People Of Edmonton, Get Your Skates On!

In Edmonton, people might just start to use their skates to commute in the future. Citizen Matt Gibbs wants to inspire the Canadian city to develop 10 kilometers of inner city ice skating infrastructure.

The Freezeway, a proposal that came out of Gibbs’s master thesis, should be a multifunctional network of urban infrastructure that functions as a cycling path in the summer and an ice skating lane during winter time. (And that winter can be long in Edmonton, North America’s most northern major city.) The Freezeway will possibly become a network for commuters, so anyone planning a leisurely skate should probably watch out! These people will mean business.

Gibbs wants to bring people together in order to get active. In a city where the temperature is below freezing point most of the time and there is only around 7 hours of sunshine daily, you can imagine that people get sedentary and idle easily. The Freezeway might be an incentive for people to change some of their daily routines — instead of going by car the skate commute could help to include exercises into their daily lives more easily as well as it would make sure that people enjoy a certain amount of fresh air and sunshine during short and dark winter days.