The $600 million Edmonton train;
Edmonton’s LRT project is the equivalent of a candy company releasing a new chocolate bar called Herpes Al-Qaeda
It’s slower than a bus. It has slowed down the buses that existed. And it is almost certainly increasing Edmonton’s net amount of carbon emissions. In short, it fails on every single possible justification for why cities should build light rail.
h/t TimR
Hey, surely Ottawa with its B$1.5 LRT slated for 2018 will prove the cynics wrong. Sarcasm off.
Saskatoon transit receives a subsidy of about 2 million a month to operate. That on top of ticket prices. How much carbon is burned to generate the 2 million a month from taxpayers.
Transit is never built to make driving better.
Transit is built to guarantee income for the public service union.
Obviously a knife registry is the answer.
Edmonton has been a laughing stock since they built their airport 50km south of the city at Leduc.
Perhaps the city can become a kind of living museum of transportation eff-ups.
What they really need is a ferry terminal.
It didn’t fail in the gubmint grant programs !!
I say build solar heated, covered tunnels for bikes, Ebikes and scooters for fat people. Think about it, no transit drivers, no trains, no unions to run it, and no pollution, just some security to keep the scum out. It would be way cheaper than light rail and probably be used more and these light weight tunnels could be suspended above and beside roads to stay out of the way of cars.
It has been a raging success.
– Corrupt contractors have all been issued contracts
– Corrupt politicians have all collected their tribute and cash donations
– Multiple unemployable commie Liberal unionized operatives are now gainfully employed in perpetuity
– Corrupt politicos now have a revenue generating cash cow to bleed for years to come
I think Dollarama sells the Herpes Al-Qaeda chocolate bar. They’re actually pretty good.
Running above ground trains through an existing transportation bottleneck was stupid. They should have separated the grade at major routes.
Waterloo Region is in process of building its LRT. All my suspicions are confirmed.
“Edmonton has been a laughing stock since they built their airport 50km south of the city at Leduc.”
To add to the stupidity, Edmonton wants to annex the land out to the airport. The communist government, that hates farmers, and was elected mostly in Edmonton might just present the Leduc County farmers to the City of Edmonton. Last time their roads will be snowplowed despite their taxes being doubled.
“I struggle to understand how such an obviously horrific idea was able to pass so many levels of approval and be unleashed on an innocent and unsuspecting citizenry. ”
I once told a government manager that ideas are like looking at a model of the solar system: good ideas are like Pluto, they come around once every couple of hundred years. Bad ideas are like Mercury, they’ll be back before the stench of the last bad idea has wafted away.
It wouldn’t take long to find political interference with the engineering plans. In Toronto, the traffic engineers who designed the 401 put the ramps where they wouldn’t slow down the traffic. Then the politicians got involved, and the ramps went to where they decided they should go.
The article doesn’t even mention that the line opening was nearly 2 years behind schedule. And because of its inefficiency, it has also affected the main LRT line which now has to run less frequently.
Yep – line line was completed and sat for 1 1/2 years while a poor unsuspecting contractor worked, trying to design a signalling system. At some point, it was realized that there was no solution to the congestion problem and they just opened the line. Time to shut it down for another year or two and separate the grades. Maybe they might want to run 118th Ave. right through the old closed airport to take out the traffic bottleneck.
I notice that not one of the persons commenting on that story questioned the ridiculous premise that the purpose of public transit is to protect the environment.
It’s because of this flawed mindset that most of the committees designing transit systems are antithetical to private transport. For them, it’s a feature and not a bug if the implementation of a new transit system disrupts other vehicular traffic. They want it to be inconvenient and unpleasant for drivers to travel into the city.
And since so few of these zealots actually care that much about where people are traveling, and why, the result is generally something that no one wants to ride.
For example, most of the biggest proponents of Ottawa’s new LRT live in the more tony downtown neighbourhoods and ride their bicycles to city hall. They can’t conceive of why so many of the rubes (who can’t afford million dollar homes) insist on living in boring, remote suburbs.
When we moved to our current house, my wife’s commute to her downtown job required a single 20-minute bus ride. Because of cutbacks to bus service, (due in part to falling ridership), and changes to bus routes, the same trip currently takes between 30 and 45 minutes.
Once our shiny new LRT system is in place, the same trip will require 2 bus rides and a train ride, and will take over an hour to complete.
It will cost taxpayers nearly 2 billion dollars to build.
Grand River Transit in September cut the bus route through my neighbourhood (with many retirees and multi-unit buildings) in order to “improve service” (and pay for the LRT). I talked to the transit company manager who was taking down the bus stops, and he had nothing good to say about the LRT.
When I was living in Winnipeg (the city with the straightest, flattest road and the best transit system in Canada) the Unirail circus was passing through; fortunately the City had the sense (or lack of cents) to reject it.
For a relatively young city, Edmonton has and continues to make some epic mistakes regarding planning and transportation. Time and again proven models are passed over in favor of re-inventing the wheel. Lots of T-intersections on main routes and some really creative design on the new ring road. Any time you have a driver wondering what to do next, you have an accident in the making.
The LRT system now services two hospitals. In both cases the stations are above ground and not built for the needs of those that will use them. With the University Hospital, the train climbs out of a deep station two blocks away to deposit riders above ground across a busy road.
Good transportation planning requires that density be built up in support of proposed routes rather than let developers call the the shots and the city being left to react.
Redmonton is one screwed up place.
Back in the chretien era the librano$ offered money for infrastructure. The mare of redmonton at the time was jan reamer – a hard core lefty who took the infrastructure money and used it to build sky boxes in the hockey arena because Gary Bettman the NHL boss told her that redmonton would not be a world class city without an upgrade to it’s rink. The hell with streets, sewers, transit etc. We’re the ‘city of champions’ and the Oilers need the rink!
A decade or two later they’re building the Oilers, a ‘professional’ hockey team a brand new rink.
Redmonton also had a downtown airport. They didn’t want it and so built one out of town. Every city in the world wants an airport downtown – but not redmonton. No sir.
They destroyed their downtown core in order to have a mall built out in the sticks. They wanted the biggest mall in the world. Bragging rights are important!
The place (city) has been an experiment in socialist planning. Each decision compounding the mess that preceded it. Is it any wonder transit is a disaster?
Remember everyone, according to Justine Canadians want more of this and he’s going to make it happen.
Most major cities that have existing busy level crossings are either building overpasses/ underpasses or talking about moving rail out of the city altogether. Are there any cities other than Edmonton creating new busy level crossings?
All the money spent went to the “right” people. Therefore 100% success was achieved.
The taxpayers getting garbage in return for their money is just to be expected.
I once lived in what is now one of the biggest third world cities in the world.
The public transit system back then consisted mainly of jitneys, filthy crowded
buses with half cent fares, and aged streetcars.
Today there is a massive modern subway system in place.
They have never thought cities should be tolerant of fools in elected office
or be governed by dull witted political hacks posing as ill informed bureaucrats.
“What they really need is a ferry terminal.” Don’t give the socialists any more ideas, as they just might go for it and double what KPMD said at 11:12 AM.
As I keep saying, we can easily fix the traffic congestion caused by level crossings by simply rotating the barriers 90 degrees. Problem solved.
I better go for a ride on Edmontons new LRT, before it is mothballed.
I’ ll bring a big lunch, just to be safe….
socialism, the destroyer of cultures and countries.
It seems to me that our newly elected infrastructure minister (federal) is from Edmonton and was on city council. Things are certainly looking up. For all of Canada!