It isn’t the boulevards with too many trees on them (or not enough trees to hide the signs, depending on what you think is important) that makes Gaetz Avenue as unpleasant as it is. It isn’t the sense of space along the route nor any sense of being confined, either.
It’s that the very design of Gaetz Avenue — pretty well the whole length of the city — dictates against people being there. The whole avenue isn’t designed for either business or pleasure; it’s designed solely for the transport of cars and trucks.
That anyone not currently seated in a car or a truck would find the area uninviting seems never to have occurred to the people who designed it.
That’s why it was good to see the city has contracted ISL Engineering of Edmonton to come up with a “visionary” plan for our major north-south transport corridor through the next 30 years.
Let’s be fair to the city here; Gaetz Avenue North and South used to be Hwy 2. When it was built, when the city grew through the post-war years, everyone travelling between Edmonton and Calgary also passed through Red Deer, right through Gaetz Avenue.
That stretch of pavement was the province’s busiest highway, bordered within Red Deer on both sides by businesses that required highway access. And that heritage is reflected in both the look and feel of Gaetz Avenue today.
Outside of downtown, actual people were never supposed to be within 30 metres of Gaetz Avenue. It’s only in recent years that people began to feel that Gaetz Avenue ought to be part of the city landscape.
This notion grew in earnest along Gaetz South, when Southpointe Common and Southpointe Junction began their phased development. Imagine all those people living in the Bower residential area, with acres and acres of shopping just across the street — and you have to drive to get there. As far as local convenience goes, you may as well live in Delburne.
Imagine how many jobs are located in those developments — plus Red Deer College — and the whole area is totally unsafe to approach for work by any means other than an automobile.
Gaetz Avenue was never meant to be a park — though it does cross one. Nobody ever thought Gaetz Avenue would be a place where people would, stop, visit or sit and contemplate the scenery. It’s hard to imagine anything an engineering company could do to change that.
Likewise, it’s hard to see how double-decker buses could make Gaetz Avenue suitable for touring.
What the whole corridor needs over the next 30 years is to become accessible for people to come to work, shop or do business. In modern cities, that includes walking, cycling and transit with people-oriented schedules and routes, and stops convenient for people.
All while making sure the motorized commerce of the city can continue safely and peacefully.
That’s a tall order, redesigning a part of the city that was scarcely envisioned to be a major urban corridor in the first place.
But you have to wonder how all the businesses along the route might evolve, if people who live within a few blocks of them could get at them, without having to first get into a car.
Greg Neiman is an Advocate editor.