Url.Action parameters?

The following is the correct overload (in your example you are missing a closing } to the routeValues anonymous object so your code will throw an exception):

<a href="<%: Url.Action("GetByList", "Listing", new { name = "John", contact = "calgary, vancouver" }) %>">
    <span>People</span>
</a>

Assuming you are using the default routes this should generate the following markup:

<a href="/Listing/GetByList?name=John&amp;contact=calgary%2C%20vancouver">
    <span>People</span>
</a>

which will successfully invoke the GetByList controller action passing the two parameters:

public ActionResult GetByList(string name, string contact) 
{
    ...
}

This works for MVC 5:

<a href="@Url.Action("ActionName", "ControllerName", new { paramName1 = item.paramValue1, paramName2 = item.paramValue2 })" >
    Link text
</a>

you can returns a private collection named HttpValueCollection even the documentation says it's a NameValueCollection using the ParseQueryString utility. Then add the keys manually, HttpValueCollection do the encoding for you. And then just append the QueryString manually :

var qs = HttpUtility.ParseQueryString(""); 
qs.Add("name", "John")
qs.Add("contact", "calgary");
qs.Add("contact", "vancouver")

<a href="<%: Url.Action("GetByList", "Listing")%>?<%:qs%>">
    <span>People</span>
</a>