From this video:


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I thought this was a pretty good piece, pretty much bang on.


Colby Cosh: Edmonton's transit showcase on civilizational decline
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Crews continue to test Edmonton's Valley Line LRT at the Muttart LRT stop, Tuesday 23, 2022. PHOTO BY DAVID BLOOM/POSTMEDIA

Colby Cosh: Edmonton's transit showcase on civilizational decline
An unusable, years-behind-schedule train line provides the city a grotesque daily vision of state incapacity
Author of the article:Colby Cosh
Published Jul 05, 2023
 
One thing I find is that Edmonton has to be its own advocate. How hard did the city have to fight for this funding? Second, how many corners did TransEd cut (e.g., concrete, cables)?
 
Edmonton is hardly alone. The ongoing disaster along Eglinton Avenue in Toronto is a case in point.


And Ottawa has had many of the same issues with its deeply flawed LRT.

Maybe Canadian municipal transportation departments just can't do mass transit anymore?
 
This is a good example of a logical fallacy and an unhelpful way of discussing nuanced items. No one is suggesting we eliminate all traffic rules.

What people are suggesting is that we don’t see 8 drivers out of the millions who have driven by this train the last 6 months as reason to redesign a permanent train. Especially when all of those accident occurred due to illegally running red lights with clear signage present.

People just don’t write articles on your average car crash vs a train. Many roads in Edmonton see well over 8 crashes a year. We haven’t redesigned the henday, even after multiple fatal accidents most years…Should we?


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The reason I want to see this line redesigned is not just the safety factor, although the ongoing accidents help make my case. Having gates, bollards and signal priority (all of which the Capital Line has) will help make this line what it is supposed to be--a rapid transit service that convinces people to choose it over their cars because it guarantees travel times and gets preference over private vehicles at all intersections. An LRT that has to wait at multiple lights along its route is little better than a bus--and the people who are already riding buses along the LRT route aren't the intended audience for this line anyway. It's supposed to win over car drivers. Put in the bloody gates, reduce the potential car-train interaction as much as possible, give the LRT priority at every intersection and then we might win over the riders we need to make this massive investment a success.

I'm glad you made the point about the Henday. No, you're right that we haven't spent billions to redesign it. YET. But it's crystal clear the thing was massively flawed when it was built and we're paying the price daily. Look at the daily traffic backups in certain directions and at certain times of day, due to it being underdesigned and underbuilt. The bumper-to-bumper traffic crawls along at L.A. speeds on what is supposed to be a freeway to facilitate commutes.
 
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I'm glad you made the point about the Henday. No, you're right that we haven't spent billions to redesign it. YET. But it's crystal clear the thing was massively flawed when it was built and we're paying the price daily. Look at the daily traffic backups in certain directions and at certain times of day, due to it being underdesigned and underbuilt. The bumper-to-bumper traffic crawls along at L.A. speeds on what is supposed to be a freeway to facilitate commutes.
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The problem isn’t that the Henday is under designed and under built.

The problem is that our City has expanded in such a way that the only viable method of travel for many, many people is to drive on the Henday. (This expansion has been facilitated by the existence of the Henday. This is an example of induced demand.)

The best way to improve traffic on the Henday is to provide options for travel other than driving on the Henday.
 
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The problem isn’t that the Henday is under designed and under built.

The problem is that our City has expanded in such a way that the only viable method of travel for many, many people is to drive on the Henday. (This expansion has been facilitated by the existence of the Henday. This is an example of induced demand.)

The best way to improve traffic on the Henday is to provide options for travel other than driving on the Henday.
Agreed. The SW henday will only get worse, with a slight improvement after we spend hundreds of millions on the terwillegar interchange. But within 5 years it’ll be bad again. Couldn’t pay me enough to live in windemere again and to have to drive that route regularly. Living centrally and mostly biking is a game changer.

I agree @TravellingChris though, a proper train line would have been awesome. We just grew so fast and fell behind. Ideally, a tunneled and elevated option to west Edmonton mall and Bonnie doon would have been built decades back to add density to those areas before expanding to millwoods and Lewis farms. The lines are so long and the density so low that we just can’t afford to elevate.

Does anyone know if the valley line can eventually be run without stopping at lights? I think that’s a stupid decision and hopefully could be reversed in the future to essentially have intersections go green as the train comes.
 
Does anyone know if the valley line can eventually be run without stopping at lights? I think that’s a stupid decision and hopefully could be reversed in the future to essentially have intersections go green as the train comes.
It theoretically does already. The majority of the intersections with the VLSE include signal preemption for the trains. There are a few locations where trains so not get signal preemption. There's a lot of location in the VLSE Agreement on the City's website.
Certainly, I have seen signal preemption employed on the Southside, in particular at 34 Ave.
 
Couldn’t pay me enough to live in windemere again and to have to drive that route regularly. Living centrally and mostly biking is a game changer.

Has the city ever done a campaign to better nudge people in this same direction? Would that be a worthwhile endeavour?
 

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