_Citizen_Dane_
Active Member
This is going to be a long and impassioned post, but words can’t describe how pissed I am about this, and this quote in particular:
I’ll be frank; Orozco and the City are out to lunch if they believe this. There’s no way they’ll be able to “create 15-minute districts” in Northwest Edmonton without the Metro. Why? It’s unequivocally Edmonton’s worst-served quadrant and a veritable transit dead-zone. How do I know? Twenty-some years lived in Wellington, one of the area’s sleepy early ’60s communities. I’d say I had NO “opportunities to move about the city in a variety of different ways that are safe and accessible” during the two-plus decades I was there, and I don’t think their proposed changes will do anything to help.
For better-or-for-worse, the City and ETS treat 97th Street as the division between Northwest and Northeast. It serves as the converging point between various bus routes, and since it runs north-south through Edmonton’s geographical middle, it acts like a funnel for downtown buses and commuters. And that’d be fine, BUT it leaves Northwest Edmonton in an untenable position. Unlike the Northeast, which has 97th, Fort Road, and the Capital Line to rely on getting transit riders towards downtown and beyond, the Northwest has ONLY 97th. That’s fine if you live in one of the communities between 97th and 113A Street. If you live anywhere west of 113A though? Nothing short of torture, as you’re forced to travel forty blocks eastward to head downtown.
What do I mean? Say you want to get somewhere like 124th Street. You’ll be forced to divert east to 97th, to head south to the city centre, to head back west again to get to your destination. Counting route transfers, it could take over an hour, versus some ten-to-fifteen minutes by car. For whatever reason — be it pure ignorance or sheer ineptitude — ETS refuses to use the 127th Street/Kingsway corridor, sans the 104X, a morning-only commuter route.
So what’s my point? There’s some real crappy transit — undoubtedly some of the city’s worst — in Northwest Edmonton, and the completion of the Metro would be a boon to the area’s livability. An accessible, rapid transit line running right through the middle of the Northwest quadrant, means you’d never be more than twenty blocks away, east or west from a reliable route. If it was completed, I could totally see the idea of fifteen minute districts becoming a possibility there, as could their stated goal of creating “opportunities to move about the city in a variety of different ways that are safe and accessible.”
As one of my buddies said, the continued southward expansion of the Capital is only subsidizing suburban growth. For all the City’s platitudes of wanting to “build up, not out,” they seem to be rewarding those in the suburbs with better transit access than those in our Mature Area Overlay. And don’t misconstrue that — I’m by no means saying that southsiders shouldn’t have access to good transit — but the argument that says “since there’s growth there, it should be prioritized” is nothing short of a fallacy. Yes it’s growing, and yes there’ll be a hospital. But pinning hopes on where people MAY be in the future versus where people ARE in the present actively goes against the City’s mission for densification and urbanization by perpetuating a cycle of continued southern expansion. And all that’s without mentioning the weird double-standard some people have about the Metro — often deriding it as “St. Albert expansion” or “St. Albert’s line,” as if it’s a purely suburban-serving route, whereas something like Capital South isn’t.
To cut a rant short: Metro was needed twenty years ago. Putting it off for fifteen more is just another indictment of Edmonton’s love-affair with the suburbs and its two-faced approach to city-building by actively punishing those who dare live in an older area without a car.
I’ll be frank; Orozco and the City are out to lunch if they believe this. There’s no way they’ll be able to “create 15-minute districts” in Northwest Edmonton without the Metro. Why? It’s unequivocally Edmonton’s worst-served quadrant and a veritable transit dead-zone. How do I know? Twenty-some years lived in Wellington, one of the area’s sleepy early ’60s communities. I’d say I had NO “opportunities to move about the city in a variety of different ways that are safe and accessible” during the two-plus decades I was there, and I don’t think their proposed changes will do anything to help.
For better-or-for-worse, the City and ETS treat 97th Street as the division between Northwest and Northeast. It serves as the converging point between various bus routes, and since it runs north-south through Edmonton’s geographical middle, it acts like a funnel for downtown buses and commuters. And that’d be fine, BUT it leaves Northwest Edmonton in an untenable position. Unlike the Northeast, which has 97th, Fort Road, and the Capital Line to rely on getting transit riders towards downtown and beyond, the Northwest has ONLY 97th. That’s fine if you live in one of the communities between 97th and 113A Street. If you live anywhere west of 113A though? Nothing short of torture, as you’re forced to travel forty blocks eastward to head downtown.
What do I mean? Say you want to get somewhere like 124th Street. You’ll be forced to divert east to 97th, to head south to the city centre, to head back west again to get to your destination. Counting route transfers, it could take over an hour, versus some ten-to-fifteen minutes by car. For whatever reason — be it pure ignorance or sheer ineptitude — ETS refuses to use the 127th Street/Kingsway corridor, sans the 104X, a morning-only commuter route.
So what’s my point? There’s some real crappy transit — undoubtedly some of the city’s worst — in Northwest Edmonton, and the completion of the Metro would be a boon to the area’s livability. An accessible, rapid transit line running right through the middle of the Northwest quadrant, means you’d never be more than twenty blocks away, east or west from a reliable route. If it was completed, I could totally see the idea of fifteen minute districts becoming a possibility there, as could their stated goal of creating “opportunities to move about the city in a variety of different ways that are safe and accessible.”
As one of my buddies said, the continued southward expansion of the Capital is only subsidizing suburban growth. For all the City’s platitudes of wanting to “build up, not out,” they seem to be rewarding those in the suburbs with better transit access than those in our Mature Area Overlay. And don’t misconstrue that — I’m by no means saying that southsiders shouldn’t have access to good transit — but the argument that says “since there’s growth there, it should be prioritized” is nothing short of a fallacy. Yes it’s growing, and yes there’ll be a hospital. But pinning hopes on where people MAY be in the future versus where people ARE in the present actively goes against the City’s mission for densification and urbanization by perpetuating a cycle of continued southern expansion. And all that’s without mentioning the weird double-standard some people have about the Metro — often deriding it as “St. Albert expansion” or “St. Albert’s line,” as if it’s a purely suburban-serving route, whereas something like Capital South isn’t.
To cut a rant short: Metro was needed twenty years ago. Putting it off for fifteen more is just another indictment of Edmonton’s love-affair with the suburbs and its two-faced approach to city-building by actively punishing those who dare live in an older area without a car.
