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As a north sider, I don't think it's fair that south side doesn't have a free park and ride at their LRT stations currently, well other than Davies but that's quite out of the way for the SW. Heritage Valley is just as important as Lewis Farms and Castledowns. The current bus connection adds at least 15 minutes to commute time and is one extra transfer.
 
The_Cat said:
There’s over 100,000 people living south of the Henday. The trains will be packed in day one.
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You guys are probably right. I’m just getting cynical after years of our LRT struggling.

Heritage Valley P&R has sort of flopped until now, but the psychological reality of a train there will likely change that vs just express buses.

The cost is still egregious imo. But I’ll jump back on the booster train.
 
If you don't have much park and ride, it can also tie up more buses on short routes to the LRT stations and I thought not having enough buses was an issue too.
 
thommyjo said:
You guys are probably right. I’m just getting cynical after years of our LRT struggling.

Heritage Valley P&R has sort of flopped until now, but the psychological reality of a train there will likely change that vs just express buses.

The cost is still egregious imo. But I’ll jump back on the booster train.
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As someone who used the Heritage Valley P&R, for a few months, it was actually nice but was prone to being stuck in traffic. Especially when 111 St south of 23 Ave was under construction for a bit.

Overall a great service but the psychological difference between “train vs bus” is genuinely big and honestly kinda dumb. Shiny train will always win out.
 
Edmcowboy11 said:
They really have to figure out what to do differently to lessen the costs of this and all future LRT projects. Even though the question has been asked in the past. I would like to know why construction for the LRT is so expensive. Is there anything that we can do here in Edmonton that would lessen the costs but not sacrifice the quality and scope of the projects.
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Not sure there is, may be other than to get East Asian companies to build them. Almost every recent major LRT project in North America (from Honolulu to Calgary to Ottawa to Austin) has gone over-budget and delayed, sometimes just a year after they were approved.

The best thing we can do is to get accurate estimates so that stakeholders can actually make informed decisions, rather than getting hopelessly optimistic initial costs that require billion dollar decisions to be made almost on the fly when those costs turn out to be way too low.
 
accord1999 said:
Not sure there is, may be other than to get East Asian companies to build them. Almost every recent major LRT project in North America (from Honolulu to Calgary to Ottawa to Austin) has gone over-budget and delayed, sometimes just a year after they were approved.
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I don't think getting East Asian companies to build them would make much of a difference. The difference in governance likely plays a bigger role than who is building it. When I lived in Taiwan while they were building a bunch of commuter rail projects the difference was stark, no community consultation, no negotiation about land acquisition, nothing. The government just told people "We are taking these homes/businesses and building a train line here. If you don't like it, vote us out in the next election".
 
Edmcowboy11 said:
They really have to figure out what to do differently to lessen the costs of this and all future LRT projects. Even though the question has been asked in the past. I would like to know why construction for the LRT is so expensive. Is there anything that we can do here in Edmonton that would lessen the costs but not sacrifice the quality and scope of the projects.
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We know why everything is so expensive - it's not rocket "appliances" - bought groceries lately?
 
First of all, and this has already been mentioned before I believe, but this extension has a lot of challenges. A tunnel under 23 Ave, the bridge over Blackmud Creek, the bridge over the Henday, and while it's not a challenge exactly, the OMF is needed and won't be cheap. However, once the SLRT reaches Ellerslie Road, the extensions after that should be relatively straight forward and cheaper. This isn't unlike 25 or so years ago when the push was to just get the LRT out from under the University as after that was done it, would be much easier to get the extension to Century Park. Now, that argument certainly also exists for getting the Metro Line over Yellowhead and Walker yards... but that's another thread.

I'm not sure how many people realize the amount of bus traffic from Century Park uses 111 St. I remember in the early days of the BNR being awestruck at the amount of buses at Century Park during AM and PM peaks and the frequencies on the 721 and 722. I think they have scaled back some of the routes to better align with post Covid ridership, but, there is still a substantial number of buses.
How many? I did some counting based upon the PDF schedules.

I was just counting SB departures from Century Park and NB arrivals at CP. AM I used 7:00-9:00 and PM I used 15:00-17:00. I only included routes that travelled south of the Henday (so no 713). Those routes are: 521, 700x, 718, 719, 721, 722. This doesn't include any school extras.

NB AM= 94 buses
SB AM= 43 buses

NB PM= 42 buses
SB PM= 75 buses

AM total= 137 buses
PM total= 117 buses

Since the PM peak is usually spread out longer, you'll probably end up with close to the same total overall number of buses between the two peaks. These numbers are just a snap shot for a 2 hour period.
The stretch of 111 St between Century Park and Ellerslie Road is 3.3 KM, so, while you're not fully eliminating these buses with this LRT extension, for that stretch of road you're getting a significant number of buses off of the road, and not to mention, the concentration of diesel exhaust from them.
 
thommyjo said:
With the hospital on pause, and a airport connection not even on the radar, I’d prefer we pause this and go hard on a blatchford NW extension first.

This will barely increase ridership for over 1bil. NW line would add tens of thousands daily from day 1, not even mentioning future TODs
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The key reason why the south extension was prioritized was because of the new OMF, no? We wouldn’t have had enough trains to run north of Blatchford if we did that extension first, unless we extended the Metro Line to Campbell road in one go. And to be honest, the south extension has wayyyy more value than extending the Metro Line past Castle Downs. Also, having a station with a park’n’ride by the Henday on the south side is a game changer for ridership, alongside closer bus connections (that don’t involve the creek crossing on 23 Ave that is absolutely wretched during winter).
 
dunno said:
Do you have a source for this? Not disputing, just curious.
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Was also curious. Used this website: https://censusmapper.ca/maps/new#11/53.5462/-113.4912 to add up the census tract populations for all those south of the Henday and got approx. 130,000 which is from the 2021 census. Using the same method, population was approx. 86,000 in 2016. A rough calculation that assumes consistent growth and using population estimates for 2023, the current population could be over 200,000.
 
yeggator said:
The key reason why the south extension was prioritized was because of the new OMF, no? We wouldn’t have had enough trains to run north of Blatchford if we did that extension first, unless we extended the Metro Line to Campbell road in one go. And to be honest, the south extension has wayyyy more value than extending the Metro Line past Castle Downs. Also, having a station with a park’n’ride by the Henday on the south side is a game changer for ridership, alongside closer bus connections (that don’t involve the creek crossing on 23 Ave that is absolutely wretched during winter).
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The 111 St/Henday interchange can also be a pretty bad chokepoint in the winter (or when there are accidents) as well if needing to get south to Ellerslie road, so having a train option will help, I think.
 
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