Valley Line LRT | TransEd/Marigold | City of Edmonton

Yeggy said:
IDK why you say ridership is concerning. Are you aware that Edmonton was on of, if not the first, major North American city to achieve its pre pandemic ridership numbers.

Be more worried about our inadequate service levels as we still remain, something like 100,000 operational hours below our set standards.
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ridership recovered for LRT or Bus? iirc, lrt is way below, bus is back.

I rode the tramline twice yesterday, around 11:00 and again around 16:00, both about 3/4 full.

Only real LRT problems was 4 bylaw at churchill chasing off 1 yelling male, while 2 were taking statements from a female witness. Major beef was ETS taking an entire 3 car LRT train out of service for a broken outside window, couldn't it have been dropped off at say south campus trail track?
 
Habibfazil said:
ridership recovered for LRT or Bus? iirc, lrt is way below, bus is back.

I rode the tramline twice yesterday, around 11:00 and again around 16:00, both about 3/4 full.

Only real LRT problems was 4 bylaw at churchill chasing off 1 yelling male, while 2 were taking statements from a female witness. Major beef was ETS taking an entire 3 car LRT train out of service for a broken outside window, couldn't it have been dropped off at say south campus trail track?
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I think a transit system is a transit system… Breaking it into parts, especially when one part of it didn't exist pre pandemic isnt fair nor possible.

The fact remains ETS was the first major North American system to reach pre pandemic numbers. Break it apart however you wish, the fact remains.

Edit. my apologies as the city statements do highlight bus traffic specifically.
 
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Yeggy said:
IDK why you say ridership is concerning. Are you aware that Edmonton was on of, if not the first, major North American city to achieve its pre pandemic ridership numbers.

Be more worried about our inadequate service levels as we still remain, something like 100,000 operational hours below our set standards.
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This has actually been highlighted to have been falsely claimed by the city and didn’t include LRT anyways, just busses.

And that’s partially because of how bad our office employment is downtown. Our transit use is driven heavily by students and low income users (who don’t have alternatives). So of course those recover better than more corporate riders in other cities that have WFH options and also more agency to change transportation modes due to safety concerns in many cities lately.

It’s great it recovered. But apples to oranges vs cities with entirely different pre pandemic ridership make up vs us.
 
Droxen said:
I'm fairly new to this community still, and not nearly as well-versed in these things as others, but I would like to point out that it seems a little unfair to judge the whole line by one train's occupancy levels at one moment, which also takes place during the last hour of peak times, when things are supposed to be winding down as peak time comes to an end.

At that time of the morning there are trains coming every five minutes, and have been coming every five minutes for over two hours. You're going to need a lot of people stuffing those trains to make every train look well occupied considering an entire rural Alberta village such as Rosemary (population ~400) could all fit on one two-car train and still have room to carry another 150 people.

I think patience is what's needed with the Valley Line, as the destinations it serves improve, and efforts to improve transit perception are made (which I agree, are way over blown), the riders will come.
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Yes, it’s momentary. But the judgement also comes from the data released showing around 5000 daily riders currently when they estimated 30,000. That discrepancy is concerning. We aren’t talking 20k when they guessed 30k. We are talking 17% of projected.

All other Canadian cities with trains would see basically every train full at 8:15am on a Wednesday.

Yes we need patience, AND we should be asking why estimates and reality are so far apart.
 
Knowing what we know today about transit ridership trends and say we were debating on the final Valley Line alignment, would we have run it through downtown or through the university, perhaps with a stub into downtown?
 
dkazzed said:
Knowing what we know today about transit ridership trends and say we were debating on the final Valley Line alignment, would we have run it through downtown or through the university, perhaps with a stub into downtown?
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Since the alignment stops at MacEwan & Norquest, I would suggest that this was taken into account.
 
The Valley Line has only been operating for a few months now, so I feel it is too hasty to be sounding the alarm based on falling short of estimates that may have been pre COVID.

It is probably true that a lot of current transit riders are seniors, students or low income. Of course, we do not have a huge financial centre downtown unlike some other cities, so there may not be as many office commuters. However, I don't think that diminishes the need for transit or for the ability of various people to get around.

I do feel over time and as traveling to downtown recovers more, it will get more use and we will be better able to judge how successful it is.
 
An interesting tidbit from today's exec committee meeting is that peak hour, mid-day, and evening numbers are getting closer to where they used to be, but late night ridership is still lagging. Admin stated that this is the second major contributing factor to the lower lrt ridership figures, along with hybrid work.

On that note, here's a couple of pics I took at around noon on Tuesday, May 21. It was surprisingly busy for a weekday at noon, and most folks seemed to get off at Churchill Square where there was something going on. For reference, this was a 2-car consist.
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Tropical said:
Since the alignment stops at MacEwan & Norquest, I would suggest that this was taken into account.
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It would have been better to surface at the quarters area and run north west across to 104th with stops at the museum/city hall/churchill, down to the arena, down to mcewan, then oliver, none of the 102nd avenue when you have Jasper avenue a block away
 
CplKlinger said:
An interesting tidbit from today's exec committee meeting is that peak hour, mid-day, and evening numbers are getting closer to where they used to be, but late night ridership is still lagging. Admin stated that this is the second major contributing factor to the lower lrt ridership figures, along with hybrid work.

On that note, here's a couple of pics I took at around noon on Tuesday, May 21. It was surprisingly busy for a weekday at noon, and most folks seemed to get off at Churchill Square where there was something going on. For reference, this was a 2-car consist.
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Really good for a midday. My PM rush hour train was equally as busy. Easily 100+ passengers on a two car train set. Then the train going towards downtown was surprisingly busy, I'd estimate at least 75 passengers. Maybe the OIlers game had something to do with it.
 
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