yeggator
Active Member
Especially if the gondola is neonified 
- Thread starter Kaizen
- Start date
Out of Towner
Active Member
OK you solved the business case for a gondola by saying that for some reason it will increase the number of public transit passengers. You've subordinated a prime advertising structure for the City and solved that qualm by saying that people will evolve and get over it. So now for one of your bigger solutions. Public safety.
Gondola's aren't infallible and the gondola cabins go over the river, which obviously adds complexity to any passenger rescue operation that could arise. You have to agree that Fire and Rescue can't walk out into the middle of the North Saskatchewan River with hip waders and start rappelling people down from the gondola cabins like they do at ski resorts when a gondola breaks down. The training alone would be expensive and dangerous, so do you have a solution for Fire and Rescue besides "get er done boys."
ChazYEG
Senior Member
Dude, why are you like this? You NEVER have a positive take on anything that's not car infrastructure.
thefreezebreeze
New Member
Safety and rescue operations wouldn't be what prevents this from being greenlit (there's lot of other gondola systems to learn from, ie london literally pictured above), so your question is honestly irrelevant.
johnnyboy
Active Member
The gondola car will be a submersible life raft, equipped with life jackets for the passengers.
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roe_
Active Member
Instead of going flashy or artificial, why not make the gondola reflect the river valley. Make each car feel like you are stepping into the woods as you float among the trees. Have massive windows, use local wood, make it feel Scandinavian chic instead of tacky Las Vegas knock off. I bet you could get that thing crawling with tourists if you did it right.
Out of Towner
Active Member
You think those passengers are paying $7 to ride that gondola? And in Edmonton's case that $2 a passenger is going to cover the City's expense of hiring, training and perhaps dispatching first responders to respond to an incident? Not worth it. Prairie Gondola can keep its $2.
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Out of Towner
Active Member
I'm an advocate of respecting and protecting the appearance of the Walterdale Bridge and you're worried about your god damn bicycle path. You have such a typical cyclist's self centered view of everything.
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CplKlinger
Senior Member
From my (very limited understanding) though, that argument wasn't being raised by people living in Rossdale. The community league, for example, loves that the Riverhawks have been so successful and rent the ball diamond out for events when there's no game going on. To the contrary, I think a lot of people there would love to have something like the gondola stop at the plant because it would alleviate some of the parking demand - both reducing the tension regarding infill (since a lot of the densification will be on the surface parking lots), and helping avoid a repeat of the event earlier this summer where residents were boxed in by attendees who didn't realize that they weren't allowed to park in the neighbourhood itself.
A lot of the pushback has been from two groups: the papaschase cree first nation, and descendants of settlers buried in the Fort Edmonton cemetery. The papaschase in particular have had a really rough go of things; given less land for their reserve (located approximately where Mill Woods is today) than they were entitled to, saw bits of their reserve eaten away as settlers illegally moved on the fringes, had their numbers dwindle as Canada tried to starve them away, then they were displaced altogether after Canada used some legal maneuvering and revoked its recognition of papaschase altogether, with the remaining members scattering across Canada. I had a classmate in university whose great grandfather was among those people displaced, and he didn't make it back to the area for 30 or 40 years I believe.
In the late 1990s-early 2000s, around the time they started to organize in the area once again, EPCOR was trying to expand the power plant. There was a multi-year legal and PR fight as papaschase members and Fort Edmonton descendants demanded that an independent expert be allowed to investigate for human remains on the land in question, EPCOR said "we checked and there's nothing there, trust us" and so on until EPCOR finally relented. And wouldn't you know it? There were indeed humans buried there, and EPCOR was lying all along.
Just think about that for a second; within our lifetimes, EPCOR was trying to expand a power plant onto lands they knew were sacred burial grounds, and lied about it time and time again to the ancestors of those buried there. I think *anyone* in that position would expect better treatment going forward, particularly once mainstream society recognized that what was done to Indigenous peoples at the time the papaschase were displaced was literally a genocide ("cultural" genocide isn't a legal concept, and as one residential school survivor told me, genocide is like pregancy; you either are, or aren't, there's no in between). And considering that land has been a sacred burial ground for longer than Canada has existed as a country, they're darn well entitled to a say in the future of that land going forward.
Should they be able to veto literally everything anyone proposes? No. But they deserve meaningful consultation—not a repeat of what EPCOR put them through not even thirty years ago. I should reiterate that I am all for the gondola and want it to be a thing (it'd make it so much quicker and more enjoyable to get between central Edmonton and Old Strathcona), I just want it to be done in a better way than previous projects were.
ChazYEG
Senior Member
LMFAO I don't even bike, due to a knee injury.
You're an advocate against anything that might benefit the city as a whole. The park, the bike lanes, transit... If it's not car-centric, it's bad.
TagYEG
New Member
I honestly can't see any kind of redevelopment at the power plant being very successful without something like a gondola. There isn't a lot of space for parking on site and there shouldn't be any plans to allow for public parking at this location, if they want it to be successful. The area doesn't need a parkade and having a novel way to get to whatever the power plant becomes would add to the experience of getting there. Taking the bus just doesn't have the same excitement.
If the gondola were to go bust for some reason, and I don't think it would, if the power plant is to become a destination, then either ETS could take it over and run it or the City could sell it. These are modular systems that are scalable and can be moved/sold from one ski resort to another. After the Whistler Olympics, a chairlift was moved from Whister to Sunshine Village in Banff. Sunshine Village sold their 35 year old Angle Chair to Castle Resort in southern Alberta. Lake Louise gondola came from Palisades Tahoe in California, and lastly, the Polar Peak chair at Fernie was previously installed at Nakiska. These things hold their value, even when they are decades old. I know some people brought up the concrete foundations as a remediation issue, but maybe the City could have interpretive art installations around each tower or something to turn it into its own destination, which could then be incorporated into the concrete so that it could just be left in the ground in the event of a removal. I', not saying this is the best solution, but there are ways around this.
I don't think the City should be on the hook for rescue services, in the event of a failure. Ski resorts have trained staff for emergency evacuations and do not rely on the local fire department. Whistler has the Peak to Peak gondola, which is over 400m above the ground and a rescue on that would be far more complicated than anything in Edmonton.
If the gondola were to go bust for some reason, and I don't think it would, if the power plant is to become a destination, then either ETS could take it over and run it or the City could sell it. These are modular systems that are scalable and can be moved/sold from one ski resort to another. After the Whistler Olympics, a chairlift was moved from Whister to Sunshine Village in Banff. Sunshine Village sold their 35 year old Angle Chair to Castle Resort in southern Alberta. Lake Louise gondola came from Palisades Tahoe in California, and lastly, the Polar Peak chair at Fernie was previously installed at Nakiska. These things hold their value, even when they are decades old. I know some people brought up the concrete foundations as a remediation issue, but maybe the City could have interpretive art installations around each tower or something to turn it into its own destination, which could then be incorporated into the concrete so that it could just be left in the ground in the event of a removal. I', not saying this is the best solution, but there are ways around this.
I don't think the City should be on the hook for rescue services, in the event of a failure. Ski resorts have trained staff for emergency evacuations and do not rely on the local fire department. Whistler has the Peak to Peak gondola, which is over 400m above the ground and a rescue on that would be far more complicated than anything in Edmonton.
lemongrab
Active Member
EFD would almost certainly have to do any rescue. Ski resorts employ patrollers for other purposes, and they just happen to be perfectly suited to this task, too. Prairie Sky ain't employing a bunch of people to sit around all day for years and probably never be needed. The city could certainly charge for a rescue operation.
But it's exceedingly unlikely that it will ever have to happen.The challenge for ski resorts is that they'll have 5+ totally different lift systems, each with a bunch of unique parts. And they don't always have an extra one of the needed parts on hand, and even if they do it may not be right at that site, so its a comms process and snowmobile ride to get it to a station. But sometimes they'll have to fabricate/modify what they need then and there. Either way it can take hours to fix, but they can almost always do it without a rescue.
The advantage for Edmonton is that they'd have a bunch of stations running identical parts, and it would be easy for them to have a bunch of spares on hand, literally waiting in the truck that the head mechanic would drive right to the problem station.
That said, the perception of a possible rescue over the river will always be a challenge. And any mechanical delays (even relatively short ones not requiring rescue) can do a lot of damage to trust in the system. 10 minutes suspended 60 feet in the air feels like a hell of a lot longer than that!
Wax
New Member
I do remember reading somewhere that the gondola would provide its own emergency response team if it were to get stuck. I think it was in its website before it got taken down.
Out of Towner
Active Member
Hope that something doesn't happen isn't a public safety strategy. Besides maintaining a response team that is trained for land and water rescues, the necessary equipment for a response needs to be readily available. No point having firemen if they don't have a truck and there's no point having a response team if they don't have watercraft for a response. Another expense. Since passengers will be traveling over water, federal safety protocol may require the gondola cabins to have flotation devices for its passenger. Another expense. And on and on for the price of a bus fare. It's difficult to see a banker interested in funding a venture like this.
an_edmontonian
New Member
There are certainly hurdles to a river valley gondola. Rescue is one of them. The supposed infringing on the Walterdale's precious view is absolutely not one of them haha.