Prairie Sky Gondola | 76.2m | ?s | Prairie Sky | DIALOG

What do you think of this project?

  • Total voters
    56
High level line will be amazing if done, but yeah. Such a different project. Its a park and cyclist route really. And a whole different set of nodes to garneau/uni and grandin/legislature vs whyte, rossdale, jasper/CBD with the gondola.

And the gondola is a more effective transportation option for a winter city vs just a cycling route.

We need both! And I bet the high level could be crowd funded and supported by grants and community donations too! Id contribute a few hundreds bucks to it for a little name plaque on a railing I could have my kids see. Know we were a part of building it. Sell 3000 little name plates for 300 bucks each and you could have 900k minus costs to contribute to the project.

This could be a really significant project. I hope we have some innovators behind it!
 
Anne Stevenson was a senior planner with the City and my political analyst friend calls her "an establishment" councillor as much as anybody elected. It might be a bit early to categorize her however here is her response on the Gondola.

Note: I told her I would be sharing her response on this site:

"I'm pleased that Prairie Sky Gondola is exploring the feasibility of this project and can see it having a number of benefits for our community. For me the major appeal of the gondola project is the potential for a direct Downtown / Whyte Avenue connection as it’s currently inconvenient to travel between these two areas by transit, and any new bridge crossings would be incredibly disruptive to our river valley. As the project details unfold, there are a number of criteria that I would be looking at to determine whether or not I would support the project moving ahead, including:

Financial feasibility, with no cost to the City

Robust safeguards to avoid any infrastructure becoming a liability to the City

Ensuring minimal disruption to the river valley, including ensuring that:footings and stations are located in existing road right of ways and that no naturalized areas are disturbed

there is no excessive noise or light pollution that would disturb wildlife

Archeological, burial, and culturally significant sites are not impacted."
 
Although it would be great to have the Gondola be paid for 100% by private enterprise, I don't really understand why that is such an important qualifier.
Personally I would prefer if the gondola were a fully integrated part of ETS, and if the project were government funded to facilitate that it would be totally worth it imo.

Edit: Not that I have anything against private funding of the gondola of course, just that if their plans fell through I'd be happy to see the city pick it up to finish it/continue operations.
 
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JuliallThat said:
Although it would be great to have the Gondola be paid for 100% by private enterprise, I don't really understand why that is such an important qualifier.
Personally I would prefer if the gondola were a fully integrated part of ETS, and if the project were government funded to facilitate that it would be totally worth it imo.
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The plan is to fully integrate the gondola with ETS, which can still happen with the gondola being privately funded. There just needs to be the right agreement in place between Prairie Sky and ETS/COE.
 
JuliallThat said:
Although it would be great to have the Gondola be paid for 100% by private enterprise, I don't really understand why that is such an important qualifier.
Personally I would prefer if the gondola were a fully integrated part of ETS, and if the project were government funded to facilitate that it would be totally worth it imo.
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I agree with the full integration, but disagree with the public funding.

Considering that their plan already is to fully integrate it to ETS anyways, we might as well not burden the public treasury, and that's why the fact that it's 100% privately funded is so great. We can end up with all we want, and only have to worry with the fares, not the capital/operational costs.
 
Avenuer said:
The plan is to fully integrate the gondola with ETS, which can still happen with the gondola being privately funded. There just needs to be the right agreement in place between Prairie Sky and ETS/COE.
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I am going to be curious to see if some of the push back on the gondola comes from the progressive end of the political spectrum on this basis. Specifically, I'm curious if this won't be framed as private investment in transportation options, but rather as an attempt to privatize public transit by contracting out significant infrastructure to private entities.

To be clear I don't agree with this rationale, but I'll be curious to see how members of the new Council line up on this project.
 
TAS said:
Anne Stevenson was a senior planner with the City and my political analyst friend calls her "an establishment" councillor as much as anybody elected. It might be a bit early to categorize her however here is her response on the Gondola.

Note: I told her I would be sharing her response on this site:

"I'm pleased that Prairie Sky Gondola is exploring the feasibility of this project and can see it having a number of benefits for our community. For me the major appeal of the gondola project is the potential for a direct Downtown / Whyte Avenue connection as it’s currently inconvenient to travel between these two areas by transit, and any new bridge crossings would be incredibly disruptive to our river valley. As the project details unfold, there are a number of criteria that I would be looking at to determine whether or not I would support the project moving ahead, including:

Financial feasibility, with no cost to the City

Robust safeguards to avoid any infrastructure becoming a liability to the City

Ensuring minimal disruption to the river valley, including ensuring that:footings and stations are located in existing road right of ways and that no naturalized areas are disturbed

there is no excessive noise or light pollution that would disturb wildlife

Archeological, burial, and culturally significant sites are not impacted."
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good grief.

because we can't disturb a single tree for a project that will have projected ridership in the millions? I hope these are early stumbles and not an indication of Anne's ability to "see the bigger picture" for Edmonton.
 
Got to see a two different systems in operation/construction while here in Mexico City. They are substantially increasing the reach of this type of mode to areas with serious topographical impacts.

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occidentalcapital said:
good grief.

because we can't disturb a single tree for a project that will have projected ridership in the millions? I hope these are early stumbles and not an indication of Anne's ability to "see the bigger picture" for Edmonton.
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Give her some wiggle room - I didn't take the tree comment literally. If she truly does mean not a single tree - that inflexibility could derail this and every other project. Same for her comment about river crossings - sugar coated with need more transit options: but maybe she sees a tram running from Ice District down 103rd into the valley add using 1 lane of the Waterdale bridge to accommodate 2 tracks and then UP/DOWN Waterfall Hill to 109 down to Whyte, hard left and down Whyte to 99th and down 99th to the Muttart Station using the new bridge and back downtown. A loop.
 
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