Greyhound bus depot looks for new digs.
A fix is needed until Greyhound finds its new home elsewhere
No one could describe Edmonton’s downtown Greyhound depot as a beauty spot.
The bedraggled bus terminal at 103rd Street and 103rd Avenue, with its faded brown metal siding and dirty exposed aggregate concrete pillars, stands as a monument to the worst aspects of 1970s commercial architecture.
The rusted chain fence and the weed-filled front “garden” borders, the broken and streaked windows and the litter of cigarette butts and petrified chewing gum do little to improve the overall streetscape.
Inside, the depot is clean and busy. On a Friday August afternoon, it’s filled with young families, seniors and tourists. Outside, it’s an eyesore — a situation made no better by its symbiotic proximity to the sketchy Grand Hotel beer parlour across the avenue.
It’s convenient for passengers — but the depot itself has been a poor downtown neighbour, a drag on redevelopment of the neighbouring heritage Warehouse district.
But the Dog’s days downtown are numbered. Greyhound doesn’t own the land where its depot sits. Its lease isn’t up until 2016. However, the site’s new owners — WAM and the Katz Group — are keen to tear down the station to make way for complementary commercial development related to the planned new downtown arena.
Stantec, the consultant for the development project, has approached the city to have the land where the station sits, and the large gravel parking lot across the street to the east, rezoned.
Currently, the Greyhound site is in the Heritage Area Zone: Any new development in that zone has to be designed to complement the neighbourhood’s historic brick buildings, with things like period-matching pedestals.
Instead, the Katz Group and WAM want the parcel zoned as part of the new “arena and entertainment district.” That would allow developers to build anything from a hotel to a casino to a nightclub on the property.
Normally, I might fight to preserve the architectural esthetic of the Warehouse Heritage Area. Yet given the checkered history of the Greyhound station, it’s hard to oppose anything that might expedite its demolition and the site’s redevelopment.
But what will this mean for the hundreds of customers who rely on Greyhound?
Peter Hamel is Greyhound’s new director of passenger operations for Western Canada.
“We want to maintain service for people in Edmonton. It’s a major centre in Western Canada,” he says.
Hamel says Greyhound is working with city officials and with realtors Wakefield and Cushman to find a new site. It’s not so easy. The company is looking for at least 1.7 hectares of land, a parcel large enough to accommodate a 2,300-sq.metre depot — and perhaps, a new maintenance facility. It’s considering land near the VIA train station and the Edmonton City Centre Airport, to capitalize on the possibilities for intermodal freight transportation — although it’s not clear how such a location would mesh with the city’s grand redeveloping of the airport lands as a residential district.
Hamel says Greyhound is also looking for a site on or near Calgary Trail, on the south side of the city. Building on that north-south axis, he says, would help Greyhound connect to its major markets in Calgary and Fort McMurray. In Winnipeg, Greyhound recently opened an attractive new depot right at the airport. Greyhound is mulling that option here, though Hamel worries the Edmonton International is too far from the city core.
“We’d like to be downtown, but the cost of land is huge and the taxes are huge,” he says. “We’re open to all options. It’s going to take some time to get where we want to be. We’re going to make the right decision for the community and for the company.”
Nowhere the Greyhound depot moves will be as convenient as its downtown site. But Hamel insists the new site will offer customers a much better passenger experience.
“Our new depot in Winnipeg is absolutely gorgeous. That’s the level we want to be at.”
A welcome promise. Still, I worry Greyhound will continue to let our unkempt bus station run down even more, rather than investing capital in a terminal terminal. It wouldn’t cost much, though, to pull the weeds and fix the windows. In the time Greyhound has left downtown, it would be refreshing to see it clean up its act and its station.
“I’ve been there,” Hamel says. “It’s certainly not the level we want it to be at. That’s going to change. It’s not at our standard — and that’s going to be addressed.”