Pedestrian Down! How Walking In Calgary Got So Deadly

We had, um, a driver hit and killed a senior on Monday, and another driver hit a family, killing a toddler in their stroller, uh, both of these in marked crosswalks.

Pedestrian safety is far and away the number one thing that we get calls and emails about in our office.

Like, it's not even close.

What kind of Calgary are we building? Calgarians have clearly said when you're on a record for fatalities and accidents with pedestrian safety, that's unacceptable.

You just heard Councilors Mike Atkinson, D.J. Kelly, and John Pantezopoulos.

The Sprawl just published a big story on pedestrian safety in Calgary, and you can read that piece on our website.

A decade ago, City Hall approved a pedestrian strategy that aimed to reduce carnage on city streets.

One of the goals was to get Calgary down to fewer than four pedestrian deaths a year by 2025.

But instead, we've gone backwards.

Pedestrian deaths jumped to 15 in 2025, a record high.

Now, after years of dithering, City Hall is trying to catch up, and in June, City Council voted unanimously to put an additional 6 million of surplus dollars towards street safety retrofits throughout the city, stuff like traffic calming and flashing beacons.

That motion was put forward by Councilor Nathaniel Schmidt.

Ultimately, every traffic incident is preventable, and the money that we spend on preventable injury and death is money well spent and that we need to do this now because the numbers are not slowing down.

There's a lot happening on the active transportation file right now.

While City Hall is trying to catch up on making its infrastructure safer, the Alberta government is threatening to rip out bike lanes in Calgary and Edmonton, one of many ways that the UCP has expanded its powers over Alberta municipalities in recent years.

And Councilor Dan McLean has a motion coming to council later in October that asks City Hall to pause all bike lane projects pending provincial legislative direction.

We're gonna hear directly from Councilor McLean about that in this episode.

We're also going to hear what Mayor Jeremy Farkas told me about all of this.

But this episode of Sprawlcast is a little bit different.

Usually, I'm the host.

For this one, I'm swapping chairs into the guest chair for most of it.

Peter Oliver recently had me on his CGSW show, The Palgrave Almanac, to talk about my story in The Sprawl.

We talk about what the province's ban on photo radar has meant.

We talk about what City Hall has and hasn't done on pedestrian safety.

And we talk about what's next as City Council gets ready to set the next four-year budget in November.