Friday, July 31, 2009

CBC Calgary interview a day before the issue comes out

The “Most Walkable Cities in Canada” issue doesn’t hit seatbacks until tomorrow (Aug. 1) and I’m already preparing to do my first interview with the CBC. The context of the interview, rather not surprisingly, is why Calgary didn’t make our 10 Most Walkable Cities cut. The short answer, as I will tell the good people at the CBC, is that city officials did not participate. We sent out walking surveys to 50 of Canada’s most populated cities and towns and received responses from just over half. We picked our top winners from these. Our intent with this inaugural ranking is to get more cities to participate next year (we’re running our ranking in May annually starting next year), perhaps driven to doing so by citizens (like the CBC Calgary crew) who want their city to be part of the pedestrian conversation in this country. I’ll try to post the interview here shortly.

Happy trails,
Tom Gierasimczuk, editor, up! magazine