FOLLOWING A CRITICAL PATH
City wrestles with walkway woes
Saskatoon’s walkways were intended as a compromise between two duelling city designs. But in 2019, many are a frustration for the residents they were meant to help.
Last week, city council directed staff to take another look at the city’s walkways, which some neighbouring residents complain have become hubs for vandalism and crime.
Lesley Anderson, the city’s director of planning and development, says poor lighting, underutilization and limited accessibility have all contributed to resident concerns, which weren’t a factor when the paths were built in the 1970s.
“It was just one of those trends that came with the time,” Anderson said.
Back then, walkways were designed to address an entirely different problem.
Saskatoon’s design was split between a central grid and outlying neighbourhoods, which had a curvilinear layout optimized for cars.
“It was a design that was very popular among homeowners. But the drawback is it made walking in your own neighbourhood a more difficult thing to do. The advent of the walkway was supposed to solve this,” said Alan Wallace, president of the Saskatchewan Professional Planners Institute.
Wallace was a planner in Saskatoon for 32 years.
Pedestrians and cyclists had to walk whole crescents just to get to the next street, so the city designed walkways as a sort of compromise between the two designs by allowing pedestrians and cyclists to get from point A to point B faster.
But while “intentions were good, the execution was flawed,” Wallace said.
Neighbours adjacent to walkways wanted privacy and built opaque fences that made the pathways dark. Some fell out of use, and many were closed beginning in the early 2000s.
Cathy Watts, the co-chair of Saskatoon
Cycles, said connectivity between neighbourhoods is a huge issue for people without cars and that walkways are still ultimately integral to many travellers, but she acknowledges the hardships they’ve brought to neighbours.
“I have great sympathy with what’s happening to those residents,” Watts said. “I just feel like it’s a result of a city design.”
Anderson said it comes down to bigger design flaws of earlier decades, when planners weren’t considering factors like active transportation or environmental sustainability.
“North America is predominantly designed around the car,” Anderson said. “And when you compare that to Europe, let’s say, you get a very different style. Decades ago, (foot traffic) wasn’t something people were flagging as an issue. Now it is.”
There are alternatives. Anderson pointed to the city’s linear park paths in neighbourhoods like Silverspring, which increase connectivity without the associated problems of walkways.
Watts said Saskatoon in the 1970s was not so different from Saskatoon today. She said the debate over walkways is tied to a bigger conversation about the lack of connectivity in the city for people without cars.
“We have bits and spats of (connectivity) throughout the city but they don’t ever connect anything.”
As for the remaining dozens of walkways in the city, no solution is easy. Closing them typically requires adjacent homeowners to buy the land.
Wallace suggested they could be improved by having neighbours transition to chain-link fences and improving lighting, but acknowledged it probably isn’t realistic.
“It’s not easy to retrofit a city once it’s built,” Wallace said.
City council has directed staff to report back on walkways next year.