LRT — in *this* economy? Yes

A Bombardier LRT train in Toronto that is similar to those that will be used on the Valley Line. Flickr/JasonParis

Our train has now arrived at Predictable Outcome Station. Please watch your step.

In September, when the UCP government released the MacKinnon report — in which Janice MacKinnon, the former finance minister for Saskatchewan, suggested the barely-signed city charters for Edmonton and Calgary should be ripped up — one could see the fate of the still-to-come Valley Line - West was life support. The reason is not that we don’t have the money to build it. No, the reason is political benefit. 

The UCP knows its base is clustered in rural, exurban and suburban Alberta, and most especially not in urban pockets of Edmonton. Its base, roughly speaking, doesn’t want Edmonton to have money for things like flashy LRT, because it doesn’t believe it needs such stuff. What this base does need, always, despite us having enough of them to travel to the moon, is new roads. So, transit is a very bad thing in the UCP’s Alberta and new roads are not. We have already seen this de facto policy in action — take a bow, 2019 capital investment plan and your maintained investment in ring-road expansion.  

On the flip side, what the UCP government knows is that people pay less attention to its cutting and smashing if they are already engaged in fights amongst themselves. Cities, especially Edmonton, fight about the cost of transit, bike lanes and crosswalks — even though what fiscal conservatives might really want to concern themselves with, were they actually fiscal conservatives, are things like $510-million in debt-financing to build a freeway. So, by scrapping the city charters and threatening to bail on its LRT commitments with just 90-days-notice — but not its roads — the UCP government knows council and city residents will surely turn on one another.

Who benefits?

The longer we fight the longer we’re not discussing the real problems. Remember those ripped up city charters? How about the fairness, fiscally speaking, of a city that creates roughly 25 per cent of the entire province’s GDP, only to see the money it receives cut? Those are the actual fiscal reasons why we can’t build transit. But those have to do with the provincial government. And I swear I’ve heard an argument about fiscal fairness coming from Alberta recently, but it’s been aimed at Ottawa for some reason.  

“On the flip side, what the UCP government knows is that people pay less attention to its cutting and smashing if they are already engaged in fights amongst themselves.”

Expect much political maneuvering centred on the Valley Line - West in the next while within Edmonton City Council. Expect this to achieve little. The next municipal election in 2021 is close and, sadly, is already blunting the ability of our council to act. Several councillors are contemplating or preparing to run for mayor. What we get as reward is a council that, as a whole, is not taking a strong stand on much these days, lest individuals look out of step with the new anti-progressive fashion and damage their chances at a mayoral run.  

We deserve better than politics on the Valley Line - West. 

One, we have the money to build it. This money is currently being spent on things like the Yellowhead and other investments that just make us spend too much over time to achieve too little. It’s also currently being left on the table, in the form of revenue tools the province should hand over to cities to allow them to build what they need rather than beg. 

Two, not building the LRT extension does several bad things we can’t afford — and this point is on council. It would choke us of transit despite our belief that we will hit two-million people by mid century. If you hate your commute today, let me tell you — you, or possibly your kids, will positively loathe it if we don’t build higher capacity mobility now. Oh, and don’t expect us to attract developers after convincing some to build towers on a premise that high-capacity transit was coming but then, you know, bailing. Expect, instead, an acceleration of greenfield suburbia at the fringes and nightmare traffic.

Three, the system is designed more or less to function with the west-leg, not without it. If we don’t build the west leg, now, how does a train line that ends in the centre of our downtown actually work? Or does it at all? 

Four, on the question of alternatives like bus rapid-transit, I’ve lived in Ottawa and saw what its BRT was like. It was great to get places, fast, but nobody wanted to live near it. Buses are loud and they stink. BRT may move plenty of people and be super cheap, and it should have a place in Edmonton, but BRT will not incentivize denser development in the way the Valley Line - West already has — without even being built. 

Five, and finally, it’s 2019 and West Edmonton Mall, one of our largest employment nodes, bigger on its busy days than downtown itself, doesn’t have a connection to LRT. This is madness. It should have been there from the beginning. We have a chance, now, to finally connect the behemoth.

We have to do it. Council needs to figure out how to make it happen.  

Today I'm pushing for transit investment — by becoming part of the problem

I drove today. And I did so to push for investment in transit in Edmonton.

Allow me to explain.

For years, I’ve lived by the idea that to be part of the solution means to you have to live like it. Fittingly, I have not personally owned an automobile to drive to work since 2009, though my wife and I share her older Kia now to get groceries and visit people in far-off suburbs.

My trip to work and how much it costs my city and province. Today I will cost nearly $27, rather than $10 or, were I to bike, $0.24. Source: City of Calgary calculator. Link in blog.

I’ve experienced many frustrations doing this. My last company job offered me monthly subsidies for car parking but would not cover my car-share and transit trips. This is common in Edmonton. For shame. I’ve also nearly died way too many times in a crosswalk or on a bicycle. Still, my thinking has been that I would like to push back on the idea that “no one bikes” or “nobody who can afford not to use transit will use transit” by being the guy who does just that. The happy side effects are I meet great people, either on my bike or on transit. And I’m happier.

And there are many, many people like me in Edmonton and Alberta.

So why would I drive a vehicle to work today and think that this will push my city and province to re-invest in transit? Because I’m going to stop saving my city and province money. I’m calling the bluff.

Each time I choose active transportation for my work commute, which is roughly six kilometres, I save Edmonton and Alberta coffers between $5 to $13. (You can calculate your own commute here.)

My thinking in protesting through driving is this: If more of us who want usable transit and have the means to a vehicle choose that vehicle, we force the inevitable. We beat our roads into needing more frequent and costly maintenance. We accelerate all the myriad, unsustainable costs. We pressure a system that’s pretending sprawl development is sustainable by allowing it to break just that much more quickly.

And then, once it’s broken, once property tax hikes are proposed in double digits or a drive from the edge of the city’s edge to its downtown takes 90 minutes because of clogged arteries, we will talk honestly and rationally about investments in transit.

I can hear the criticisms to this — that I’m just virtue signalling while opting for a car, or that driving won’t achieve what I’m after.

My response is that I’ve been choosing the sustainable option, repeatedly, over the past few years and showing up to committee and council meetings to push for investments in these things, but to what end? It’s not making my leaders invest in my transit system, is it? As we’ve seen recently, we’re getting the exact opposite. On the flip side, I’m being incentivized to drive, through free on-street parking and zero added cost to access the road network.

The other criticism is that I will only accelerate further political and monetary responses to car demand by becoming part of that demand. I accept that and do worry about it. But I think this problem boils down to dollars. If all of us who try to move around in our city more sustainably chose, instead, to max out our demands on the public purse and its systems more often, that already stretched system might just hit a breaking point that leaders could not ignore.

That might prompt the reckoning we need. Transit and rational land-use might, then, finally, seem the only way to survive.

I’m happy to hear feedback on this.

How Edmonton can and must fix e-scooters in 2020

E-scooters are terrible! E-scooters are wonderful!

Both are true, depending on who you are and the context.

A fix is needed. Having just written a long blog on this that disappeared (does that ever burn!), thanks to a crashing page, I’ll save you the justification, stats and arguments and just get to it.

Here’s how to fix e-scooters in Edmonton in 2020.

The problem: This sidewalk is rendered impassable for people like my mom, who uses a walker. Unacceptable but fixable with actual effort.

1) Dedicated parking areas on streets, havens on sidewalks — and financial incentives
Take parking dedicated to private vehicles on city streets and create stalls set aside for share vehicles such as e-scooters and carshare. Do this on every single block. In areas where more spots are needed or stalls are difficult to come by, create havens on sidewalks that are out of the right-of-way. Financially incentivize using these areas by making it far cheaper to park in them than elsewhere.

2) Build more separated and safe lanes
Edmonton recently set out, slowly, to build proper bike lanes. While it has done this the world has changed. Anyone who uses the small grid of lanes has seen they aren’t just used by cyclists. Instead, they’re used by all sorts of people on all sorts of mobility devices, many of them electrified. This is only going to accelerate, and at a dizzying pace, in the future. Indeed, if you think e-scoots came out of nowhere, get used to the feeling. Cities that work to allow the shift will win in so many ways — on climate change, on congestion, on vibrancy. So build more lanes now, build them using adaptable and affordable measures (buffered lanes) and get to work. People using e-scoots, e-skateboards, e-mopeds, e-bicycles and e-younameits are the more affordable future.

The solution: Dedicated parking on the street. It’s already happening in isolated areas on the ground in Edmonton, like at this bike corral in Strathcona.

3) Stop setting ourselves up to fail
Anyone, and I literally mean any person, who uses a bicycle or walks in Edmonton could have told rule-makers that forcing people onto streets and keeping them off sidewalks was a nice, idealistic rule that was going to fail from the moment it went into force. I’m a vehicular cyclist and have been for more than 25 years. I still am forced onto sidewalks in Edmonton, one of the most speed crazed cities (thanks to road design — looking at you slip lanes and inner-city freeways) in North America. Our e-scooter rules need to reflect reality. People will use sidewalks. So teach them how, create campaigns to suggest good behaviour and stop the denialism. Lecturing people on following rules is a good way to say, “Our rules don’t actually make any sense in reality.”

4) Adopt ideas like the #YEGCoreZone
One great way to get people off sidewalks and onto streets when they’re on bicycles, e-scooters or other devices is to make those streets safe. That means lower vehicle speeds for everyone. It means streets for people. The #YEGCoreZone idea to reduce neighbourhood speed limits within the inner core of Edmonton to 30km/h is vital for all of the future ways we will move around and the future density we will absorb to be happy and healthy.