The Sunion

Watched a piece this morning on Ezra Levant's visit to the CBC mothership and how well that went. I was surprised by his Michael Moore-ish, 'just-in-the-neighbourhood' approach to the situation, given his dislike for Michael Moore and the more leftish media. Leavnt's buffoonery is not quite at the mythical proportions of Michael Moore yet, but this graphic he used in recounting his tale of woe is definitely edging that direction:

"Chief Trickster"? "Bag Man"?

Clever, Levant. Just like the Onion, right? Looks real, but with funny captions, HOO HOO!

Sun News, I hereby dub you...the Sunion. Like Real News, But Made Up. I even made you a new logo:

In the follow up report Sun Media does make a good point, however;

When the CBC's Mary Walsh shows up unannounced with a camera crew at Toronto mayor Rob Ford's house, the state broadcaster considers it comedy. When Sun News Network's Ezra Levant pops up in the lobby of the CBC's Toronto headquarters with a camera operator, it's a matter for police." source

Heritage Minister James Moore said of the incident "I think Mary Walsh's behaviour was out of line," Moore said. "And I don't think she can be defended for what she did." source

A friendly reminder that this is satirical, but I still retain the rights to the IP in this post. Have a great day!

Un-Conventional Thoughts

On Wednesday it was announced that $93 million of funding to the City of Edmonton for a new Royal Alberta Museum [RAM] was not forthcoming from the Federal Government. The process to build a new 36,000 square metre museum located in downtown Edmonton was already under way with a design and location finalized. It seems that without that money there will be no new museum, or at least not the same one as planned.

In a totally (but not) unrelated City of Edmonton document about the state of Edmonton's convention facilities "...there is the potential to nearly double the number of delegates that come to Edmonton, if the appropriate facilities exist." and the need to "...attract 800 to 900 more hotel rooms into the core and [a doubling] of the downtown convention space within one single facility".

I would suggest to not expand the Shaw Conference Centre [SCC] any further but to relocate the RAM into the SCC and build a new Conference Centre next to the proposed arena, where the new RAM was supposed to go.

Why do that? First the SCC monopolizes a good portion of Jasper Avenue and the river valley. This space is, by default, private. With a large public attraction, such as a museum, we could make that space public again. Second, we could attract more people to a part of downtown which needs that activity, and they will likely walk there to do it, supporting street level commercial activity. Third, the view is beautiful, the building is already connected to the pedway system, and is in good repair. Fourth, a new conference centre located on the other edge of downtown could be integrated into both the pedway system for hotel access and the proposed arena development which should help with the development of the additional hotel capacity necessary for increasing Edmonton's convention capacity. Fifth, expanding the current SCC would require eating up more of the river valley unnecessarily.

Is this feasible? The proposed RAM would have double the gallery space of the current one housed in a 36,000m2 building. Nobody seems to know what the current gallery space of the RAM is, but according to their own website it was 4,000m2 when the facility opened in 1967. The current SCC has approximately 10,000m2 of exhibition space. For comparison the Glenbow Museum in Calgary has ~8,600m2 of exhibition space.

Surplus Margins

As a former PSAC member I still receive the quarterly newsletter and this quarter I noticed a pretty big  inconsistency on the front page of the latest newsletter:


Private contractors must build in profit margins – which mean higher costs for taxpayers combined with lower salaries and fewer benefits for the people they employ. It’s a lose-lose situation. (link)


One cannot disagree that private industry does build in a profit component, however I find it strange that PSAC doesn't consider its margins as increasing costs for taxpayers as well. In the year 2007 (the last year for which PSAC has provided financial statements) PSAC reported cash surpluses from operating activities of $8,727,409 in the general fund and $4,080,725 in the strike fund for a total cash surplus of $12,808,134.


The salary and benefits expense for PSAC in 2007 was reported as $36,731,710. Neither specific salary information nor organizational charts are available from PSAC; however there is currently a job posting for an administrative assistant offering ~$55,000 to ~$65,000 plus a $1,200 bilingual bonus.

Mandatory dues collected by PSAC in 2007 were ~$69,000,000; Membership was 172,000. The average PSAC employeee paid $402 in dues in 2007.

Read it and Weep

While digging around on the Internet I found an interesting document:

http://www.edmonton.ca/business_economy/documents/InfraPlan/AppendixICOEFortRoadOldTown.pdf

It's all about a proposed development, approved by the City in the year 2002. I'm no expert, but I don't believe that the City has managed to implement any of this plan. I still harbour many doubts that they can manage any of the current ones.

Whither and Thither

(NOTE: This post has been sent in various forms, tweets, emails, to Edmonton City Council Members and has received no reply, positive or negative, if you agree with anything here please tweet or send a link to your council-person and hashtag #yegcc #yegtransit and #yeg)

(Originally published April 1, 2011)

Edmonton's City Council is mulling new LRT lines for the city to Nowhere (Whitemud Drive and 75th street, Jasper Place Transit Centre) and Everywhere (Lewis Farms, Millwoods Town Centre)

I can not begin to explain how asinine it is to build a transit centre at Whitemud Drive and 75th street. There is nothing there. There is no need to take a train or bus from or to there unless there is a huge 'Park-and-Ride' lot there, which is a problem in itself addressed further down. For anyone who thinks that can not be true, that no sane person (or city) would do that to its' citizens, I submit to you the Millgate Transit Centre, a place where anyone going to or from Millwoods on Edmonton Transit is likely to have been stranded at some point, waiting on a connection.

West Jasper Place is another gem of the system, how can it not be? Nestled in behind some sort of utility substation, some run-down residential, and dark, empty fields. The safety of this station is enhanced by a lack of sight lines to the main road and the dearth of buses there after dark. Many times I have taken the eastbound number 1 and been told to get off here because this is the last stop.

Being that the eastbound number 1 is the last bus running in the entire city it leaves you with precious few choices at just after one a.m.. Thankfully there is a liquor store just up the road open until 2 a.m..

In regards to providing LRT service to everywhere else, in a word, don't.

The suburban areas the city is aiming to serve are full of residents ready to take the train to and from work and maintain their car-centric suburban lifestyle; sadly they actually have little choice in this. The suburbs they live in offer no accessibility for anything other than automobiles. Strip malls and un-walkable power centres set back half a kilometre from access points to provide oceans of empty asphalt which only fill up the week before xmas or the week before school. Cul-de-sacs and crescents with no sidewalks and giant houses with front exposures largely made up of garage doors and parking pads. Schools which sit empty 75% of the time and which can only be reached safely if you drive there because the roads are all four lanes wide and filled with speeding cars.

We are following the embarrassingly antiquated notion that we only do one activity (for instance; working) in one location and another activity (for instance; living) in a completely different location. This is how we became a sprawling mess of a city with a hollowed out core and massive infrastructure debt. Adding LRT to these places does not erase or even mitigate the structural failings of suburban design principles which put automobiles ahead of people at every single turn.

Taking the trains to Grant MacEwan and NAIT, make a little more sense (but only a little, the ridership is still limited to school year and peak hours, and will be much lower than University ridership simply because they are fewer students). Grant MacEwan is relatively close to the existing LRT and has more than adequate bus service, even in the later hours of the day. NAIT is conveniently located next to the second or third busiest shopping centre in Edmonton but that mall is being excluded from the new LRT line, in fact the (city owned) homes across the street are being demolished to make way for the tracks while the mall parking lot right across the street sits empty. The new transit centre is being moved from the southeast corner of the mall parking lot to a concrete oasis bordered by two extremely busy roads and the inaccessible end of the Royal Alexandra Hospital. In addition to that the NAIT stop is only a temporary stop, pending the 30 year redevlopment of YXD, the City Centre Airport and another extension of the LRT, this time to another city (St Albert) and is located on the far side of the NAIT parking lot, another inconvenience which non-transit riders take for granted.

The city bought up:

• Apartment building at SE corner of 105 St/108 Ave.
• Low-rise building at SW corner of 104 Street/Kingsway Ave.
• Row of houses on east side of 106 Street between 111 Ave/112 Ave.
• Restaurant building at SW corner of Princess Elizabeth Ave/106 Street.

...and will have them demolished by May 2011.

Taking homes away in favour of transportation, separating the neighbourhood from the main transportation lines and commercial district with that same transit service, removing medium density housing to provide a train which encourages people to live far outside the neighbourhood, and laying the base for eventual expansion farther away from the downtown core.

Two Simple Ideas Which Can Help in the Shorter Term

Bus Rapid Transit.

We can have LRT equivalents up and running tomorrow with very low cost. Transit priority signals, some bus lanes, voila. Since 1974 Curitiba, Brazil has had Bus Rapid Transit which "provide[s] high quality rail transit service to customers and at a comparable cost to that of a bus transit." and has been implemented in more than 100 other cities around the world. ("average capital cost per mile for busways was $13.5 million while light rail average costs were $34.8 million."). The main problem for Edmonton is that Provincial and Federal funding are for capital projects and not operating costs, i.e.: BRT in Edmonton would cost in operating dollars from City of Edmonton Coffers and LRT capital would come from Provincial or Federal taxes.

Edmonton City Council so far has shown a propensity to take the easy route on this and ask only for what is offered, and this has led to declining transit service outside of the LRT system and increasing fares for new LRT and dwindling bus service. Certainly the South LRT is a huge success, however it is largely because the 'Park and Ride' lot at Century Park fills up every morning with suburban drivers who choose free (paid for by tax dollars) parking and a $6 round trip to the University or Downtown, but takes few vehicles off the road and does not change the nature of the ever expanding southwest and far south sectors of Edmonton. The city aims to repeat the Century Park(ing) Lot development model in Lewis Farms, Heritage Valley, and other totally inappropriate locations.

More Affordable Housing in Existing Neighbourhoods

Take a moment to think about why Old Strathcona seems to flourish regardless of the economy and markets? Because University students live there. Lots of them. University Professors as well, and University employees. These people live and work in the same community, the sustainability of these types of neighborhoods is built right in - it's cheaper and quicker to walk in many cases, the transit is better because of population density, businesses are more successful because they have customers right there, the list goes on and on, but it has been shown time and time again that successful cities are dense, and the more dense, the more successful they are.

NAIT and Grant Macewan import almost all of their staff and students from remote communities and very, very few of them live anywhere close by. NAIT has hardly any bike racks and parking lots are everywhere. Grant MacEwan has a few bike racks, but provides huge turnarounds for automobile traffic and parking lots all around as well, including a giant eyesore on 109 street. There are precious few places to live close by. The closest grocery stores are practically inaccessible without a car, the residential areas are fenced off from the schools.

Transit Oriented Development

Edmonton seems to be big on Transit Oriented Development, I hear the term bandied about often in the media, on Twitter (@lesoteric) and in blogs and Facebook posts. I'm not sure if everyone is on the same page about what it actually means. We talk about Century Park, Griesbach, and the City Centre Airport as Transit Oriented development only none of them actually are. I had the distinct displeasure of taking the train to Century Park and trying to access the grocery store there. It's a nice fifteen minute walk from the train station. Almost everything is at least a fifteen minute walk from the train station, through muddy parking lots, over berms, no sidewalks to be seen. Griesbach falls into the 'work here - play there - sleep somewhere else' model as well, building a strip mall with a gas station, Subway, and real estate office at the entrance to each named neighborhood is not 'mixed residential-commercial' type development. Finally the City Centre Airport isn't anything right now and trying to make it something else is a gross misdirection of funds and effort; many people have noted about the plans for a new Edmonton Hockey Arena that there is no need to build another one (with public money for private profit), as we have a perfectly good one already. Ditto for another housing development - why is public money being spent to help developers, builders, realtors, and speculators turn a profit when we already have a perfectly good Transit Oriented Development in the City Centre?

Indeed, Downtown Edmonton is Transit Oriented Development, with high population density, existing mixed use development (retail, commercial, residential), and lots of opportunity for growth. Unfortunately we have put Downtown at a distinct disadvantage in regards to development as we encourage the bulk of the population to only work there and use transit to subsidize their flight from the inner city.

The people who work in the core could and would live closer to the core and patronize the businesses in the core can instead choose a $6 bus trip to avoid $20 or more a day parking and the time and effort of driving in to work but continue to live in far flung areas of the city. The obvious effect being that the core subsidizes the suburbs by providing massive amounts of economic activity and generating huge amounts of money for non-residents to spend closer to home. Hidden effects of the suburban flight include the dilution and loss of services and infrastructure to these far off places. Inner city schools close so we can open suburban schools, hospitals and medical clinics locate and re-locate around the fringes of the city, retail, grocery, pharmacy, even mail service drops off, and transit can only go so many places, but gets stretched thinner and thinner to service the fringes of the city so people can continue to live in one place and work in another for no real good reason.

The current LRT plan for the City of Edmonton is seriously flawed and I fear that if it is implemented it will only serve to reinforce the issues and problems it intended to fix.

Putting Edmonton's Roads on a Diet

Putting Our Roads on a Diet (Video) : TreeHugger

One suggestion I have made for Downtown Edmonton is to eliminate all on-street parking along Jasper Avenue from 124 Street to 95 Street and remove the 'bus bumps' which hold up transit on nearly every block. Make the outside lanes bus / bike only and restrict cabs to transit zones. You would lose about 600 parking spots (30 blocks * 10 spots per block * both sides of the street), about 1.3% of the 45,000 which are located in the core (mostly in surface lots), but gain increased efficiency in transit and relax the speed while increasing overall safety and encouraging more transit use.

The additional benefits (as noted in the video linked above) would be to encourage people to walk more in the core which in turn helps grow and support street level commercial and human-scale development in Edmonton's CBD.

The Great White North (LRT)

I just watched the City of Edmonton YouTube on the North LRT (NAIT) Line and I have a few choice comments.

1. Two storey stations are excess infrastructure which creates impediments to effective transit (see: Stadium Station, Southgate Station, Century Park Station). Just last week I was at Southgate Shopping Centre and it takes a good two minutes to access the platform from the mall, and that's without buying a ticket. It's nice they tell you how long until the next train, and that you can wait inside, except that (as it happened to me more than once) those poorly designed stations only have one set of doors so when one train is offloading slightly off schedule from the other it's nigh impossible to get to the platform and get on the other train.

2. After all the nice things we said about the 105 ave station I would only like to add "honey pot for rapists" due to the isolated access and long walk from indoors to train station on the back side of Grant McEwan. The station should be on the well lit and well traffic-ed side of 104 ave, on the 'good' side of the new residences or directly attached to the university.

3. The LRT runs down the wrong side of 106 street and the terminus should be on the Mall side - if Harry Ainly can't have a station because there is not enough year round traffic, why NAIT? Even if there is a business case for NAIT, a station in the NE corner of Kingsway parking lot lends itself much better to dual uses (NAIT and the Mall), instead of the single purpose it serves now, and you can add another park and ride there, possibly with room for an actual parking structure.

4. #ecca won't be built up enough to deserve a dedicated station for 20 to 35 years, putting it there now makes it another 'poor for all purposes' design. Move it later if you have to, but IMO the mall parking lot is a better location - it reserves NAIT space for more learning space and the mall can go ahead and build the parkade (or partner with NAIT and ETS to do so).

5. Screw St.Albert. If you choose to live in the boonies (or another city) my bus pass shouldn't subsidize that. Take the North line to Westmount or Northgate even, but forget St Albert, Ft Sask, Sherwood Park, Nisku, Leduc, etc... Let them pay for their own trains and buses, rather than Edmontonians.

I ♥ Downtown

Comment Posted on Mastemaq's Blog

I ♥ Downtown. It has grown into a Transit Oriented, pedestrian friendly area and is getting close to critical mass as far as being self-sustaining (in the sense of desireability to live there) and I am extremely concerned that we (city council, citizens) are going to muck it up beyond repair with all these giant aspiriations (ecca redev, sprawling 'burbs, wacky transit to everywhere) instead of enticing Downtown over the hump and making it a real community to live in, full-time (not just Monday to Friday).

Part of the reason #yxd (ecca) redevelopment is undersireable at this point is that it will only serve to pull population away from downtown. Yes, I have heard the argument that it will make downtown property cheaper (by flooding the market with 'near-downtown' properties) - however that will basically reenact the 1970-2000 flight to the suburbs which gutted downtown to begin with. If Downtown has the capacity to absorb another 24,000 people in a short (10 year) timeframe (which I believe it does) we really should concentrate on that and not risk the whole kit-n-caboodle (which the city is currently doing by actively courting development elsewhere).

Its also another good reason to look at a Downtown arena as an anchor tenant for the Jasper Avenue commercial district. Imagine an arena complex that was more than an arena complex - add theatres, hotel rooms, conference rooms, retail, an accessible to the outside [concourse] and you have a building which serves the whole community and not just a few. Even if you never go inside for anything having a hive of activity begets more activity which makes the area safer, more accessible, and a better place to live.

Anyways, things I'm interested in writing more about.

More is Not Always Better

On increasing the reach of LRT:

"Without a rapid transformation of our building patterns and a push to make existing communities denser, high-speed rail could be a conduit of sprawl, not a deterrent. If stations include vast parking lots, or they’re built in remote areas away from urban cores instead of being made a part of the community, it will all but guarantee people drive to the stations and create a system that is only accessible by car. Drivers already comfortable with a commute of an hour or more could move further away from urban centers, drive to a station and ride to work and still enjoy a shorter overall commute time. High-speed rail will simply add another layer of access to the far-flung suburbs/exurbs and Central Valley, resulting in more mass-produced subdivisions,” warns Robert Cervero, director of the University of California Transportation Center and author of Development Around Transit.

Adding LRT or transit to farther flung communities can actually increase sprawl and the attractiveness of suburbs by making it easier to access auto-centric communities. Transit also lessens congestion, which has the unintended effect of encouraging people to drive from those areas served by transit. To get people off the roads we need to make driving and parking more difficult (raise prices, reduce COE provided on street parking) and increase taxes on unimproved surface lots (especially Downtown) to either encourage development on those lots or a rise in parking prices.

Building LRT to Eaux Claires or Heritage Valley or St Albert only allows people to continue a an auto-centric lifestyle in auto-centric suburbs while subsidizing their daily trips to and from work. It might make sense to run several peak hour buses there, but LRT needs to go to the more mature, more dense neighborhoods in the city (Millwoods, West Edmonton, Whyte Avenue).

What about limiting the growth of our City with a "Development Exclusion Zone" whereby more roads / transit need not be implemented and the City could focus on maximizing service for the existing geographic area?