New councillor expected to push for buses over LRT
New councillor vows to consider rubber-tire options to LRT — and the public may like it
To BRT or not to BRT? That is the question coming fast to Edmonton city council after an election where voters expressed dissatisfaction with the high cost, operational delays and traffic jams caused by the city’s new Light Rail Transit (LRT) lines.
Leading the charge in this debate will be new southwest Edmonton councillor Tim Cartmell, a businessman, project manager and civil engineer.
Cartmell argues Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) may be a cheaper, more efficient and effective way for the city to get mass transit to serve Edmonton’s growing and highly populated suburbs of the south, southwest, west end and north.
Cartmell is uniquely placed to help lead this debate, not just because he’s a project engineer who brought in such projects as Edmonton’s $150-million Expo Centre on time and under budget. Transportation systems have been Cartmell’s obsession since he was a kid going on crosscountry car trips with his parents — his father Bernard, a math and science teacher, driving the car, and young Tim providing directions. If he got bored, he whipped out a drawing pad and started to sketch highway and road systems, often trying to figure out the various major traffic exchanges he’d see in cities such as Las Vegas and Los Angeles.
“I had a doodle pad and my entertainment was to figure out where all the ramps would go and how all spaghetti made sense,” he says. “I reverse engineered the California high(way) system trying to figure it out. Where do they go? What did they all do? What do they all mean?”
To this day, when he’s bored, he’ll sometimes sketch freeway plans.
“I kid you not. I do schematics. I can tell you I’ve got about eight different plans for the 40 Avenue interchange on Terwillegar Drive. I can’t wait.”
Arterial traffic on and onto Terwillegar Drive often backs up onto the Whitemud in both directions during rush hour. A new $40-million interchange at 40 Avenue should help fix that.
A second Terwillegar bridge over the Henday is also needed, but maybe nothing more, Cartmell says, who is a politician of the incrementalist, not transformative, bent.
“Let’s see what happens. Maybe that’s all we need. We don’t need $800 million to build a super expressway to the airport. Because we might want some of that money to build BRT at Century Park down to Heritage Valley (on 111 Street, south of the Henday).”
Cartmell isn’t keen on any new transportation system, be it bike lanes, LRT or BRT, that makes things worse for car traffic. This, of course, has been a major issue with bike lanes taking up road space and LRT jamming traffic at intersections.
“I’m not sure I agree with compromising the vehicle system in order to build the mass transit system. I think now we’re getting into forcing culture.”
Cartmell fears the new $1.8-billion Valley Line LRT to Mill Woods will also cause traffic
I kid you not. I do schematics. I can tell you I’ve got about eight different plans for the 40 Avenue interchange on Terwillegar Drive. I can’t wait.
jams, while also moving more slowly than our current LRT. The smaller, low-floor trains won’t be faster than going by car, Cartmell says. It’s nothing like our speedy LRT.
“The whoosh is gone from the Valley Line. It’s low floor. Slow. Two-car trains, not five-car trains. Frequent stops. It’s a bus. It’s a streetcar. I’m concerned we’re going to have a lot of people disappointed for what we’re buying with the money.”
Design work has been done on the $1.4-billion Valley Line extension from downtown to West Edmonton Mall and beyond, but Cartmell plans to explore if it’s not too late to shift that LRT line to BRT.
Why do so?
“If that thing isn’t going to move much faster than a bus, and it’s low floor, kind of like a bus, we can build a Bus Rapid Transit system for less money and be just as effective.”
With LRT, commuter roads will have to be dug up for three years to put in track, Cartmell says. BRT on the same road with dedicated stations can go in much faster and less expensively.
“Everything is the same. No rails, but rubber tires — that’s the only thing that will change. That makes it cheaper, and if it makes it cheaper, then maybe we can go farther.”
The goal should be to get mass rapid transit on dedicated lanes to all our outer suburbs as fast as possible, and to do it in years, not decades, Cartmell says.
That may not be a vision every councillor is ready to accept, but I suspect it will resonate across the city.