Nearly 60 per cent of public spaces in Calgary, Ottawa and Vancouver lacking in accessibility: study

New research from the University of Calgary shows Calgary as the least most accessible city among three main Canadian cities.

The study shows that nearly 60 per cent of public spaces in Calgary, Vancouver, and Ottawa are either inaccessible or partially inaccessible to people with disabilities.

“We hired over 30 mappers across the country and they represented a range of disability so there were some wheelchair users and some people who are blind and others experiencing hearing loss,” said Dr. Victoria Fast, associate professor in the geography department at the University of Calgary.

Calgary came last, with only 35 per cent of the buildings mapped considered accessible.

“Vancouver was a little bit higher at 48 per cent, [and] Ottawa was a little bit higher at 53 per cent,” she said.

Fast and her master’s students Russell Copley and Rhiannon Scott began the Mapping Our Cities For All Project (MOCA), in 2021.

The research considered public-facing buildings and businesses, including libraries, restaurants and retail shops.

Ratings looking at barrier-free entrances and doors, automatic door buttons, availability, ramps, publicly available washrooms, countertop height, door width and more.

They found out that in Calgary, areas in the downtown core are among the least accessible while the neighbourhoods of Kensington and Sunnyside have the best accessibility.

Fast says that after pairing the MOCA Project data with the North American industry classification system, they surprisingly found out that the education institutions in Canada rates the lowest.

“Our institutions of education, you’d think would be pillars of accessibility, but our mapped data has indicated that they’re not, so there’s a long way to go making the world more accessible,” she said.

UCalgary says the report is aimed at aiding the federal government in meeting the goals of the Accessible Canada Act (ACA) established in 2019, which aims to create a country free of barriers for people with disabilities by 2040.