Edmonton is a motor city. With an area a little under seven hundred square kilometres and growing, everyone here knows that Edmonton has become synonymous with urban sprawl. While Edmonton’s traffic is nowhere near the madness of say, Toronto’s, our geographical size makes vehicular travel an absolute given. The Anthony Henday ring road, finally completed in 2016, is often considered already insufficient to handle traffic demand. I commute on the Henday myself and many stories are true. The infamous stretch between Terwillegar Drive and The Whitemud in the West does, indeed, become a volume-choked shitshow.
Edmonton city council has responded to the sprawl with a focus on developing the inner city. Infill is expected to reign in the spread by balancing urban growth more toward existing areas. Meanwhile, public transit gets beefed up to handle accessibility to the outlying districts, as well as address the expected population boom near the core. All well and good, especially since it also looks environmentally friendly on paper. Fewer cars running all over the region means less emission.
Except that the horse pretty much left the barn, ran off the property, trotted down the road, ate the neighbour’s apples, pooped on their driveway and then got hit by a passing semi decades ago. I keep getting the feeling that city council takes observations from other cities where public transit initiatives thrive and tries to fit them together into Edmonton after the fact. I recognize that cities can change and evolve – we should always strive to do so, in fact – but you can only force a round peg into a square hole so tightly.
I drive all over Edmonton in the normal course of everyday life. Despite the rush hour congestion and a generous helping of idiocy on our roads, I still find the freedom of one’s own car indispensable. When I transitioned from dependence on public transit to using my own wheels, the difference did no less than alter the course of my entire life. I could go anywhere in basically half an hour, I was never stranded and I didn’t become essentially immobile between one and five in the morning. A Class Five driver’s license is the single most foundational certification I’ve ever received. It has opened more options and allowed more actions in my life than every other credential combined. Because a simple plastic card and a beaten up Civic are so profoundly important in this giant sandbox, it’s no surprise that around one million people throughout metro Edmonton kinda need to keep driving.
The practical need to drive leads me to question Edmonton’s intense push over the last few years to “take cars off the roads”. If we were a tightly packed city with more people needing to travel shorter distances, then I could certainly see the wisdom of trying to convert motorists into pedestrians. In a city like Edmonton however, I’m leary about forcing more and more money into extra bus services and expanded LRT.
A major assumption around public transit in Edmonton is that if you build it, they will come. I’m not saying that good public transit isn’t important but you can’t get people out of cars just by expanding services. Far from struggling to meet demand, Edmonton Transit System has been hurting for ridership. Underused bus routes were cut in 2017 to tighten the city’s belt around transit cost. According to the city’s own report, use has been slowly falling off since Spring 2015.A Global News article by Caley Ramsay in 2016 recognized that dropping numbers were expected to continue for several years.
Annual ETS ridership dropped by 600,000 in 2015 … Because of the downward trend, the city is doubtful it will reach its target of 103 million rides by 2020. (Ramsay, 2016)
ETS reflected that dropping ridership was due to economic downturn but unless you’ve been in a coma for the last few years, you’re probably aware that Edmonton Transit’s left a lot of people unhappy, particularly with expanded trains lines. Metro line has been plagued with timing issues due to software since it was built. Many people have suggested that the LRT expansions are too little too late. Forty years ago, it would have been much easier to install lines that the city is only now designing and building. The Valley line SouthEast is now forced to include raised track in order to bypass existing infrastructure. But forty years ago, the city wasn’t expected to expand as aggressively and Light Rail Transit from one horizon to the other made much less sense. The planned Valley line West is also reported to cost $2.4 billion instead of the original $1.8 billion (CBC, 2018) because of proposals for similar raised sections. The hope, when all this is done, is that neighbourhoods linked by rail will one day experience the magic of fast, convenient connectivity.
Yes, because Edmonton’s growth has of course been resoundingly predictable thus far.
Buses and trains still see constant use, at least. If improving scheduled services aren’t spurring a sudden surge in use, then the same is especially true for the new bicycle lanes. In the same article, Ramsay notes that only 1.1 percent of Edmontonians ride bicycles to work. That’s a hell of a lot less than you would expect to warrant modifying the city’s road network with special bike zones. As with rush hour volume elsewhere, I have experienced this particular baloney firsthand. Motorized traffic bunches up and slows down, bottlenecking where there used to be additional lanes, while the bicycle lanes that now occupy that space sit empty for hours. So far I seem to have missed the legions of motorists abandoning their cars and trucks to leap onto bicycles simply because the infrastructure is now there. Must be happening whenever I’m out of town.
Inevitable congestion aside, what about service and delivery vehicles? I know a couple of people who are couriers and apparently those segregated lanes are a logistical bitch. Jamming a truck full of commercial freight into busy curb space downtown was difficult enough when there was still space to jam into. When you have a job to do and mere minutes in which to do it, where do you place a two-ton vehicle so you can step out and deliver packages to fifteen different businesses in one stop?
So in summary: cars too necessary to eliminate, bus and train expansions too late to be cost effective, bike lanes dumb.
Edmonton’s inflated goals of drawing drivers into public transit and removing tons of vehicles is misplaced. I see what council is going for here and it’s noble, but you can’t just shoo away motor traffic when it’s built into the very fabric of a city. This is an attempt to force a socially engineered result in order to look environmentally progressive to the rest of the world.
Incidentally, I looked into the cost comparison for an individual Edmontonian and yes, it is actually cheaper to take transit and bicycles everywhere than it is to drive a car. But immediate cost saving is only part of the life equation. If pure thrift was the only factor, we’d all be living grey, uneventful lives, riding work-shift trains and cheap, identical bicycles back and forth as flesh robots in a repetitive, dystopian society of wonderfully open roads and nothing else. I’m poor and I have a car and two motorcycles (one that actually works). That’s called budgeting! It’s not nearly as hard as people think to survive on modest income with a set of wheels.
Maybe forty years from now, when infill has built up to a suitable density that people no longer need to go from one side of Edmonton to the other several times a week, fewer cars on the road will be a solid option. In places like New York, for example, a lot of foot traffic and public transit is suitable because the different boroughs essentially act as individual cities. People can live, work and play in a particular area for weeks or months without needing to travel far. When Edmonton looks more like New York and has a population density to match, then let’s try dragging people out of cars. Until then, let’s not try to put the cart before the horseless carriage.
Ramsay, Caley. After years of increased ridership, fewer people taking public transit in Edmonton 2016. Global News. Web. 5 October 2016.
After years of increased ridership, fewer people taking public transit in Edmonton
LRT to west Edmonton could cost more than estimated, report suggests 2018. CBC News. Web. 13 March 2018.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/lrt-to-west-edmonton-1.4575184
ETS Ridership by month:
https://dashboard.edmonton.ca/Dashboard/Transit-Ridership/q4c4-5fu4/data
There's No Going Back 