FINICKY FUNICULAR GIVES US MORE DOWNS THAN UPS
When I was a little kid, my dad loved to take us to Klondike Days. While my brother and I loved the rides, Dad loved to see all the new gadgets on sale in the SportEx. Every year, we left with some kind of new gizmo that had been sold to my dad on the promise that it would make our lives better. Every year, that thingamajig would end up in the basement, because either Dad couldn’t get it to work, or because it was more trouble than it was worth to use.
Oh, Edmonton, you are so like my dad. Every time some slick salesperson come along with a shiny new toy that’s supposed to make us “world class,” we rush to buy it, without stopping to ensure that we know how to work it — or that we need it at all.
Example? Our ridiculous new funicular. We were told this $24-million installation, which has an operating and maintenance budget of $500,000 a year, would make it easier to get from downtown to the river valley trail system.
The sales pitch was that we could make the river valley parks more accessible to people with mobility impairments who couldn’t navigate all those stairs — and that we could make it easier for cyclists to commute downtown through the valley, since they could use the funicular to bring their bikes up the steep bank. To do that, we actually needed two separate pieces of equipment.
The funicular proper, which cost $5 million, runs from the outside of the Hotel MacDonald to a viewpoint and boardwalk below. But the funicular doesn’t get you to the river valley.
It doesn’t get you anywhere at all.
A separate, $1.5-million, glasswalled elevator is supposed to take you to the bike and pedestrian paths below.
But the elevator doesn’t work.
It didn’t open when the funicular first launched in December. The city says it was waiting to get all the necessary permits from the province.
The elevator finally opened Feb. 16. For two days.
Then there were two separate incidents where yahoos jumping around in the elevator caused it to shut down.
It has run intermittently since. But it’s been off-line for days now, though no one I talked to seems to know why. Monday afternoon, the City of Edmonton’s Facility Notifications website said the elevator would be out of service until March 31. By Monday evening, it simply said the elevator would be closed “until repairs are complete” — whenever that might be.
Meanwhile, the funicular turns out to be a rather more delicate piece of equipment than anticipated. It doesn’t work below -25 C, as temperatures are wont to fall here. The funicular also gets finicky when it’s too snowy and windy. And so it too keeps malfunctioning.
It’s absurd. We bought the funicular from Doppelmayr, a Swiss-Austrian company that specializes in ski lifts and mountain gondolas. They are world experts in transporting people in the snow and cold. How is it possible that we bought a model that can’t cope in the Edmonton winter?
According to Jesse Banford, the city’s director for facility infrastructure delivery, most of Doppelmayr funiculars and lifts are designed to be run by an operator.
We wanted one that didn’t require staffing. So we ordered an unmanned funicular that works automatically.
But riders keep hitting wrong buttons, accidentally or on purpose, which gums up the works. And when our sensitive funicular gets confused, there’s no one onsite to fix it.
I don’t want to be cynical about the funicular project.
I love Louise McKinney Park, and I’d like to see more people able to reach it. I ride my bike to work in the summer, and I’d love the option of taking a scenic river valley route.
But if you can’t guarantee people that the elevator will be working when they get there, when you leave them no way to get up or down except a steep set of stairs, then what have we spent all this money on?
The upside is that the elevator and funicular are still under warranty.
We’ve got a few months yet to work out the bugs before summer.
But don’t blame Edmontonians if they’ve got a certain sinking feeling that this particular gizmo may not live up to the sales pitch or the hype.