Consider two spots for elevators
Re: “Downtown funicular project gets OK,” June 24 It is unfortunate that after attempting to provide funicular access designs for 104th Street to allow people to access the new Rossdale Waterfront Plaza as well as Louise McKinney Riverfront Park, the city is proceeding with a single access which won’t allow proper accessibility to either major park area.
Not only that, but the selected location is a particularly ugly one, directly looking at the end of the Low Level Bridge. It’s also very noisy, as the bridge is one of the major entry points to downtown.
The 100th Street mechanical access is an unusual design which has both a conventional elevator and an inclined elevator, which doubles the cost of both construction and maintenance. In addition, the large bridge over the road makes for a project costing far above what is needed to provide functional access.
As all other cities which have embankments requiring mechanized access have determined, best value is achieved by selecting conventional elevators combined with careful evaluation of where they should be located both to minimize construction costs and make them aesthetically attractive.
In this case, the 104th Street upper location with a walkway and elevator to 103rd Street offers excellent access to Rossdale. An upper-level walkway from Jasper Avenue east of the Shaw Conference Centre to an elevator placed near the Grierson Hill Road will also give excellent access to the oval grass centre of McKinney Park.
With their small footprint, elevators are ideal for natural areas where little vegetation is required to be removed during construction. With their standardization, they are easy to design and build, and there is no need to fit them to a slope.
Locations such as McKay and Rossdale benefit since there are numerous apartment dwellers on the slope and the flats who have difficulty walking up the equivalent of eight flights of stairs. And because the elevators are inside a shaft, they are far more reliable and resistant to vandalism.
Rather than spending on two elevating devices for a single location, providing a single elevator at two locations makes more sense since standard vertical elevators can carry more people faster, for less money.
It’s high time we select projects for best value and best service to the public. David Hamilton, GMH Architects, Edmonton