Utility conflicts on 6th avenue prevented proper sidewalk trees on this one. If they were to be placed, they would have had to be right in the middle of the sidewalk, not too different from the bicycle racks.
Argh, I figured. Bicycle rack bolts only go down through the sidewalk slab if I am not mistaken, are any utilities shallow enough to block the racks from being installed on the curb or against the building?
The location of these racks - like many, many bike rack locations installs - fails to think through what using a bicycle and being a pedestrian is actually like. Many days a lot of the racks will be empty, but throw in a bike on either side of a single rack, or someone with a widen/cargo type bike or with a trailer, or someone parking at a slight angle and all of sudden the footpath is obstructed or narrowed. This wouldn't be a problem if the footpath was wide enough, but by placing the racks in the middle which divides the generous foot width, it's almost guaranteed that this will happen regularly. The location being a grocery store, is likely to have pedestrians carrying bags or towing carts meaning conflicts on that side will also occur. Having a single 3m wide unobstructed footpath is significantly more useful than having two 1.5m footpaths separated by bicycle storage.
I guess that's where I get most frustrated by our sidewalks - we clearly know how to build good ones, we sometimes do. However, more often we compromise sidewalk width and function on behalf of pretty much any other need we can think of (utilities, vehicle traffic lanes, parking lanes, laybys and loading zones, sloped alley ramps, unusually wide traffic signal poles to accommodate overhanging signals, traffic signal control boxes, bus shelters, randomly placed benches, ornamental street flag poles, even sometimes we have trees where we shouldn't!).
I get that compromises are inevitably required, however we have almost no sidewalks that are sufficiently wide, unobstructed and straight for more than a few blocks anywhere in the pedestrian core of the city. Even Stephen Ave isn't unobstructed for more than a block, if you exclude the roadway (which you often have to). Pedestrian-only areas like our LRT platforms downtown have a wild amount of obstructions that impede pedestrian movements too.
Our contemporaries in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver all have their share of inferior public realm and insufficient sidewalk widths, but they are *far* more consistent in pedestrian-heavy areas on ensuring that the footpath is straight and unobstructed, whether that is a new build or a historic main street. In those cities you rarely have to stop to let someone pass you on the walk or step into the road, something a typical Calgarian for a walk on many of our urban main streets has to do regularly, even before a 2m social-distance rule was in place.
This sidewalk is far superior to most in the inner city. If the racks were only a foot from the curb I wouldn't have posted anything. Pedestrian design is all in the details, if we can't get it right on the new projects with so much space, what chance do we have to get it right in the tricky parts of constrained right-of-way where the damage is already done from decades of compromises?
