Valley Line LRT | TransEd/Marigold | City of Edmonton

Extremely disturbing trend of substandard construction throughout this project. Every piece of concrete on this project needs to be subject to engineering testing and review at this point (which should have been done YEARS ago when the first batch of issues cropped up).
 
Oh well, that answers the question of why there still was no announcement of an opening date. Disappointing, but not surprising. Unfortunately, it seems to be quite a recurring theme with such large projects involving the City of Edmonton.

The blame the weather excuse is not a good one. Surely, the people involved with this should have had some understanding of Edmonton's weather patterns and planned accordingly. I suspect there will be a lot of finger pointing about this, which is sort of a bureaucratic reflex. However, in practice blame and responsibility are often shared.

It would be good if everyone who had a role in this owns up to it, but that might be too much to expect.
 
yeggator said:
How did TransEd drop the ball this badly? This is on top of a bad concrete pour for the Whitemud overpass that required them to completely redo it a few years back.
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Don't forget the 3 sections of elevated track they had to pull down and replace with brand new builds too. I have never seen a project waste so much concrete before in my life.
 
Wow, that's super disappointing. I'm astonished at how bad the concrete quality is and that the project was even allowed to progress to this stage, despite low initial quality test results. I really wonder at the internal decisions made to proceed forward.

The continual problems on LRT projects really sours its image, making public support for future public transit projects harder to get.
 
I’ve heard CoE project managers who shut their phones off at 4:30 don’t help either
 
I get that this delay is frustrating. But to blame the City of Edmonton overlooks one key point: the P3 model (public-private-partnership) under which this leg was built was mandated by the federal government under the PPP Canada Fund announced in 2009.

An almost laughable quote from the original press release from then-finance minister Jim Flaherty: "P3s have demonstrated their ability to deliver public infrastructure on-time and on-budget" said Minister Flaherty. "The P3 Canada Fund will help to open the door to greater possibilities for P3s in Canada ."

They have advantages and disadvantages, one of the disadvantages being the city has little to no direct control over the process. An advantage being a point the mayor made today, the $1.8 billion budget hasn't changed as a result of the delay announced today.

As an aside, the original website for the P3 Canada Fund, the organization set up by Ottawa to facilitate P3 funding, now advertises the best online casinos in Canada. 😂
 
Windermere said:
Does anyone know if Calgary's elevated LRT had similar issues?
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Not that I am aware of. Neither has Vancouver with all the concrete used on the Skytrain!

It seems to me too, that the construction of the piers for the elevated section was something that was running on time and seemed to be going well.

My question is: would this have happened if this was not a P3?

As much as the NLRT extension gets flak for being late, let's not forget the actual construction came in on time and under budget. The issue was that the City separately procured the CBTC signal system and kept on increasing requirements, up to and including making the legacy 1970's LRV's run under a degree of automatic control.
 
... and the finger pointing begins! Well Jim Flaherty has been dead for almost a decade now, so lets not blame him. Maybe it was Joe Flaherty to blame. Wasn't he in Edmonton for a while?
 
Not whatsoever. Make a temporary fix to get the line opened. Then do the work in LRT off hours to put the permanent fix in place. The public must be prioritized, management and the engineers need to work around that.
 
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