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Warehouse District Park

Out of Towner said:
Core transportation is not the purpose of every bike lane in the city. The River Valley has numerous lanes and paths whose primary purpose is recreational by design and there was/is a monetary element in constructing and maintaining them. It wouldn't be a surprise to learn that the recreational lanes get more use from cyclists than the transportation bike lane arteries do.

That being said, the primary question about the omission of a water feature (fountain) remains. Why and who decided to omit it from the park?
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No argument there, some bike lanes are amenities and could potentially be a fair comparison. But the post I was responding to was referencing the City's spending on the Bike Lane Network project, which is explicitly about fixing the gaps in our bike transportation network. It's not a valid budget comparison with the omission of the water fountain in Warehouse Park.

Edit: Not personally concerned about the fountain being omitted. I think the park looks pretty awesome as designed even if it does have some compromises. Leg and City Hall are superior fountains anyway. Don't fry me! ;)
 
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Exactly how many does this core transportation infrastructure for a wide variety of folks really serve throughout the year, like a number, and at a cost for a bike lane at 1 million per KM?

NOT saying we do not need some, but most of the year they are vacant...
 
TAS said:
You can find out by sending an email here:
warehousepark@edmonton.ca

Please share what you find out.
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Here's a template you can use if you just wanna quickly send them your thoughts, feel free to make any changes before sending it.
If you are making your own from scratch, send it to Warehouse Park <warehousepark@edmonton.ca> with CC to Evan Spitz <Evan.Spitz@edmonton.ca>, Sarah Stephenson <sarah.stephenson@edmonton.ca>, Nicole Wolfe <nicole.wolfe@edmonton.ca>
Sarah Stephenson is the project manager and works for the city in the Open Spaces Planning and Design department.
 
Habibfazil said:
Exactly how many does this core transportation infrastructure for a wide variety of folks really serve throughout the year, like a number, and at a cost for a bike lane at 1 million per KM?

NOT saying we do not need some, but most of the year they are vacant...
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There are still a number of huge missing links in our system and that's a significant factor in people feeling safe using it. Some people will ride no matter what but many others won't use it until it's a viable, well connected option. If a good part of a trip means sharing the space with busier vehicle traffic, that's a non starter for many. As more and more of the core system gets completed in later 2026, that will help immensely - but still a ways to go.

City Plan is to get active/public transportation to 50% mode share and you can't do that until you have a very good transit system and active transportation infrastructure.
 
TAS said:
There are still a number of huge missing links in our system and that's a significant factor in people feeling safe using it. Some people will ride no matter what but many others won't use it until it's a viable, well connected option. If a good part of a trip means sharing the space with busier vehicle traffic, that's a non starter for many. As more and more of the core system gets completed in later 2026, that will help immensely - but still a ways to go.

City Plan is to get active/public transportation to 50% mode share and you can't do that until you have a very good transit system and active transportation infrastructure.
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I'd like to see a set standard city wide, all the same, would go a longs ways rather than this patchwork of varying styles...
 
Coprolite said:
While I would love a water feature in said park comparable at least to the one in Paul Kane Park, you can get admittedly get quite a bit of bike lane for the cost of a decent sized water feature, and the bike lanes don't really suck up as much maintenance. I LOVE the water feature at Paul Kane Park, but it seems very labour-intensive what with pumps to maintain, the whole process of mothballing it for the winter, and getting it started back up in the spring (which involves replacing all of the cat tails and such). I mean even putting a pond in your yard is an expensive undertaking, a whole bunch of work, and stuff goes wrong with them all of the time, and troubleshooting leaks with them is anything but fun.

So while I can make a lot of arguments for such a water feature, "it's cheaper than bike lanes" DEFINITELY isn't one of them. I mean you can say, "OH IT'S CHEAPER THAN A MAJOR BUILD OUT OF THE BIKE LANE NETWORK SPANNING THE ENTIRE CITY OVER SEVERAL YEARS", but that's a bit silly.
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$7M per year to maintain bicycle lanes as reported by the Edmonton Journal. I can't tell you the cost to build and operate a fountain but if it's too much for the City to handle then it's too much for the City to handle. Perhaps one of the biggest selling features of a fountain is that it keeps people coming back. Without a fountain, people will go to the park once or twice and then say that there's nothing there and quit going.

Hopefully the City's bait and switch tactic doesn't discourage more development in the area because attracting projects with scale is competitive and time will tell if a scaled back park is enough to attract more development to the area. Some uncertainty has been introduced into what should have been a slam dunk for the City.
 
Out of Towner said:
$7M per year to maintain bicycle lanes as reported by the Edmonton Journal. I can't tell you the cost to build and operate a fountain but if it's too much for the City to handle then it's too much for the City to handle. Perhaps one of the biggest selling features of a fountain is that it keeps people coming back. Without a fountain, people will go to the park once or twice and then say that there's nothing there and quit going.

Hopefully the City's bait and switch tactic doesn't discourage more development in the area because attracting projects with scale is competitive and time will tell if a scaled back park is enough to attract more development to the area. Some uncertainty has been introduced into what should have been a slam dunk for the City.
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You just successfully argued that bike lanes are a spectacular bargain when it comes to moving people.
 
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Out of Towner said:
Core transportation is not the purpose of every bike lane in the city. The River Valley has numerous lanes and paths whose primary purpose is recreational by design and there was/is a monetary element in constructing and maintaining them. It wouldn't be a surprise to learn that the recreational lanes get more use from cyclists than the transportation bike lane arteries do.

That being said, the primary question about the omission of a water feature (fountain) remains. Why and who decided to omit it from the park?
Click to expand...
So, the river valley bike network was overwhelmingly built back in the 1980s, and the work built on the core bike grid since 2017 has made many routes which were previously overwhelmingly recreational into viable active transportation corridors, because it helps if when you reach the edge of the river valley trails that there's actually coherent connections to destinations and rather than just dumping you onto a stroad. Mill Creek, for instance, has become a great way to get from Strathcona to downtown, and vice versa.
 
Habibfazil said:
Exactly how many does this core transportation infrastructure for a wide variety of folks really serve throughout the year, like a number, and at a cost for a bike lane at 1 million per KM?

NOT saying we do not need some, but most of the year they are vacant...
Click to expand...
So, none of this is really true. They don't cost $1 million per km unless you do some creative accounting (as was done by City Admin with the cost of the downtown bike grid) and lump the costs of car infrastructure that were going to be bought anyways (in that case, planned replacement of traffic lights) into the project. This admittedly happens a lot, but it doesn't mean the true cost of the bike lane is actually a million dollars.

And they aren't vacant most of the year. It's perhaps easy to think that if you don't bicycle and your perception of the city is extensively shaped by what you see from your car, because the main routes are overwhelmingly on low traffic side streets and connect to MUPs which aren't on any street at all. The ones I see get used year round, and while there are fewer riders in winter, actual winter is not the majority of the year here as much as we like to get all dramatic and pretend it's commonly -40C.
 
While we discuss about the cost of bike infrastructure vs. fountain maintenance - I'd like to say that I think this will be pretty hype and become something uniquely Edmonton:
Screen Shot 2024-07-18 at 9.07.07 AM.png
 
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