Valley Line LRT/ Valley Line West | ?m | ?s | City of Edmonton

occidentalcapital said:
Mandel wanted downtown to be the hub of the system. Rich people or not you could have easily run a train along whitemud - but a different decision was made to prioritize downtown. People forget how much Mandel really wanted to focus on downtown. He was responsible for the decision to route the Valley line through DT, the arena, moving the Museum downtown. Frankly, I miss this kind of dedicated focus on downtown. We really are missing out by not having a mayor who can drive a city-building agenda.
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While I think Downtown should be much more vibrant and more of a destination than it currently is, realistically nowhere has everything downtown. Even highly centralized cities like Chicago and Calgary. That being said, my only qualm with the Valley Line West is it goes down 104 Ave instead of Jasper Ave (underground, splitting off from Corona). I think the route chosen connects a lot of important places in west Edmonton and I remember at the time this route being my preference for this reason. You miss Oliver, 124th, and the bulk of Jasper Place going down 87th.

Because we've been dealing with cash strapped austerity for decades now, it feels like we're often looking for a magic bullet that does everything so that you don't have to spend on something that does one thing well and then spend again on something else doing another thing well. The west end can use a couple light rail lines, and I hope eventually, an 87-Whyte Ave Crosstown route between WEM and Bonnie Doon is made that complements the Valley Line. Could extend further west down 178th St too and to the east up to Capilano and then down Baseline.

The Metro Line's planned alignment is far worse than the Valley Line.
 
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One thing I’ve never understood is when people say that Calgary’s network, while larger, doesn’t make as much sense as Edmonton’s. Is Edmonton’s network more efficient with more places of interest or practicality?
 
Friendmonton said:
One thing I’ve never understood is when people say that Calgary’s network, while larger, doesn’t make as much sense as Edmonton’s. Is Edmonton’s network more efficient with more places of interest or practicality?
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That might've been me. I know I said that recently.

The C-Train is still a very good and successful light rail rapid transit system and it does hit places of interest a lot better than American LRT systems often do. But it does feel like they built it as quickly as possible to funnel as many white collar workers into the CBD and everything else was secondary or tertiary. Even downtown, 7th Ave is annoying to traverse because the trains don't get full signal priority (this is what I fear for the Valley Line) and it significantly slows down traffic. But beyond the core, there's a few other things about the routing choices in Calgary that aren't great:

1) Chinook Station and Chinook Mall. The station is a full 4 blocks from the entrance to the mall (1 block is crossing the parking lot). It doesn't stop the mall from getting a lot of patrons via transit, but it's definitely annoying, only fixed slightly by the new pedestrian bridge across MacLeod. I get why they did it - like the NE Capital Line ROW here, they were using an existing freight ROW, but it does feel silly. And something they'll probably never change, even though re-aligning down the middle of MacLeod (maybe elevated) from 39 Ave to Heritage makes most sense to get people where they want to go. As much as we complain about the configurations of Southgate and Kingsway stations, they are a breeze in comparison.

2) Everything around the UofC. This is where the "get people directly from the burbs to downtown" really comes into play. They punched as straight of a line as possible down Crowchild and from that perspective, it's efficient. But it means that at the UofC, the station skirts the easternmost edge of campus, rather than the UofA, where there's a station in the heart of campus plus a second one at the southern end of the main campus. Our main university is far better connected by light rail. There's a lot of other major destinations that should be big trip generators adjacent to the UofC too -- Market Mall, Foothills Hospital, Alberta Children's Hospital, and now the University District. All of these are to the west, further from Crowchild, and completely missed by the C-Train as a result. The closest analogy I can think of in Edmonton (but it isn't really the same) is the area around RAH, Kingsway, and NAIT - all big destinations, all properly accessible by light rail, even if in some cases (like Kingsway Mall) not the most perfect.

3) The west LRT basically goes nowhere of note besides Sunalta and Westbrook. Obviously beneficial to those living around there in SFHs to get downtown for work, but again, not much else. There could've instead been a line down Crowchild to connect MRU, Marda Loop, and other denser neighbourhoods with more infill opportunity than any of the ones on the current alignment aside from where Westbrook Mall is. I know this issue is somewhat fixed by the new MAX BRT but still. Whereas in Edmonton all 3 major post-secondary institutions are connected to the rail system.

There's other things it does well, and the Green Line will fill in some important gaps, but there's some major oversights that you don't see the likes of in Edmonton.
 
dunno said:
That might've been me. I know I said that recently.

The C-Train is still a very good and successful light rail rapid transit system and it does hit places of interest a lot better than American LRT systems often do. But it does feel like they built it as quickly as possible to funnel as many white collar workers into the CBD and everything else was secondary or tertiary. Even downtown, 7th Ave is annoying to traverse because the trains don't get full signal priority (this is what I fear for the Valley Line) and it significantly slows down traffic. But beyond the core, there's a few other things about the routing choices in Calgary that aren't great:

1) Chinook Station and Chinook Mall. The station is a full 4 blocks from the entrance to the mall (1 block is crossing the parking lot). It doesn't stop the mall from getting a lot of patrons via transit, but it's definitely annoying, only fixed slightly by the new pedestrian bridge across MacLeod. I get why they did it - like the NE Capital Line ROW here, they were using an existing freight ROW, but it does feel silly. And something they'll probably never change, even though re-aligning down the middle of MacLeod (maybe elevated) from 39 Ave to Heritage makes most sense to get people where they want to go. As much as we complain about the configurations of Southgate and Kingsway stations, they are a breeze in comparison.

2) Everything around the UofC. This is where the "get people directly from the burbs to downtown" really comes into play. They punched as straight of a line as possible down Crowchild and from that perspective, it's efficient. But it means that at the UofC, the station skirts the easternmost edge of campus, rather than the UofA, where there's a station in the heart of campus plus a second one at the southern end of the main campus. Our main university is far better connected by light rail. There's a lot of other major destinations that should be big trip generators adjacent to the UofC too -- Market Mall, Foothills Hospital, Alberta Children's Hospital, and now the University District. All of these are to the west, further from Crowchild, and completely missed by the C-Train as a result. The closest analogy I can think of in Edmonton (but it isn't really the same) is the area around RAH, Kingsway, and NAIT - all big destinations, all properly accessible by light rail, even if in some cases (like Kingsway Mall) not the most perfect.

3) The west LRT basically goes nowhere of note besides Sunalta and Westbrook. Obviously beneficial to those living around there in SFHs to get downtown for work, but again, not much else. There could've instead been a line down Crowchild to connect MRU, Marda Loop, and other denser neighbourhoods with more infill opportunity than any of the ones on the current alignment aside from where Westbrook Mall is. I know this issue is somewhat fixed by the new MAX BRT but still. Whereas in Edmonton all 3 major post-secondary institutions are connected to the rail system.

There's other things it does well, and the Green Line will fill in some important gaps, but there's some major oversights that you don't see the likes of in Edmonton.
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Couldn’t have asked for a better response!
 
occidentalcapital said:
Mandel wanted downtown to be the hub of the system. Rich people or not you could have easily run a train along whitemud - but a different decision was made to prioritize downtown. People forget how much Mandel really wanted to focus on downtown. He was responsible for the decision to route the Valley line through DT, the arena, moving the Museum downtown. Frankly, I miss this kind of dedicated focus on downtown. We really are missing out by not having a mayor who can drive a city-building agenda.
Click to expand...
The problem is that this vision was pretty much killed by crime, homelessness and the decline of retail.

Many folks stay away from downtown because of the safety issue (or the perception of it), particularly women. Even those of us who aren't as concerned from a personal safety perspective are still disgusted by the filth (not long ago I used an entrance at Bay-Enterprise Square station that reeked of urine so badly that I had to hold my breath) and utterly depressed by the empty storefronts on Jasper.

An equally important factor is the question: what do I need to go downtown for that I can't get anywhere else in the city? Old Strathcona has plenty of unique shopping, and the malls and power centres cover pretty much everything else. I would argue the last really compelling retailer of any size that was downtown-exclusive was Holts. and that's LONG gone. The Edmonton Centre-Eaton Centre mall complexes (now CityCentre) used to be excellent but the loss of their major anchors (and the failure to replace them with anything truly unique), only fueled the decline.
 
Friendmonton said:
One thing I’ve never understood is when people say that Calgary’s network, while larger, doesn’t make as much sense as Edmonton’s. Is Edmonton’s network more efficient with more places of interest or practicality?
Click to expand...
A key difference is that Calgary made the decision to stay on the surface through downtown (Red and Blue Lines) while Edmonton tunneled and built five underground stations in its city centre. This meant that Calgary (whose first line opened three years after Edmonton's, though initially using the same rolling stock) was able to expand out to multiple quadrants of the city much faster. Calgary already had a line to Anderson (for sake of comparison, equivalent to Century Park) while ours was still underground and only as far south as the U of A. Calgary already had a northwest line by the late Eighties, and that same line now goes out towards the city limits. By contrast, our Metro Line hasn't even reached Yellowhead Trail, let alone the northwest city limit, let alone St. Albert.

You could argue that Edmonton made the right decision in going underground through the core: grown-up cities do have subways downtown, even Ottawa knows that (three stations) and Calgary itself will finally get four underground stations downtown with the Green Line. But nevertheless Edmonton's underground sections of the Capital Line used up resources that could have been spent in extending the network faster.

What Edmonton HAS done right is making sure that its less extensive network is aimed directly at almost all the top transit destinations in the city--post-secondary institutions, hospitals, and major shopping centres (most of which already had a transit centre, allowing convenient bus-rail connections). Calgary has been far less successful at this--the LRT is nowhere near Market Mall or Rockyview Hospital, for example. As the CoE has pointed out, the Valley Line West is the final piece that will bring ALL of Edmonton's hospitals onto the LRT network and most of the major shopping centres (Londonderry being the key exception).
 
There is still concrete blocks across the tracks north of there though. It seems the blocks across the tracks at the top of Connors road are gone this morning, however there are still derails on both tracks there.
 
Random thought about watching the resumed Mill Woods testing, and keeping in mind I'm always suspicious of TransEd, I genuinely wonder what they're actually doing apart from having trains out for the sake of being able to say that they are testing trains. They aren't running 2 cars trains, they don't seem to run weekends (grounding cables in place on Saturday at the Whitemud so nothing could leave the shops that day at least) they aren't running into the evening. All they are doing is shuttling 3 trains back and forth between Mill Woods and about 51 Ave. I guess it's better than nothing, and it's their money, but I just see it as a way for them to claim they're running trains and testing the system.
 
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