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.