Valley Line LRT | TransEd/Marigold | City of Edmonton

[IanO]

Also a bit of cherry picking going on here. Do you think ALL stations in the cities you posted are nice and architecturally stunning? Hardly. For all you know there's a poster in Norway bitching that their new bridge looks like a piece of crap compared to this fantastic Tawatina Bridge that was just build in this world class city called Edmonton.
In my mind Edmonton IS world class...we just need to start believing it. FWIW, world-class does not mean every single new public piece of infrastructure is top notch design. If that were the case, there would be no world class cities in the world.

Agreed, but where do we spend our dollars.

It's akin to our Library versus Police station and how Davies is gorgeous and yet Churchill is just ok.

Signature locations should have more attention/dollars/design consideration and yet they seemingly do not.

With finite resources we have to prioritize and our priorities are messed.

 

[Didama]

^ I don't disagree with that. And I certainly think there is still room for Edmonton to raise the bar when it comes to key infrastructure projects in key locations. The discussions around the quality of public infrastructure happens in all cities, world class (whatever that means) or not. Screwing up a few projects in key locations doesn't make Edmonton lame. Having citizens call their own city lame make Edmonton lame, if anything. Clearly we can do better all around.

 

[David A]

Yeah, there may be some cherry picking and maybe not all the stations in these places are quite so nice, but I think we should be open to having nicer or better ones and there are some good examples here. Thanks for these pictures.

The excuses - it is winter here, we are not a world class city ... seem a bit tiresome to me. If you don't want to make the effort, but just come up with reasons why not, for sure you will remain mediocre.

 

[David A]

Agreed, but where do we spend our dollars.

It's akin to our Library versus Police station and how Davies is gorgeous and yet Churchill is just ok.

Signature locations should have more attention/dollars/design consideration and yet they seemingly do not.

With finite resources we have to prioritize and our priorities are messed.

Good point - Davies is not in such a high profile location. Perhaps it is easier because it is totally new and has less constraints on it than Churchill, where the Valley Line has to integrate with an existing station/line and other things.

However, it does seem it should have been more of a signature effort.

 

[The_Cat]

I’m glad that the LRT blends in the the beauty of the river valley. Some stations like Government Centre and University are decent. Some stations like Churchill could benefit from a makeover to complement the AGA and Winspear. The connection with The Valley Line will be great for natural light.

 

[thommyjo]

Yeah, I agree with the idea that many cities also have many very average stations. I think these are fair comparisons though as they are similar sized, northern cities in small countries. Oslo, helsinki, etc are in a similar playing field as us. NY having wild ones makes sense and aren’t fair for us to compare to, I agree.

And like Ian said, I think that’s more the heart of it for me, where we put money. I love the bridge, absolute home run. Walterdale, Davies, meadowlark library, meadows rec. so many gorgeous projects. But then yeah, the library, Churchill connector…seems weird to not blow money on these being that they’re the center of our city. And then we spend crazy money on police stations and fire stations in random areas next to arterials and duck ponds. Would just love to see our core projects really shine.

The connector will be fine and functional, would have just loved it to really be a centrepiece and for money to be value engineered from less prominent projects. I think it’s also about the brand and image of ETS not seeming dirty, cheap, lame. Enbridge and stantec towers give me a different impression of those companies than older government buildings on 108st. The aesthetic impacts perception for me.

 

[Windermere]

If you have the Google Earth app on your phone, the imagery has been updated to August 2021. It's cool to use to follow the Valley Line.

 

[quit]

Part of this can be blamed in provincial legislation. Cities in Alberta are obligated by law to go with the cheapest RFP when tendering contracts

Folks, please be careful when commenting on something as law unless you are referencing some sources. To other posters here, if you read something where someone says something is law here, or elsewhere on the internet, look it up yourself or talk to a lawyer.

This statement is misleading, because a privilege clause can be included in the tendering documents effectively stating that the lowest bid will not necessarily be accepted. Other scoring criteria could be defined or the tender could say that it would award to the bidder deemed the most advantageous. If a privilege clause is not included, an unsuccessful proponent could make the argument that the lowest bid be accepted. More information here, here, and here.

Canada does have one of the highest rates of litigation related to procurement though, which is interesting when you consider people always are quick to mention how easy it is to sue someone in the states. Different types of law and awareness I guess.

That said, it would be nice if we did see nicer design in Edmonton. Often, I even compare Edmonton vs Calgary and wonder why we get the short end of the stick. I guess if you go further back we have more gems though.

 

[cliffapotamus]

Work is really starting to ramp up on some of the west sections. Saw crews fencing off trees at the 149st and Stoney plain road intersection.

The project offices seem to have quite a few vehicles at them now as well.

yeah, and I'm still just really impressed with how fast the section near West Ed is going. Every time I think about it, the fact that they have the viaduct sorted out enough to be able to be doing foundations already?! they've only had the contract for a year or so, which isn't that long to design something like that fully.
side question, could the viaduct be getting designed as it's getting built, ie the bridge segments getting sorted out as piers are being built? and is it possible that Transed is sharing their design drawings for reference for Marigold? so piers etc match? That question of matching/not repeating design work unnecessarily has been in my mind for a while.

 

[tbjarnason]

The excuses....

and we wonder why edmonton is lame. It's cause people think like this. All excuses. Have some vision people!

Here's some train stations form Norway, Sweden, and Finland so ya'll can stop blaming our climate for everything.

You build any of those 4 stations here in Edmonton and guess what - it would be the same complaints from the same people about how they are soooooo unoriginal and Edmonton is sooooo lame and everyone is sooooo much better than us. And the reverse can also be said - if any other city built any of the structures we dislike here, we’d think they were the cat’s ass and praise the heck out of them. Why? Because they are not in Edmonton.

Ever notice that the complaining is often not so much about the building elements itself, but more about the city? It’s rarely “this building is terrible because it has this design feature” but more so “this building sucks because Edmonton sucks and always has and always will and everything is nicer everywhere else except here." The latter example is the real problem in my opinion. It’s a general lack of pride that people seem to have in our city and always using “Edmonton“ as a blanket explanation as to why they think everthing is terrible and lame here.

Does Edmonton have some ugly buildings? Sure it does. Does it have beautiful buildings? Of course. And maybe the buildings that I think are ugly are admired and loved by others and the ones I think are great are hated (Manchester Square for example). Does that make our city a lame, unoriginal place? No it does not. Quite the opposite actually. So if a person doesn’t like a certain building, why does it always seem to relate back to Edmonton as a whole? Do people really think a questionable library design or a boring LRT connector are enough to define what the world thinks about our city? People act like every single design choice in the history of our city has been made by the same committee of 4 people in a dark, secluded boardroom in some basement. The truth however, is that our city is built on the visions and decisions of thousands of different people over the span of 130 years, all with different tastes and ideas. Some of those ideas good, some of them not so much. But regardless, they all add up to make our city exactly what it is - a unique, vibrant and diverse city with a world-class LRT system, unique to our climate and population size. I can think of a whole lot more examples of what makes our city great than I can of things that make it lame and boring.

So it really comes down to pride. If people don’t have pride in the city that they live in, then it doesn’t really matter what’s built here - they are going to dislike everything anyways. Simple as that.

 

[BASE]

The curse of being hyper focused on our own city. We are all guilty of probably being overly critical at times. Need to be able to both be critical so mistakes aren’t repeated while also having the ability to be proud of what we have and promote the good parts to others.

 

[occidentalcapital]

Huh? They have more HVAC requirements than most uses/places/spaces.

-Pressurization differentials
-Makeup air on various levels
-Significant temperature variation in the entrance stairwells
-Just look at any of the new doorways they added top of stairs (~3yrs ago - see Bay) and how hard it is to distribute or control

Under the LRT design guidelines, forced air heating appears to be prohibited. They specifically state that overhead resistance heaters are to be used (which in my opinion are pretty useless for any real heating). If you look carefully at the stations, at most, including Churchill, I don't believe there is any significant make up air provided. When its -25 outside, it is ice cold on the concourse and platform on Churchill. There's no sense that the space is conditioned or heated. You have passive ventilation, yes, to account for the pressure differentials. If they installed some forced air heating w/ positive pressure in the Churchill Connector, I would be pretty happy about that, as I think it would help the remainder of the station and tunnels to warm up a bit in winter.

 

[The_Cat]

I remember the same people complaining about West Edmonton Mall when it opened - "Too expensive", "Too gaudy", anything nice for our city. If they want to be ungrateful, they can do it by themselves.

 

[superelevation]

spent this afternoon walking the line (perks of getting fridays off lol) and yeah, pretty much everything is done, save for some landscaping and sidewalk stuff. they could open to the public tomorrow if they wanted, infrastructure-wise it looked like.
The big red flag I noticed was the testing happening. today it was between Avonmore and Strathearn. with flaggers at every crossing. none of the signals were being heeded by the train. they were shutting down intersections at will and the train was going against the lights. Now, maybe that was just for whatever they are doing today, and the signals work just fine, and they were ignoring them for expediency, but i doubt that.
I think signalling and testing are still in early stages. Beg buttons are everywhere, some don't even work when you push them, traffic signal phases seem off (really long periods with everything red, short greens, long turn lights, etc) and the train isn't even attempting to follow its own signals. I think there's still a couple months of the back-and-forth on sections of the route while lights get programmed ahead of us before any big news.

Also. the trains have horns. Car horns. Loud car horns. not a train horn, or an air horn, a car horn. I got it on video today.
very disappointed by that.

The vehicles have multiple types of horns as in Toronto.

 

[The_Cat]

I think some of the train signals still have yet to be synchronized with the traffic lights, hence the reason for the flaggers.