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This small Alberta town 🇨🇦 wants to reduce car dependency. Some residents are fuming. (www.cbc.ca)
submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by Carawou@lemmy.world to c/fuckcars@lemmy.world
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[-] JoshuaFalken@lemmy.world 19 points 23 hours ago

Wendy Klassen, who has lived in Medicine Hat since 1988, labelled city hall's plans to install wider sidewalks and narrower lanes in some places “a nightmare.”

What a way to admit you can't operate a vehicle within a standard width. It's not as though lanes are being reduced to two metres.

In Alberta’s southwest corner, Lethbridge city council voted this month to cancel a study into a new bike path after negative feedback from about 200 residents.

Lethbridge, a city over a hundred thousand people, won't even study a bike path because a couple hundred people got grumpy about it.

How I wish people would bother to vote.

[-] FireRetardant@lemmy.world 4 points 3 hours ago

What would voting even do here? If 400 people voted for a candidate that support bike lanes how would that have prevented the 200 complaints from canceling it. It seems more like an advocacy & showing up to public feedback meetings issue. Those meetings specifically should be reworked cause its often only retired or rich people able to attend due to scheduling.

[-] JoshuaFalken@lemmy.world 3 points 2 hours ago

Why would my wish for voters only apply to 400 people? Apply it to 79,173 and see how that stacks up to the 200 complaints.

I agree, advocacy and public meetings are key, but in the diagram of who votes and who advocates, I'd wager you'll find about zero people that advocate for a cause that don't also vote. The inverse is not true.

Regardless, 30% don't vote in federal elections, 40% skip general elections. In Medicine Hat, 78% didn't vote in last year's municipal election. Over in Lethbridge, 83% chose to forgo their civic duty.

While federal and provincial turnouts have room for improvement, they aren't bad. Municipal affairs, on the other hand, are in such a sad state it's incomprehensible to me how anyone could ask "what would voting even do here?"

this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2026
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