'There's a lot of conversations that still need to happen': Enhancing the Banff experience for residents and visitors

Allan Buckingham, spokesperson for A Better Banff Avenue, discusses the recent pedestrian zone plebiscite with Alberta Primetime host Michael Higgins.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length

Michael Higgins: All right, Allan. You're a proponent of the pedestrian zone.

You advocated for a 'yes' vote.

As close as that vote was, what does the outcome say to you?

Allan Buckingham: There's a lot of things that you can read into this and I think a lot of people are reading all kinds of things into it.

It did feel throughout the discussion that the pedestrian zone became a bit of a lightning rod for our community's concerns over tourism, evacuation routes, traffic management, housing, these kinds of things.

And it felt like there was a bit of a belief that if the pedzone went away, some of those problems would go away.

I saw it as a tactic, as a stepping stone to more conversations, and I'm looking forward to having more conversations about these different ways to go.

Obviously, the pedzone is not a tactic we're going to be doing in the near future again, but we need to keep having these conversations, and we need to recognize there's not going to be a perfect solution to any one of, never mind all of, the different things that Banff is dealing with these days.

MH: It will soon be gone, but what do you feel the Banff Avenue pedestrian zone has come to represent for the community?

AB: There's so many different ways that different people were reading into it.

Some of us really saw it as an awesome place for folks to be able to gather.

A lot of folks saw it as a good way to encourage people to get out of their vehicles and use active modes of transportation, rather than just driving from one point to another within our community, which would increase the amount of traffic we have, and so there's all of that.

It was also just a fun place to hang out and meet people and whatever, but then there's also folks who saw it as something that kind of got in the way of the life that they were used to and the life they love.

I get that and we just need to, as a community, come together and figure out how we're going to move forward now, find the good things from the pedestrian zone and how we can enhance those in different ways.

MH: Traffic congestion is a real tipping point for some residents, and many Albertans visiting Banff through the summer months know what it's like to be stuck in a vehicle trying to get around.

Can you relate to the concerns of those on the 'no' side?

AB: Oh, absolutely, I think most folks on both sides of the issue recognize the problems that we have in the community, including traffic management and just having a community that feels like it's for the community.

The pedestrian zone was just one tactic to try to deal with some of these things.

We've got all kinds of stuff that we do in our town to try and encourage people who come and visit to leave the vehicles on the edge of town.

Making it more attractive to walk downtown was one of those tactics but we're just going to have to keep working through and figuring out ways that we can encourage folks to leave their vehicles at the edge of town, or at the hotel or the campground, in order to have some traffic flow to get where we want.

But there's different ways we can move around town, it's not just all about vehicles either, and we need to remember that and encourage folks who live here and who come to visit to remember that as well.

MH: In the wake of what happened in Jasper, how do you weigh 'no' side concerns over evacuation routes?

How does that fit into the conversation?

AB: It absolutely was always part of the conversation and I think what happened in Jasper really reinforced that for some people.

We do have an evacuation plan that the town of Banff and our emergency preparedness staff have figured out and it shows a bunch of different ways that we have opportunities to evacuate.

Is it going to be perfect? Is it going to go according to plan? Probably not, rarely do plans.

But we have plans in place to show what we can do and so I get the feeling that it's harsh and that people are concerned.

But I think we also have to trust people whose job it is to make sure that we're safe, to keep us safe.

Kind of like, I trust the firefighters to know how to put out a fire if my house catches on fire and I’m not trying to do that myself.

I also trust that the staff at the town of Banff have a good plan and they share it with people so that we can know what the plan is and that we're able to do that.

So I get it, I just feel it's too bad that may have gotten in the way of thinking whether this is something we’d like to have in our community or not.

MH: Mayor DiManno doesn't appear to be giving up on the idea of pedestrian zones.

What will you be looking for from council in, as she puts it, returning to the drawing board?

AB: Part of the conversation is still about traffic management and how to encourage people to get out of their vehicles.

Having interesting places for people to go and do that, locals and visitors, is one way.

So I think we're just going to keep having the conversations about what tactics we can use to encourage the things that we want.

And it's priorities that were set in the town of Banff Community Plan in council's priorities and things as we go along, too.

I really hope that we keep working at these things and just find tactics that work for more people, more of the time, or explain them in better ways.

There's lots of conversations to still be had as a community as we get used to the reality that is not having this pedestrian zone that we've had for the last few years.

MH: Your group was the face of campaigning for a 'yes' vote.

Is this the end of the road for your group?

AB: Our group is still very committed to our ideals – sustainable movement, getting people out of vehicles and that kind of thing, so we're going to still stick around.

What form it will take, what it will do, that's still hard to say, but there's a lot of committed volunteers, local supporters and businesses, who want to promote active lifestyles within our community and these broader sustainability goals.

We're going to keep doing that, it's just going to change our focus for a little bit.

MH: You've referenced sustainability, sustained growth and tourism is a government priority, notably so here in Alberta.

Where does that leave Banff? What comes of the sustainability conversation? Pedestrian zone or not?

AB: I think tourism is a whole big thing.

What sustainable tourism means, and how many people and how we deal with them, especially here in Banff with our limited land base, and a lot of people who want to come and visit us.

How we as a local community deal with that and how that interacts with other governments, the provincial government, Parks Canada, the federal government, and how they deal with tourism, there's a lot of conversations that still need to happen.

It complicates things because it's not just our community that says, 'Hey come to Banff, we're awesome.'

We all know that, we don't need to tell anybody else, but lots of other people are still telling folks to come to Banff, and maybe in ways that don't work as well for our community.

So we're needing to have those conversations locally of what that looks like, what long-term visitation looks like, but also with those other organizations.