I left Toronto in the early 2000s and sought asylum in Calgary, because the Big T.O. had become increasingly non-English-speaking and extremely left-wing. But one thing that bothered me about Calgary right from the start, and I wrote articles about it then, was how Calgary’s downtown core fell dead after 5 PM. Going for a leisurely stroll, say, at 8 or 9 PM was out of the question, as there were no open coffee shops or other retailers, and the only “humans” you encountered were of the kind that in an ideal world would be thrown in a dumpster and disposed of for the good of society.

You see, upon my arrival in the city, I lived downtown, and it was depressing as hell – there was no “Yonge Street”, “Yonge/Eglinton” or “Bloor-Danforth” where one could hang. I felt like a prisoner, honest to God. Where I live now, in the city’s northwest, there’s actually more to do and see, and even well past 5 PM, than in downtown.

Even though I wrote about the problem excessively at the time, there was one aspect that totally escaped me. Only now, after reading an excellent article on one-way streets in inner cities, have I been able to pinpoint the real cause behind the hopelessness that is Calgary’s downtown today.

As it turns out, a city becomes a ghost town with little to do and few retailers and eateries when it’s intersected by one-way streets. One-way streets do not only induce speeding and reckless driving behaviour (and we have plenty of that in Calgary), but they also turn the city on either side of such a street into a passing background that no one pays any attention to.

With Calgary’s downtown being a maze of one-way streets that make it extremely difficult to get to one’s chosen destination in a more or less linear fashion, it’s not surprising that it should be so utterly unappealing, except for the dregs of society that come crawling out at night.

The article describes the examples of various cities that have eliminated one-way streets in favour of two-way traffic and that have prospered as a result: Perth in Australia, Lexington, KY, and even St. Catherines in Ontario. Forfar, Scotland, is given as a deterrent to illustrate what happens to local business when a main artery is converted to one-way.

Apart from that, data also shows that one-way streets are less safe for pedestrians. One study, for example, concluded that a child is 2.5 times more likely to be hit by a car on a one-way street.

Calgary should definitely follow the example set by hundreds of other cities in the US and Canada that have gone two-way. But it won’t happen any time soon, as City Council and mayor Naheed Nenshi are busy doing other “stuff” (in the mayor’s case, admiring himself in the mirror and proclaiming his love of himself for hours every day).