Neglected routes ‘just like the haunted house’.

The closest thing Calgary has to a pedestrian rush hour route often smells of urine, users say.

Light fixtures in the 8th Street S.W. underpass are smashed almost beyond recognition, empty sockets where light bulbs should be.

Rusted, warped rails. Crumbling concrete. Intersections with blind stairwells that can — and do — cause collisions.

People make this trip on foot 10,000 times every day.

“It’s pretty dodgy. Sometimes I’m surprised that it’s just accepted,” downtown resident Karen Gott says.

After several years of neglect, and a few of planning without cash flow to do anything, city hall will start work later this year on major renovations to the underpasses at 8th Street and 1st Street S.W.

Combined, the two Beltline-downtown crossings handle 18,000 pedestrians daily, and 27,000 cars.

They’ll be brighter, cleaner and festooned with art and design touches. The upgrades to both Beltline-downtown crossings will cost $8.5 million.

This week, council’s talk of pedestrian safety after recent crosswalk deaths shifted to a broader pedestrian strategy, and the need to think of safety, convenience and desirability of walking as a complete package.

To planners on the Centre City team, the rail underpasses embody the challenges and opportunities they see in offering better foot-traffic corridors in Calgary’s core.

Despite chronic public complaints of loitering transients or panhandlers, they’re not a hot spot for criminal incidents, project manager Ben Barrington says.

But the perception problem looms large, especially at night in the poor lit walkways.

“It’s a case of, ‘OK. What’s down there?’ ” Barrington said. “And then if you couple that with it’s raining and it’s wet, and it’s dripping off the ceiling onto your head, it’s just like the haunted house.”

Drips from rail and road bridges create another safety problem in the underpasses, when puddles form into ice.

A third safety problem, especially on 8th Street, is the stairs from 9th Avenue above. There are sharp corners on the stairwells and no hazard markings, leading to potentially ugly surprises for passersby.

“I try to (go) slowly. I always look around the corners. I’ve seen people startled if I do use those stairs, which is very seldom,” says Ginette Demers, who tries to avoid walking the underpass at night.

Barrington said: “It’s got to be safer and cleaner. Those stairwells are neither.”

Refurbishments of the underpasses and 8th and 1st will have substantially different designs, although both are getting fresh sidewalk surfaces, rails and lighting.

On 8th, crews will repaint the bridges and retaining walls in reflective white to make brighter, with art installations accenting the gallery-style walls. The design for 1st Street won an architecture award last year for Calgary’s Marc Boutin, and is bathed in dark greys to complement the heritage buildings around the city’s oldest underpass, Barrington said.

Each design will also pay homage to the reason the underpasses exist: the Canadian Pacific bridges, the city official said. The bridges themselves will be cleaned and repainted, but the steel girder structures won’t change. Light sentinels will frame the train crossing at 1st, and proposed cycle lanes to go at road level along 8th will look like they’re fastened with rail ties, Barrington said.

The underpass on 8th — which cuts beneath a road bridge and the rails — is estimated to cost $5.5 million. The 1st Street plan will run about $3 million. The new crossing at 4th Street S.E., designed as a model for how other underpasses should look and function, cost $70 million.