Bridgeland-Riverside Water Main replacement at 7A Street NE

Hi Bridgeland-Riverside,

The Ward 9 Office received notice that there is water main work starting September 24. The work is estimated to take 2 weeks to complete and will effect the area in the picture below.

The City of Calgary will be replacing a water main on 7A Street NE, from Centre Ave NE to 1st Ave NE. The City has chosen to replace the water mains in this area given the past history of water main breaks and age of the infrastructure.

The City has chosen to replace the water mains in this area given the past history of water main breaks and age of the infrastructure.

If you would like more information, please click the link for the notice that was sent by Water Resources on September 12 giving more information about the water main replacement program.

If you would like more information on the project, you may also contact North Star Contracting’s project manager, Michael Campese, at 403-370-4434.

Please let your neighbours know.

Thanks!

Your Team Ward 9

Clarification on supervised consumption site community mail outs

While the City of Calgary is an interested group in these discussions, the ultimate decision lies with the provincial government.

I want to give you a heads up that some of you in certain areas in your community will be receiving a mail out from HIV Community Link, the organization contracted by Alberta Health Services to provide advisory support to the development of supervised consumption services in Calgary, on behalf of the Province.

The card states that a supervised consumption site is coming to your community. This is not actually the case – one site is proposed for the east end of downtown while the other is proposed along 17 Avenue SE.

As part of their communications plan, HIV Community Link is mailing out postcards to postal codes whose boundaries intersect within a 1 km radius of the proposed location in the east end of downtown, and 2 km radius of the 17 Avenue SE proposed location.

While the City of Calgary is an interested group in these discussions, the ultimate decision lies with the provincial government.

If you are interested in learning more, contact HIV Community Link to register for one of their engagement sessions. You can contact them by visiting their website at www.calgaryscs.com, emailing them at supervisedconsumption@hivcl.org, or calling them at 587-393-4095.

As engaged communities, there is no shortage of items, ideas, and projects to be informed about and provide your feedback.

Please keep us in the loop when you provide your comments and submit your comments, we’re interested in hearing your feedback.

Thank you,

Gian-Carlo

Achieving our values through our budget

Date: September 11, 2018

The Budget.

It’s the most important thing we as a city do. It drives what our neighbourhoods look like, how we’re connected, and how essential services are delivered to us all.

Every four years, The City creates business plans and budgets. This year is no different. This new four-year (2019-2022) budget program called One Calgary is becoming more service-focused. To do this, each department is putting forward their budget by service delivery, instead of by department.

Over the years, I’ve heard that you want to know more about the services provided, how your tax dollars are invested, how that investment is delivered to you everyday, and how that investment shapes your future.

This new way of viewing The City’s service plans and budgets will make it clear what services are provided, how much those services cost, and how those services provide you value. You’ve told me that there are things that matter to you that you feel are inadequately funded, with some of these everyday things - like snow removal, parks maintenance, illegal dumping, bylaw officers, and traffic calming.

I’ve also heard from you that the larger items that will shape our city for the better aren’t given the appropriate amount of resources, and it’s shown through the lack of funding. Items like transportation, pedestrian and cycling infrastructure, affordable housing, planning and development policies and programs like Main Streets and Step Forward, along with the seniors Age-Friendly Strategy (to name a few) aren’t budgeted for in a way that will deliver our success into the future.

I’m calling on you and your neighbours to tell me what your funding priorities are. Photo source: Iris Jegen

The City will begin engaging you on the One Calgary budget process in November, but I want your feedback much sooner than that. While I know from many of you who have attended the Ward 9 Community Objectives Workshops what your priorities are, I’m calling on you and your neighbours to tell me what your funding priorities are so that during budget deliberations, I can have laser clarity and ensure that the resources and tools that we need to continue building Great Neighbourhoods is locked into the budget.

Please send me an email at ward09@calgary.ca with your name, community, and your top 10 important items so they can be addressed during budget deliberations. The more responses, the better. 

If you would like more information, feel free to check out some more of the budget pages:

• One Calgary

• Our Services

• 2019-2022 Service Plans and Budgets hub page at calgary.ca/yourservices

I hope to hear from you soon.

Gian-Carlo

P.S. sign-up for my Ward 9 e-newsletter at www.bit.ly/Ward9Newsletter

Join us for the Ward 9 Traffic Safety Meeting

Join us for the annual ward 9 Traffic Safety Meeting. Photo source Lisa Wolansky.

Did you know that The City of Calgary and Calgary Police Service host annual meetings about traffic safety in each ward?

On Monday, November 5 from 7:00 PM to 8:00 PM at the Forest Lawn Community Association (4020 26 Avenue SE) the annual Ward 9 Traffic Safety Meeting will be taking place. 

The Community Traffic Safety meetings are a great opportunity to learn about traffic safety initiatives in your community and provide your input on how we all can improve traffic safety in our neighbourhoods.

Presentations by The City and Calgary Police Service highlight work being done, followed by an open discussion with various safety experts from The City of Calgary, Calgary Police Service, and Ward 9 Councillor Gian-Carlo Carra.

Please RSVP by sending an email to ward09@calgary.ca

Improving street safety in our neighbourhoods

The goal of this work is to reduce collisions, the severity of collisions that occur, and make our neighbourhood streets safer for all users. Photo source: Dreamstime

Hello Ward 9! Happy fall. I am writing this article to tell you about a very exciting notice of motion that six of my colleagues and I on Calgary City Council are bringing forward to the September 10 Meeting of Council.

Councillor Gian-Carlo Carra shares his thoughts on the Street Safety and Neighbourhood Speed Limits and Vision Zero.

The Notice of Motion is entitled ‘Street Safety and Neighbourhood Speed Limits’. What we are looking to achieve is the culmination of many years of work and advocacy for Great Neighborhoods, and many years of listening to people at their doorsteps. That work, which is now within The City of Calgary’s jurisdiction due to the new City Charter, is to decrease speeding in residential neighbourhoods, on residential roads throughout Calgary, by defaulting the speed limit on residential roads to 30 kilometres per hour.

Why 30 km/h matters

Why 30 kilometers an hour? The science is clear that that is the point where our neighbourhoods and communities gets a lot safer for everyone who works, plays, and lives there. It is stunning to know that collisions involving people who walk cost society $120,000,000 dollars a year. At 30 kilometers an hour you feel a lot less concerned about the impact of neighbourhood traffic on your life and lifestyle, and importantly, in neighbourhood zones, it has a minimal impact on people's commute times.

Can 40 km/h work instead of 30 km/h?

There have been some people who have asked me whether 40 kilometres per hour is a decent compromise. To be honest, while it sounds like a common sense place to start, the science does not support it. In fact, what we know is that when collisions happen at 40 kilometres, survivability starts to decrease substantially. The fact of the matter is that 30 kilomteres per hour has the best balance of safety and travel times.

What do you mean by residential roads?

Often we think about residential roads as all streets in the neighbourhood. For the purposes of this Notice of Motion and the direction we’re looking to provide to City Administration, that is not accurate. In this case a ‘residential road’ would be roads that do not have lane markings on them. Different roads in Calgary have different ‘road classifications’, and not ever road found in a neighbourhood and community is a residential one – it could be a ‘Collector’, ‘Skeletal’, or ‘Arterial’ one.  

If you think about it, non-lined streets with no lane markings represent a small fraction of our commutes - about one minute – and the benefit for our collective and individual qualities of life is clear and obvious when we think about what safer, more walkable, and congenial neighbourhoods means to us. 

But the benefits to our quality of life do not end there. Lowering the speed limit in our neighbourhoods and communities also saves lives.

Read the Notice of Motion in .PDF format

View fullsize

This Notice of Motion will be going to Council for debate on September 10, 2018.

Is 50 km/h really THAT dangerous?

It is known and proven that at 30 kilometers an hour, one in 10 people will die from a collision with a vehicle. At 50 kilometers per hour, Calgary’s current default limit, that number skyrockets to nine in 10. The chances of accidents dramatically as our speed increases because our ability to see what’s around us and react quickly to unexpected circumstances as we drive decreases as the speed goes up.

Additionally, Council will be continuing the work that was started by the Step Forward pedestrian strategy which recognizes that lower neighbourhood speeds are key to making communities and neighbourhoods safer and more desirable.

Our neighbourhoods future matters

I am super excited that there’s a lot of support on Council for this. I am also very excited for the debate, both publicly in the lead up to September 10.

I have heard from many residents and businesses on this issue and I want you to know that I have given it full thought as there is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution to some of the specific questions we may have about the roads we use every day.

A 30 km/h limit can't solve it all

I recognize that changing the speed limit alone will not reduce speeds, but I also know that complimentary design changes are key to ensuring that Calgarians will follow the limit and that our communities and neighbourhoods become safer.

While changing the limit is a first step, I am dedicated to ensuring that these practices allow us to change Calgary’s design standards and build streets correctly the first time, saving money and time.

This Notice of Motion does not only call for lowering the residential speed limit to 30 kilometres. For us to make sure that this is successful for all of us, there are other challenges and obstacles we need to address. 

I fully acknowledge that setting a speed limit is one thing, and environmentally designing our road system to drive slower is a much different and more important thing. The old school transportation engineering approach, which built a lot of Calgary, worked on the flawed theory that you made streets safer by encouraging driving faster. What we now understand is that when you make it safer to drive faster people drive faster, and speed kills.

For example, if you have a 50 kilometre speed limit posted on a road, the old-school design speed for that road might be 70 kilometres an hour. We also know that people while drive at the speed the road design allows, regardless of what the actual posted speed limit is.

Car collisions with people who drive, cycle, and walk, are common sites in Calgary. Road design and speeding are often factors. 

Using fine revenues to end speeding

I have heard that some people think this is a cash grab. I want to be clear that this Notice of Motion asks City Administration to explore funding these road design improvements through speeding fines and that this revenue from those that are breaking the law as it currently stands does not solely go to enforcement or general revenue. Instead, I believe that this revenue should go to fixing the root cause of the problem of speeding.

Taking charge by fixing what's broken

This Notice of Motion is embarking on a generational shift to fix the wrong-headed approach in the past through also asking that roads are designed to reflect the speed limit that is intended – making streets safer for ourselves, our families, and our neighbours.

Enforcement is part of the solution

I am glad that the Calgary Police Service also believes that the cost to society is too high and that the number of collisions ending in harm to a Calgarian must be brought down.

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City officials estimate the financial effect of life-altering pedestrian collisions and fatalities could be $120 million annually. Source Calgary Herald

The third item that this Notice of Motion is looking to achieve is an educational and promotional campaign that will work with the Calgary Police.

This is a major transformation for Calgary that will have a positive generational impact and it starts with establishing the expectation that 30 kilometres an hour is the right speed for residential streets. This Notice of Motion begins the process and City Administration will need to review budget impacts, understand effects on transit in our city, and provide Council with a map of exactly what roads are in or out.

Building Great Neighbourhoods 

I am not expecting this work to be done overnight. It will take time to get the on-the-ground expertise of residents, identify and prioritize hotspots, and update our policies and traffic calming will take years to spread throughout the city. But I have heard you loud and clear - you have asked me to work towards decreasing speeding in your communities and neighbourhoods – and through extensive research, international best practices, and clear science, I am proud to support this practical and plausible way forward.

I hope you can support this too, and I hope to hear from you.

Gian-Carlo Carra