“Often the bus doesn’t work with my schedule,” she says. “I’m either 45 minutes early or 10 minutes late. [Also,] because we are the last major stop on the bus routes, we’re often asked to wait for the next bus, which is an hour wait. That just doesn’t work for me.”
So when ETS announced a new LRT line with a planned stop on Princess Elizabeth Avenue servicing NAIT, she was thrilled, but not totally won over. NAIT has three Edmonton campuses, and NAIT students are often apprentices with trade jobs in industrial areas. The single LRT station near the main campus doesn’t do much to address their transit needs. Not to mention the fact that the NAIT station is considered “temporary.”
The northern leg of the LRT comes up to street level from Churchill station and heads west to Grant MacEwan before heading north to the Royal Alexandra Hospital, Kingsway Garden Mall, and NAIT. ETS’ current plans involve tearing down the current Kingsway transit hub on the south side of the mall; the temporary NAIT station will sit on Princess Elizabeth Avenue on the north side of Kingsway Mall.
“We’d build it basically to be flexible, so that if we needed to move it in the future we could,” says ETS senior planner Brad Smid. “If it does stay there, we will build it so that it lasts as well, because we don’t know when that next extension further north of here would happen.” (For an idea of the money involved here, consider that the city estimates the cost of building a station on the South LRT at Harry Ainlay High School at between $10 and $15 million.)
The North LRT line can’t wait until city council approves long-range plans, says Smid. And the LRT line also can’t stop short of NAIT because the college needs the connection. “If it is a 20-year gap between when this line gets built and when the future extension north of NAIT gets built,” Smid says, “well, then it’s not really like you are throwing away money on a station because it’s going to be there operating for quite a while.”
ETS faces plenty of other challenges in the neighbourhood. LRT crossings at 111 and Kingsway Avenues are significant hurdles and funding for the project has yet to be approved. Other than the route and station locations, the public meeting on Tuesday, December 11 didn’t offer much information, says Brian Gould, spokesperson for the Transit Riders’ Union of Edmonton.
“There wasn’t any information on how long the trip would take,” he says. “How the bus connections would change, how often the trains would run.... I find this very troubling.”
Not that either Wyspianski or Gould want to seem ungrateful. Both want more LRT built in Edmonton. Although NAIT is not part of the student U-Pass program, Wyspianski supports the concept. The universal pass was introduced in September for Edmonton’s college and university students. NAIT didn’t sign on to the program because ETS doesn’t service NAIT sufficiently—and Wyspianski doubts whether an LRT station will change the situation.
Unlike the University of Alberta (which has two LRT stations on campus and has good bus service) or MacEwan (which can take advantage of the many downtown transit connections), NAIT students had little incentive to get on board with the U-Pass. For students traveling to the West Edmonton Mall area, a trip on public transit can last up to two hours, according to Wyspianski. There’s little service between NAIT and the Strathcona area, either, and an LRT line isn’t going to help apprentices working in the industrial areas. “To pay for a service that we are not really getting,” Wyspianski, “to force students to pay, just doesn’t seem right.”
City council will get its first look at the proposed route in January. The public gets another hearing in February and Smid will go back to council for final approval in June. The earliest NAIT students on the main campus could start riding the LRT to school is 2010.
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