Gobsmacked Line continues to provide a rough ride

Even if city solves LRT’s software issues, they still have traffic problem to resolve

The Metro Line LRT’s name should be changed to the Gobsmacked Line.

The botched LRT spur from the downtown to NAIT continues to utterly astound us with new heights of failure, with trains getting signalled to head down the wrong tracks over the weekend and with city manager Linda Cochrane’s statement that she isn’t sure if this LRT line will ever run as it’s designed.

Cochrane’s admission, along with the cumulative problems around LRT, make me question if we’re ever going to get LRT right, despite the billions already spent and planned to be spent.

We’ve had five years of fiasco with the $655-million Metro LRT, much of it due to a signalling system developed by Thales Canada that the city doesn’t trust.

First, the Metro LRT opened 17 months late, running at half speed and causing greater traffic jams than expected.

As alarming as that was, we also found out many years too late that in 2009, city administration failed to do a study about the Metro Line’s potential for causing massive traffic snarls, a revelation that had Coun. Scott McKeen tell administration: “I’m honestly so gobsmacked I almost don’t know what to ask.”

“This has been going on for years and I think people are just frustrated,” said Coun. Bev Esslinger of the signalling issues.

“It’s kind of the last straw for many folks. I’m getting questions about safety. ‘Can I take my children on it? Are you taking your children on it?’ ”

Just when you might have thought things could not get worse, at Tuesday’s council meeting, Coun. Michael Walters asked Cochrane point-blank about the future of the line: “Is it going to run as it was designed?”

“I don’t think I can answer that particularly right now,” Cochrane said, adding she still needs to dig into what software problem caused the latest problem.

It’s crucial to note that the problems with the Metro Line have also bunged up LRT traffic to northeast Edmonton.

If there were no Metro LRT spur, trains would run up and down the main north-south Capital Line, one train every five minutes.

The Metro LRT was supposed to be added to that, an additional fourth train running from Health Sciences Station to NAIT station every 15 minutes.

But because of software signalling issues, just three trains run up and down the Capital Line, and one of those now gets diverted to NAIT instead of travelling northeast as it used to do. Northeast Edmonton gets shortchanged one train every 15 minutes.

Mayor Don Iveson, other councillors, Cochrane and her administration all assure us there are no real safety issues, that software problems have been identified and are being addressed.

“We know that it doesn’t sound good that a train was operating on the wrong track,” Cochrane told council. “Our commitment to safety, however, is absolutely paramount.”

“The most important question in the minds of the public is: Is it safe?” Iveson said. “The answer we heard several times, no matter how many different ways we asked it, is, ‘Yes, it is safe.’ It has multiple fail safes. They worked.”

But even if the problems on the Metro and Capital lines are solved, the traffic snarls caused by them aren’t going away. There will be massive, ongoing jams at intersections at Kingsway, 111 Avenue, Princess Elizabeth Avenue, University Avenue and 51 Avenue. That’s what happens when city council plunks down a train track at ground level through areas of the city that are already historic commuter bottlenecks.

Perhaps the most gobsmacking thing of all about Edmonton’s LRT is why city council ever approved lines that directly intersect so many major arterial roads.

McKeen says the city will have to look at rebuilding parts of the Metro Line to put them under or over major arterials in the NAIT-Kingsway area, as well as in the west end with the Valley Line extension.

“We have to go to grade separation when we look at some of these intersections ... We have to have a really serious look at the cost benefits of that.”

It may be that the next LRT dollars should be spent fixing old LRT fiascos. It’s now abundantly clear LRT is not worth doing at all if we don’t do it right.