Wise Words on Walkability

LET’S NOT BLAME CALGARY’S LACK OF WALKABILITY ON ITS CLIMATE. I’VE ATTEMPTED TO LIVE THE WALKABILITY LIFESTYLE IN A HOTTER CLIMATE AND IT DIDN’T WORK THERE, EITHER.’

I love these new buzzwords that crop up out of nowhere and then, from one day to the next, they’re on everyone’s lips.

Up until last week, I’d never heard of a bitumen bubble, but now this delightfully alliterative phrase is rolling off everybody’s tongue. And until federal NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair popularized Dutch disease, it was all about elm trees for me.

“Walkability” is another. My Canadian Oxford has “walkable” and even “go walkabout” (“Austral. go on a walkabout”), but “walkability” is conspicuous by its absence.

Last week, however, walkability was the word on the street, although Calgary streets themselves are deemed to lack this quality. According to a Seattle group called Walk Score, Calgary ranked last among Canadian cities for its walkability.

What that means is you can’t traipse over to The Brick and walk home pushing your new couch ahead of you. I guess we could raze the whole city, put up a few tents on the banks of the Bow River, just like old times, and start from scratch planning our ideal new Calgary 2.0.

But it’s much easier just to acknowledge, as Ald. Shane Keating did, that “We can’t have a society where everyone walks to the grocery store.”

No, we can’t. The reason is that, unless you live right around the corner from it, walking to the grocery store, getting a few items and walking home again takes about three hours. As compared to maybe 20 minutes by car.

If you walk, you can bring home two, maybe three bags at the most. Four bags, and your blood supply is cut off from the plastic handles knotting themselves ever tighter around your fingers as you tramp along. Creeping paralysis begins to ooze its way up your wrists, arms and shoulders early on in the walk home. Plus, one edge of that 900-gram box of spaghetti will begin to work a determined hole through the bag as you walk along, even if you have double-bagged. And when the hole is big enough, the pickle jar you rashly bought will tumble out onto the pavement, along with five cans of tuna, which will roll merrily away in different directions and land in some disgusting, unidentifiable muck. You’ll frantically cram it all into your other bag, and wonder if there are now shards of glass in the pickle brine.

Walkability severely limits your grocery list. No milk cartons (too heavy), glass jars (ditto) or a lot of cans (more ditto). No ice cream or other frozen food in warm weather.

In winter, of course, the ice cream will come in handy when you slip on an icy sidewalk. You can use it to cushion your fall. Kind of.

And if you set your ice cream pail on top of a snowbank at the curb, you can use it as an aid to propel yourself over the pile of snow.

You can trundle your groceries home in one of those lightweight wheeled carts, but you’re still limited by weight, volume, weather considerations, and the level of industriousness with which the people who live along your route home have shovelled and de-iced their sidewalks.

But let’s not blame Calgary’s lack of walkability on its climate. That would be a cop-out. I’ve attempted to live the walkability lifestyle in a hotter climate and it didn’t work there, either.

During a brief time that I lived in San Antonio, Texas, I quickly discovered why I was the only one in the neighbourhood who walked home from the grocery store. Everyone else went by car, even though the store was a five-minute walk around the corner at the end of the street. It is because when you walk home in 35-degree heat, five minutes is all it takes for butter to melt into a squishy mess, for frozen chicken to warm up to the point where it might start clucking at any moment, and for anything chocolate to dissolve into a formless blob.

Not to be deterred, I figured it should be safe to walk to the other end of our lovely, tree-lined street to get toothpaste at the pharmacy there. But when I got to the pharmacy and went inside, there was no toothpaste. There weren’t even any shelves. Some Spanish-speaking men were sitting on stools at a counter and they all fell silent and turned to look at me. What a lot of clerks this pharmacy seemed to have. “Where do you have toothpaste?” I asked them. They said nothing.

I figured there must be a side entrance to the pharmacy, so I went out and tried another door. All that happened was the men turned to watch me come in the other door. I went back outside and looked up at the sign. That’s when I noticed that someone had changed the “p” in Pharmacy to a “b” and that the place was actually the “Bharmacy.”

So ended my experiment with walkability.

I’m taking the car from now on — and I’m sure the guys in the Bharmacy would raise a glass to that.