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Lorne Gunter: City council BRT plan doomed to compound transit problems

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There is a common theme among a handful of city issues, council and administration are so blinkered by their ideological biases they don’t listen to Edmontonians.

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Both council and the administration get fixated on fashionable, lefty theories about urban planning until there is no point in trying to convince them otherwise. They know better than you about densification (and, so, about infill) and environmental sustainability.

They want 15-minute cities so most Edmontonians can live, work, shop, go to school and recreate within a 15-minute radius.

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Never mind how impractical that is or how unlikely our city is ever to be remade to make that possible. City leaders know better. They have superior understanding of what the city needs, so they’re deaf to objections.

Consider councils’’ entire transit strategy. They are sure our transit system must be set up like most cities’: on a hub-and-spoke model. Transit is focused on moving people in and out of the city core.

That’s why Edmonton council is so obsessed with LRT. Light rapid transit doesn’t run around the outside of town to light industrial areas, it starts out in suburbs and goes mostly directly Downtown.

But of the 10 largest cities in the country, Edmonton has the lowest percentage of its workforce working in the core and the highest percentage working outside its ring road. A hub-and-spoke transit model is not what’s needed.

What might work — might — is a web of transit focused on taking workers from the inner and outer ‘burbs to the industrial areas. But even that’s unlikely to work.

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We know two things about transit ridership: People take transit when they can’t afford a car of their own or when transit is faster than driving themselves.

Fewer than five per cent of Edmontonians are without a car (which is why no more than 10 per cent commute by buses and trains). Travelling by bus is almost never faster; LRT could be, but it’s too expensive to build a dozen lines criss-crossing the city, making it convenient enough for even half of residents to ride rather than drive.

Which is why I think bus rapid transit (BRT) is also doomed. Dedicated BRT lanes are cheaper to build than LRT tracks, so more of them can be built and their routes can be more easily modified after the fact. But by-and-large, BRT follows the same hub-and-spoke design council and the city’s urban planners are possessed by.

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The BRT plan being considered by city council merely doubles or triples the number of transit units going in the wrong direction.

Like bike lanes, BRT requires the removal of traffic lanes from major roads or at the very least the removal of on-street parking so buses may use the curb lane unimpeded.

No wonder business owners along 101 Street through Chinatown are resisting the parking-vs.-bus lane swap.

Richard Liukko, president of the Chinatown Business Association, told Postmedia that removing parking on 101 Street, even during off-peak hours on weekdays, has dramatically impacted his business.

No kidding. But will the city listen? Will council care? Unlikely.

The city hopes at some point that 50 per cent of traffic movements in town will be by modes other than private vehicles. But currently the split is about 18/82. So mostly the city is favouring the 18 per cent rather than the 82 per cent.

Their hope is that driving will become so inconvenient and time-consuming you’ll feel obliged to take public forms of transportation.

Consider, too, among the city’s “we’re not listening” habit is the fact that vendors at the Old Strathcona Farmers’ Market have lost about half of their customers in the past year because the city removed free parking from lots near the popular market.

Not only is the market a great place to get produce, meat and baked goods, it’s a community gathering spot.

So by its obsession to formalize parking and discourage the use of cars, council is damaging community.

Cars are just how we get around and will be for a long, long time.

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