IF ONLY FURY COULD SPEED METRO LINE

It is still not full-speed ahead for Edmonton’s Metro Line LRT extension, which has hit more obstacles during its slow, troubled multi-year launch than a bumper car piloted by toddlers.

Council learned Tuesday a recent safety audit says, despite months of scrutiny, that it remains unsafe to run trains through at-ground intersections at the planned 40-50 km/h speeds.

For passengers that means continuing to crawl through intersections at a 25 km/h pace that makes the trip barely faster than a bus ride. For Edmontonians as a collective, it means more months of frustration and annoyance that a project so important to this city could still — more than two years after it was originally supposed to open at full service — fail to meet basic expectations despite its hefty price tag.

The saga of the Metro Line now measures in years. While the public only started hearing of problems two years ago when signalling issues repeatedly delayed its opening, a city auditor report last August found engineers warned in 2010 there would be problems if the current signal system was used. Taxpayers can only wish they’d issued those warnings with more force.

This week, one city official said that maybe, just maybe, trains will be operating at the 40-50 km/h clip come August, just in time for students to return to NAIT and MacEwan University.

But no one can blame Edmonton residents for being skeptical of any timeline associated with the project. Councillors have used all kinds of language along the way to describe the situation, not that colourful outrage has made the trains move any faster.

City manager Linda Cochrane nailed Edmonton’s mood when she said, in response to a council question, that this is not the kind of thing that should ever see a ribbon cutting given its tortured history. Getting a public works project to operate as billed well after deadline is hardly something to celebrate.

The only good thing that could come from this debacle — other than an LRT line that operates with the speed and frequency that was intended — is for someone to write it up a case study so other politicians, planners and project managers can learn from Edmonton’s LRT agony. Considering that Edmonton still has its own massive LRT expansion ambitions, that report would have high local value. Council and city administration must be held to account on the upcoming Valley Line project and any future LRT plans. No one in Edmonton will ever again be able to play the card that they couldn’t have imagined something going so wrong with an LRT expansion.