay and Inglewood.
"They were really excited," Doggen said. "As soon as you mention train tracks out, people are excited — and they think, 'Yeah! This should happen! Because we want to get rid of it!'"
So far, Canadian Pacific has offered no response — although, according to Doggen, the railway company just received the plans Wednesday.
"I'm really looking forward to seeing what they think about it," she said.
Hart added that if the project were to proceed at an accelerated pace, it could be completed within 25 years. Doggen said some neighbourhoods would begin benefiting within a decade.
It may or may not happen, but for Hart and Safer Calgary, it's all about starting a conversation.
"This is really something that spurs the discussion in Calgary regarding these train tracks," he said, "and this is what's really necessary, I think."
Calgary: The Road Ahead is CBC Calgary's special focus on our city as we build the city we want — the city we need. It's the place for possibilities. A marketplace of ideas. So. Have an idea? Email us at: calgarytheroadahead@cbc.ca
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