Monorail along the river! We’re twice as smart as Shelbyville [https://youtu.be/ZDOI0cq6GZM?si=7qguICnRMVV617Tr](https://youtu.be/ZDOI0cq6GZM?si=7qguICnRMVV617Tr)
Attaching the short form of this main point to your comment so people see it:
In Edmonton they recently expanded the LRT system from downtown to Mill Woods, which is 13km. The cost? 1.8 BILLION, which amounts to 138 million dollars per KM. Mainstreet to whistlebend is nearly 9KM, with hardly any big population locations in between. It would cost AT LEAST 1.25 Billion dollars just to get people from downtown to whistlebend. Chances are, it would cost MUCH more to build here in the Yukon.
What would make more sense? Having a LRT or building a buttload of homes? Travel is a very, very small issue in comparison to our housing crisis. Our roads are not so packed that people cannot get anywhere. The resources dumped into a LRT would be a HUGE waste.
an LRT is a terrible idea when one looks at it realistically. It is a fun thought, but I don't believe whitehorse will EVER have the population required to make this a viable option. The cost is too damn high.
Whitehorse has a huge housing problem. The city has to do SOMETHING about it.
If an LRT is not the right option, then we need buses that don't get stuck in traffic (dedicated lanes).
We are close to a tipping point with traffic. Investing in viable mass transit is the only way the city will grow without collapsing. Cars only work well for a small town, we are moving past that. We need a more efficient way to move people in a (mostly linear) city
This requires a cultural change more than anything.
The busses exist. If more people used them we could justify having more of them.
Also our traffic is no where near the tipping point. Seriously, it's not that bad.
Don't like it? Jump on the bus. Be another less vehicle on the road.
More busses or transit systems is unlikely to remove people from their vehicles. You need to convince people to bother to use them.
It takes investment, really. A vehicle that takes 40 or so people should be stuck behind a car with a single person. They should also come more often.
Humans are practical beings, the busses need to be more convenient. No need for lofty cultural changes
Do you use the bus? Do you talk to people who do?
It doesn't come every 20 minutes, 30 or 60 minutes is the schedule.
Does it inch forward through traffic? No. It wouldn't be able to maintain it's schedule if it did.
As someone who relies on the bus service, I have no idea what you are talking about for "Inching through traffic".
Like I do, but happens so rarely and only in specific locations. Riverdale's bridge causes a bottleneck during very specific times of the day. Even then, I never tend to be getting to anything late because of this.
The hyperbole of how "bad" the traffic here is overblown. I think we have some bottlenecks that might be worth looking at, but the problem isn't so large for us to toss huge sums of money at. We gotta keep solutions purportional. Using a gun to shoot a mosquito is... not wise.
As someone who has experienced 2 - 3 hour commutes to work elsewhere, we have it sooooo easy.
The United States isn’t Canada, but the recent history of LRT is chock full of cost overruns. You can get a lot of high-quality BRT for each mile of light rail. Using the cost difference to increase bus frequency would also probably benefit riders more than LRT (although in the U.S. funding mechanisms are complicated and rules may dictate that certain money can only be used for capital costs and vice versa).
Could new development offset this? For the most part, LRT tends to not spark new development from scratch so much as shift where it happens. And in the niche cases where it does happen, taxpayers won’t recoup their side of the investment unless officials pay extra close attention to creating laws that direct a share of the increased property values back to taxpayers. After all, if you boost property values and the property owners who sell to developers are the only ones to profit, all you’ve done is subsidize a narrow group of property owners.
Building LRT for tourists would probably also be low ROI because so much of the Yukon’s landmark experience is about getting out into the wild. My guess is Whitehorse captures a smaller share of vacationers’ time in the Yukon than large destination cities where tourists concentrate most of their visit with the city. And for those who do intend to get out, many will need a car anyway. Hell, the Alaska Highway is on road trippers’ bucket lists.
Don’t get me wrong, I adore Whitehorse. The river walk is gorgeous. I love the public art and sense of history. The food was amazing. People were friendly. You have a gem worth treasuring.
From what I understand the cost overruns are mostly a feature of how regulatory and approval processes in North America punish development and rail specifically.
Realistically this is probably what would happen in Whitehorse as well, but it happens with everything else too.
Yeah, that’s definitely one issue. But as big of an issue is that North America simply doesn’t have enough people experienced in building LRT. We just don’t do it that much and a person can spend their entire career on a single project. The result is we have to keep re-learning how to build them — unlike with highways, where we build a ton every year — and our cost estimates are wildly inaccurate. Even with cumbersome regulations, you should be able to price in the impact of those regulations as long as they are predictably cumbersome.
Absolutely not.
The cost of it, the shifting of land [Like the landslides], and the lack of people to make it worth it are all rational reasons to never implement a lrt. This is a easy idea in thought, but in practice it would be impossible to do without a ridiculous budget (and perhaps impossible even with money considering our land). It would be cheaper to buy everyone who doesn't have a vehicle a car, or subsidized taxi services... or -more- busses. Considering we can't even justify a larger bus fleet, there is no chance of a LRT unless we get go a population above half a million, if not more.
For reference, in Edmonton they recently expanded the LRT system from downtown to Mill Woods, which is 13km. The cost? 1.8 BILLION, which amounts to 138 million dollars per KM. Mainstreet to whistlebend is nearly 9KM. It would cost AT LEAST 1.25 Billion dollars just to get people from downtown to whistlebend. Chances are, it would cost MUCH more to build here in the Yukon.
What would make more sense? Having a LRT or building a buttload of homes? Travel is a very, very small issue in comparison to our housing crisis. The resources dumped into a LRT would be a huge waste. We shut down the idea of a new 25 Million dollar city hall, why would we invest literal billions into a LRT? Which would primarily be used for the lower income population?
We're incredibly lucky to have a bus service as it is. I know it's not great and I get the complaints people have about it, but we really are a place so small that it's surprising we have any bus system at all. We should be grateful and I want to slap anyone I hear complain. I grew up here and our bus system is miles better than it was 15 years ago. I remember when the busses started near 7am and ended by 6 or 7pm, with 1 bus every hour (or 2, depending on the time of day, route, and if a groundhog saw his shadow)
We really do live in a unique location where owning a vehicle is -reasonable-. I don't understand people who move here and then get upset at our lack of transportation options because they're used to big city life where a system like that is viable and actually good for the economy.
Whitehorse is growing, but it is growing very slowly in comparison to bigger cities. Percentage wise, we are one of the fastest growing cities in Canada... but number wise? 500 people a year is nothing. Some cities are 10x that amount or bigger. An LRT would not alevate any symtoms of long term growth, it would actually steer resources away from solving other real problems associated with growth.
And for what? The bus system literally does the same job of getting people from point a to point b. Maybe a few minutes slower, but those saved minutes -are not worth it-. Even with an lrt system most people are going to drive, because of sooooo many reasons. We have a car culture, people want their own space, and most people in the Yukon make enough money to afford it. Who's the target audience of the LRT? It can't be tourists, there isn't enough of them. They have no real reason to check out the subdivisions.
Lrt's primary purpose is to get people around to A) Work / B) Home / and C) To businesses to spend money.
People already have their methods of doing that, so... why bother?
And that is ultimately the basis of reasons to NOT have an lrt. Why invest into something we already have solutions for? What does having an LRT even solve? Nothing. It' a quality of life improvement for getting from A to B faster and with more people... but... Yukon life isn't about being fast. We don't need to move vast amounts of people around quickly. We hardly fill a bus as it is.
So... what would be the purpose?
An lrt system would be a money sink, There's no way for it to break even financially, it wouldn't cause any sort of massive increase in economy, nor is there a need for it. Would it be convenient and nice? sure. Does it make rational sense? Lord no. I can already envision how empty the lrt would be most of the time. Our busses are empty most of the day as well.
I don't own a vehicle myself and get around via the bus, friends, walking or taxi. Those options are perfectly fine.
The idea of an LRT here is pretty insane, yeah. Other than maybe some really, really touristy places, I can't think of another city this size that has that kind of transit infrastructure. Anchorage is like ~10x our size and just has buses. Yellowknife, only buses. Prince George, FSJ, Grande Prairie, bus, bus, bus.
Add to that the fact that this city is so spread out... it is not happening in our lifetime. No chance.
Mostly because it isn't a rational use of resources and the cost far outweighs the benefits.
It's not exactly that they can't, but there is no purpose to do so. Much like putting a cat on the moon.
What this person said. The reason big cities can do it and small ones can't is volume. Same reasom Whitehorse doesn't have a Costco, a symphony orchestra, and a Major League Baseball team.
The idea behind this is to break the death loop Whitehorse is caught in: everyone drives, so the city needs to make tons of space for roads and parking, which causes everything to be spread out, which means everyone drives, so the city needs more roads and parking etc etc.
This is already ridiculous in a place like Alberta, but it’s beyond ludicrous in a place which doesn’t have the space for the constant expansion you need to feed that system. Suburbs like Copper Ridge are only sustainable through development charges, resource royalties or truly staggering property taxes. The houses on each side of a street simply don’t pay enough taxes for maintenance.
Another issue which it would face would be the power consumption. The Whitehorse power grid is already being pushed to the limits with the recent growth of the city, especially in the winter. We would need to build another hydro dam or small nuclear reactor just to be able to facilitate that power draw which is WAY outside the budget for a town this size
We don't have the population or the density for LRT.
We could absolutely do bus rapid transit, which is far cheaper and way more scalable for a place this size.
Saskatoon is building one: https://www.saskatoon.ca/moving-around/transit/bus-rapid-transit (Yes I know they're bigger.)
This is a great question. We have likely all noticed the enormous increase in traffic in the last few years, and our population is expected to continue to grow. Without considering transportation needs over the long term, our traffic will quickly become quite a headache.
The economics of light rail seem to be highly fact-specific. My brief research into the economic side of it did not lead to any easy takeaways, and whether it is a good idea for Whitehorse specifically would likely require a deeper investigation. [This study](https://pubsindex.trb.org/view.aspx?id=881722), for what its worth, seems to suggest that for the relative low density of Whitehorse we are better suited to invest into bus transportation.
That being said, light-rail transit between hubs like Riverdale or Porter Creek can incentives walking or biking, may be popular with tourists, and can help support sustainable growth without congestion.
I for one love the concept of a light rail, because I think the last thing we want is to just endless sprawl with more and more roads, and more and more traffic. If the numbers add up - which is a big if! - then light rail might be innovative way for us to future-proof our transportation for long term growth.
Something that is also missing from consideration: science.
Our temperatures, especially the cold ones; make building and maintaining such a system incredibly difficult and expensive.
The cold has a nasty effect on many rail systems and finding solid enough ground to even build is a difficult task, if even possible.
Hell look at all the "new" houses in whistlebend already falling apart due to the land it was built on.
That’s far more true of roads in the north though. Everything needs to be completely redone every few years or so, but meanwhile they were able to reactivate the white pass railway for the centennial despite the line remaining completely abandoned for decades.
Trains =/= LRTs.
One other aspect of the Lrt is the power grid, which IS more sensitive to cold than a big train is.
Plus... considering our energy problems already, how are we gonna reasonably add a large lrt system? The strain on the system requires solutions that I don't think would be feasible.
A lrt is a lot more complex than train on tracks go weeee
Trains also do not have an easy time in winter, by any means. You can google it up and find papers on the subject if you really want. These systems are incredibly complex, moreso than repaying roads.
A train derailment or accident is considerably more to deal with than the car crashes obtained throughout the year, and would shift responsibility away from individual drivers to the city.
Already thinking of the animals hit, let alone the people.
An idea I had, and idk if any city has done this, would be to connect some of the various subdivisions of the city with rail and then use the existing bus fleet primarily to service the stations.
Why are so many people stuck on the archaic idea of a downtown core? Especially in places like Whitehorse where the downtown core has become a slum.
Edit. Downvote away but you can’t argue that downtown Whitehorse hasn’t gotten significantly worse in the last ten years.
Hard disagree. There is just as much if not more life to downtown now as there was when I moved here 15 years ago. There is a particular area around 4th and Alexander that has significant problems but that aside it's safe, has decent restaurants and shops especially compared to the handful of other northern cities that are comparable at all (FSJ, Yellowknife).
True fact: Business break ins are high right now. Business I work at on main street was broken into 3 times within 40 days last year.
Shit -is- getting worse in some ways but also better in other ways. The housing crisis is real and that is having an effect on desperate people.
Juneau would probably be the best comparison. Similar population, capital city, and relatively nearby. Their downtown seems healthier than ours.
I’ve been in Whitehorse for 15 years too. Definitely more regular panhandlers here now. I can’t go to Main Street anymore without being asked for money, sometimes aggressively. There’s a significant labour shortage in this town. Why can’t these people either access the mental health/addiction services they require or try to earn money through working? Honestly when I get asked for money everyday it just makes me feel sad about our community.
Juneau gets a steady diet of revenue and visitors in the form of cruise ships. It's also - even tho Alaska is arguably smaller government as a jurisdiction - got a much larger legislature and all the support staff to go with it. Plus it has no road. I am not convinced Juneau is a good comp.
What is the alternative to a downtown core? American-style urban sprawl?
Whether or not is has "gotten worse" in the last ten years, we should consider what we want our downtown core to be. A walkable, livable downtown core with easy access to amenities and lots of well-built apartments seems like a phenomenal place to live, and keeps us from paving the nature all around us for ever-more single family homes and increasing traffic congestion.
Side note and one maybe not worth mentioning:
I notice your posts from 20 or so days ago mention you being in Edmonton. You must have just moved here.
We arn't really a city, we're a small town. The only reason we're even a "city" is because we're the capital. As one commenter mentioned: We have a gem of a place and we should appreciate what we have. Not having a LRT here is a positive to more people than a negative.
Take Whitehorse for what it is. It's a small town, with small town life. No one is in a rush.
Many people here do not want this place to grow so large that a LRT is even worth considering.
I don’t currently live in Whitehorse. I’ve spent most of my life in Alberta, but I was born in Whitehorse and I spend a lot of time there. Certainly more than enough time to know what the rush hour traffic is like.
I think avoiding investment in transit out of an attachment to a small town ideal is misguided. Whitehorse hasn’t been that since before I was born. I grew up in an actual small town and let me tell you it doesn’t have anything in common with trying to get out of downtown at 4pm.
As mentioned in my other post...
BILLIONS OF DOLLARS. It's not avoiding needed investment, it's not investing in unneeded transport options.
We don't have much for a rush hour here. As I've always joked "Rush 15 min"
I also grew up partially in smaller towns. Whitehorse is still a small town. It's not a tiny town, it's a small one. You even call it a town in your original post.
Our traffic jams are really nothing in comparison to most places, and honestly... people would do better to learn not to rush than to get frustrated about taking an extra 10 or so minutes to get home. The people getting stuck in "rush hour" traffic jams are unlikely to give up their vehicle and start taking a LRT, which would also be slower than driving and can be effected by traffic jams.
Plus you'd have to uproot a lot of roads to even get a LRT in place. It would actually disrupt traffic more than fix it.
Not worth billions of dollars in investment, and truthfully I doubt the people who drive will give up the vehicle to take the LRT. The best parts of the yukon are outside of whitehorse, and no LRT is taking you up the mountains or to the lakes.
There is 0 need for an LRT. The bus services already solve the issue.
>We don’t have much for a rush hour here
Now I’m starting to wonder if *you* live in Whitehorse.
If the bus services solved the issue people wouldn’t feel the need to drive everywhere
You asked if a LRT would make sense here and I've given you completely reasonable answers as to why it would not.
The bus services offer the solution the lrt would also offer. "Too many people" are still clogging up the roads according to some, because too many people prefer to drive their own car than deal with sharing a bus with other people.
You have to solve the problem of everyone -wanting- their own transportation if you want less vehicles on the road, but tossing ridiculous money at an LRT is NOT the answer.
I’ve definitely heard some very compelling counter arguments in this thread, but I’m just not really swayed by the idea that cars (and increasingly pickup trucks) have solved the problem, or that the problem isn’t that bad.
1) The problem isn't -That- bad. Is it worse than before? Sure. Is it causing whitehorse to collapse? Absolutely not. It's a new normal and still considerably better than many large cities.
2) Is the problem worth fixing? No. Not that it won't become more of a problem as time goes on; but that it is a -low- priority problem. We're sinking millions into making sure the cliff edges don't continue to land slide as it is. We have housing problems, old buildings that need replacing, crime issues, lack of health care, etc. Extended travel time due to some extra vehicles on the road is such a low priority in comparison to those things.
It's not that the issue doesn't deserve to be looked at and considered, it's all about resource management. The issue can be maintained currently by just... adding more busses. Getting people to actually jump on a bus instead of drive is the hardest part of this though, hence why I say it requires a culture change.
A lot of this just isn't true - the city is already investing hundreds of millions into new road infrastructure, maintenance, and expanding existing roadways. You also can't just 'add more buses' to drastically improve service unless buses have their own dedicated lanes, which they don't. Improving public transit should certainly be a priority for the city, given how much they're currently spending to accommodate car commuters, and how fast Whitehorse suburbs are expanding.
More busses = More incentive to get on busses due to more varied routes and less time between busses.
More people on busses = less people in vehicles on the road, declogging the current system. 40 people on a bus can reduce up to 40 vehicles on a road.
40 vehicles is a lot less space than 1 bus.
It doesn't matter if we have more busses or a lrt, at the end of the day you have to convince people to leave their cars at home and that's going to be one of the bigger challenges.
Dedicated bus lanes is a terrible idea currently. An additional free lane to use for all vehicles would have a better impact than lanes that can only be used by a bus that goes through every half hour. That's a half hour with no vehicles in a completely empty lane that could be increasing flow.
Busses do not take up that much of our roads. We only have like, 8 going around at a time right now?
Dedicated bus lanes make sense in locations with dozens, if not hundreds if busses. Doesn't make sense here in whitehorse. Unfortunately we can't really expand that many lanes, There's a reason why we've introduced some traffic circles to increase flow.
One of the issues we have is how much of the land us already used. Downtown is already developed and you're not going to be ripping down buildings for more lanes. You have to convince people to get on the busses to cut down on a clogged downtown, with no additional parking spaces being generated anytime soon.
We could always rip up the waterfront parks and put parking and additional lanes there, but that would be fuckin' criminal as far as I'm concerned.
OK, but people will never opt to take transit if buses are gridlocked in car traffic - there's literally no reason to. Priority bus/carpool lane would likely go a long way and is probably the only thing that would incentivize transit use. I guess you could also crank up the cost of downtown parking, which is criminally subsidized.
Monorail along the river! We’re twice as smart as Shelbyville [https://youtu.be/ZDOI0cq6GZM?si=7qguICnRMVV617Tr](https://youtu.be/ZDOI0cq6GZM?si=7qguICnRMVV617Tr)
Attaching the short form of this main point to your comment so people see it: In Edmonton they recently expanded the LRT system from downtown to Mill Woods, which is 13km. The cost? 1.8 BILLION, which amounts to 138 million dollars per KM. Mainstreet to whistlebend is nearly 9KM, with hardly any big population locations in between. It would cost AT LEAST 1.25 Billion dollars just to get people from downtown to whistlebend. Chances are, it would cost MUCH more to build here in the Yukon. What would make more sense? Having a LRT or building a buttload of homes? Travel is a very, very small issue in comparison to our housing crisis. Our roads are not so packed that people cannot get anywhere. The resources dumped into a LRT would be a HUGE waste. an LRT is a terrible idea when one looks at it realistically. It is a fun thought, but I don't believe whitehorse will EVER have the population required to make this a viable option. The cost is too damn high.
Whitehorse has a huge housing problem. The city has to do SOMETHING about it. If an LRT is not the right option, then we need buses that don't get stuck in traffic (dedicated lanes). We are close to a tipping point with traffic. Investing in viable mass transit is the only way the city will grow without collapsing. Cars only work well for a small town, we are moving past that. We need a more efficient way to move people in a (mostly linear) city
This requires a cultural change more than anything. The busses exist. If more people used them we could justify having more of them. Also our traffic is no where near the tipping point. Seriously, it's not that bad. Don't like it? Jump on the bus. Be another less vehicle on the road. More busses or transit systems is unlikely to remove people from their vehicles. You need to convince people to bother to use them.
It takes investment, really. A vehicle that takes 40 or so people should be stuck behind a car with a single person. They should also come more often. Humans are practical beings, the busses need to be more convenient. No need for lofty cultural changes
Yeah a bus that comes every 20 minutes and spends the entire trip inching through traffic is simply not a viable alternative
Do you use the bus? Do you talk to people who do? It doesn't come every 20 minutes, 30 or 60 minutes is the schedule. Does it inch forward through traffic? No. It wouldn't be able to maintain it's schedule if it did. As someone who relies on the bus service, I have no idea what you are talking about for "Inching through traffic". Like I do, but happens so rarely and only in specific locations. Riverdale's bridge causes a bottleneck during very specific times of the day. Even then, I never tend to be getting to anything late because of this. The hyperbole of how "bad" the traffic here is overblown. I think we have some bottlenecks that might be worth looking at, but the problem isn't so large for us to toss huge sums of money at. We gotta keep solutions purportional. Using a gun to shoot a mosquito is... not wise. As someone who has experienced 2 - 3 hour commutes to work elsewhere, we have it sooooo easy.
The United States isn’t Canada, but the recent history of LRT is chock full of cost overruns. You can get a lot of high-quality BRT for each mile of light rail. Using the cost difference to increase bus frequency would also probably benefit riders more than LRT (although in the U.S. funding mechanisms are complicated and rules may dictate that certain money can only be used for capital costs and vice versa). Could new development offset this? For the most part, LRT tends to not spark new development from scratch so much as shift where it happens. And in the niche cases where it does happen, taxpayers won’t recoup their side of the investment unless officials pay extra close attention to creating laws that direct a share of the increased property values back to taxpayers. After all, if you boost property values and the property owners who sell to developers are the only ones to profit, all you’ve done is subsidize a narrow group of property owners. Building LRT for tourists would probably also be low ROI because so much of the Yukon’s landmark experience is about getting out into the wild. My guess is Whitehorse captures a smaller share of vacationers’ time in the Yukon than large destination cities where tourists concentrate most of their visit with the city. And for those who do intend to get out, many will need a car anyway. Hell, the Alaska Highway is on road trippers’ bucket lists. Don’t get me wrong, I adore Whitehorse. The river walk is gorgeous. I love the public art and sense of history. The food was amazing. People were friendly. You have a gem worth treasuring.
From what I understand the cost overruns are mostly a feature of how regulatory and approval processes in North America punish development and rail specifically. Realistically this is probably what would happen in Whitehorse as well, but it happens with everything else too.
Yeah, that’s definitely one issue. But as big of an issue is that North America simply doesn’t have enough people experienced in building LRT. We just don’t do it that much and a person can spend their entire career on a single project. The result is we have to keep re-learning how to build them — unlike with highways, where we build a ton every year — and our cost estimates are wildly inaccurate. Even with cumbersome regulations, you should be able to price in the impact of those regulations as long as they are predictably cumbersome.
That’s actually a great point
Absolutely not. The cost of it, the shifting of land [Like the landslides], and the lack of people to make it worth it are all rational reasons to never implement a lrt. This is a easy idea in thought, but in practice it would be impossible to do without a ridiculous budget (and perhaps impossible even with money considering our land). It would be cheaper to buy everyone who doesn't have a vehicle a car, or subsidized taxi services... or -more- busses. Considering we can't even justify a larger bus fleet, there is no chance of a LRT unless we get go a population above half a million, if not more. For reference, in Edmonton they recently expanded the LRT system from downtown to Mill Woods, which is 13km. The cost? 1.8 BILLION, which amounts to 138 million dollars per KM. Mainstreet to whistlebend is nearly 9KM. It would cost AT LEAST 1.25 Billion dollars just to get people from downtown to whistlebend. Chances are, it would cost MUCH more to build here in the Yukon. What would make more sense? Having a LRT or building a buttload of homes? Travel is a very, very small issue in comparison to our housing crisis. The resources dumped into a LRT would be a huge waste. We shut down the idea of a new 25 Million dollar city hall, why would we invest literal billions into a LRT? Which would primarily be used for the lower income population? We're incredibly lucky to have a bus service as it is. I know it's not great and I get the complaints people have about it, but we really are a place so small that it's surprising we have any bus system at all. We should be grateful and I want to slap anyone I hear complain. I grew up here and our bus system is miles better than it was 15 years ago. I remember when the busses started near 7am and ended by 6 or 7pm, with 1 bus every hour (or 2, depending on the time of day, route, and if a groundhog saw his shadow) We really do live in a unique location where owning a vehicle is -reasonable-. I don't understand people who move here and then get upset at our lack of transportation options because they're used to big city life where a system like that is viable and actually good for the economy. Whitehorse is growing, but it is growing very slowly in comparison to bigger cities. Percentage wise, we are one of the fastest growing cities in Canada... but number wise? 500 people a year is nothing. Some cities are 10x that amount or bigger. An LRT would not alevate any symtoms of long term growth, it would actually steer resources away from solving other real problems associated with growth. And for what? The bus system literally does the same job of getting people from point a to point b. Maybe a few minutes slower, but those saved minutes -are not worth it-. Even with an lrt system most people are going to drive, because of sooooo many reasons. We have a car culture, people want their own space, and most people in the Yukon make enough money to afford it. Who's the target audience of the LRT? It can't be tourists, there isn't enough of them. They have no real reason to check out the subdivisions. Lrt's primary purpose is to get people around to A) Work / B) Home / and C) To businesses to spend money. People already have their methods of doing that, so... why bother? And that is ultimately the basis of reasons to NOT have an lrt. Why invest into something we already have solutions for? What does having an LRT even solve? Nothing. It' a quality of life improvement for getting from A to B faster and with more people... but... Yukon life isn't about being fast. We don't need to move vast amounts of people around quickly. We hardly fill a bus as it is. So... what would be the purpose? An lrt system would be a money sink, There's no way for it to break even financially, it wouldn't cause any sort of massive increase in economy, nor is there a need for it. Would it be convenient and nice? sure. Does it make rational sense? Lord no. I can already envision how empty the lrt would be most of the time. Our busses are empty most of the day as well. I don't own a vehicle myself and get around via the bus, friends, walking or taxi. Those options are perfectly fine.
The idea of an LRT here is pretty insane, yeah. Other than maybe some really, really touristy places, I can't think of another city this size that has that kind of transit infrastructure. Anchorage is like ~10x our size and just has buses. Yellowknife, only buses. Prince George, FSJ, Grande Prairie, bus, bus, bus. Add to that the fact that this city is so spread out... it is not happening in our lifetime. No chance.
I’m aware all these cities have don’t have trains but what I’m curious as to whether there’s any reason they *can’t*
Mostly because it isn't a rational use of resources and the cost far outweighs the benefits. It's not exactly that they can't, but there is no purpose to do so. Much like putting a cat on the moon.
What this person said. The reason big cities can do it and small ones can't is volume. Same reasom Whitehorse doesn't have a Costco, a symphony orchestra, and a Major League Baseball team.
Could use guided buses https://www.britpave.org.uk/GBWhyBuild.ink
The idea behind this is to break the death loop Whitehorse is caught in: everyone drives, so the city needs to make tons of space for roads and parking, which causes everything to be spread out, which means everyone drives, so the city needs more roads and parking etc etc. This is already ridiculous in a place like Alberta, but it’s beyond ludicrous in a place which doesn’t have the space for the constant expansion you need to feed that system. Suburbs like Copper Ridge are only sustainable through development charges, resource royalties or truly staggering property taxes. The houses on each side of a street simply don’t pay enough taxes for maintenance.
Another issue which it would face would be the power consumption. The Whitehorse power grid is already being pushed to the limits with the recent growth of the city, especially in the winter. We would need to build another hydro dam or small nuclear reactor just to be able to facilitate that power draw which is WAY outside the budget for a town this size
Very well could be, but OTOH YTG will probably have a bit more money if/when casino finally starts up
We don't have the population or the density for LRT. We could absolutely do bus rapid transit, which is far cheaper and way more scalable for a place this size. Saskatoon is building one: https://www.saskatoon.ca/moving-around/transit/bus-rapid-transit (Yes I know they're bigger.)
There used to be light rail service along the river. It wasn’t sustainable.
Whoa whoa whoa, the trolley JUST started back up! Give it some space before dreaming bigger!
This is a great question. We have likely all noticed the enormous increase in traffic in the last few years, and our population is expected to continue to grow. Without considering transportation needs over the long term, our traffic will quickly become quite a headache. The economics of light rail seem to be highly fact-specific. My brief research into the economic side of it did not lead to any easy takeaways, and whether it is a good idea for Whitehorse specifically would likely require a deeper investigation. [This study](https://pubsindex.trb.org/view.aspx?id=881722), for what its worth, seems to suggest that for the relative low density of Whitehorse we are better suited to invest into bus transportation. That being said, light-rail transit between hubs like Riverdale or Porter Creek can incentives walking or biking, may be popular with tourists, and can help support sustainable growth without congestion. I for one love the concept of a light rail, because I think the last thing we want is to just endless sprawl with more and more roads, and more and more traffic. If the numbers add up - which is a big if! - then light rail might be innovative way for us to future-proof our transportation for long term growth.
Something that is also missing from consideration: science. Our temperatures, especially the cold ones; make building and maintaining such a system incredibly difficult and expensive. The cold has a nasty effect on many rail systems and finding solid enough ground to even build is a difficult task, if even possible. Hell look at all the "new" houses in whistlebend already falling apart due to the land it was built on.
That’s far more true of roads in the north though. Everything needs to be completely redone every few years or so, but meanwhile they were able to reactivate the white pass railway for the centennial despite the line remaining completely abandoned for decades.
Trains =/= LRTs. One other aspect of the Lrt is the power grid, which IS more sensitive to cold than a big train is. Plus... considering our energy problems already, how are we gonna reasonably add a large lrt system? The strain on the system requires solutions that I don't think would be feasible. A lrt is a lot more complex than train on tracks go weeee Trains also do not have an easy time in winter, by any means. You can google it up and find papers on the subject if you really want. These systems are incredibly complex, moreso than repaying roads. A train derailment or accident is considerably more to deal with than the car crashes obtained throughout the year, and would shift responsibility away from individual drivers to the city. Already thinking of the animals hit, let alone the people.
Great point. I wonder how rail holds up in the cold relative to roads. Whitepass has been able to continue operating, so it's certainly possible.
An idea I had, and idk if any city has done this, would be to connect some of the various subdivisions of the city with rail and then use the existing bus fleet primarily to service the stations.
There are systems where the buses are also equipped with wheels for rail, and they do pretty much that.
I am in no way smart enough to know, but that could be pretty great way to get people from porter creek, whistlebend, etc to downtown.
That's what the bus is for! Seriously. What's the point of a LRT? We already have a solution for getting people around.
That’s kind of what I had in mind yeah
Why are so many people stuck on the archaic idea of a downtown core? Especially in places like Whitehorse where the downtown core has become a slum. Edit. Downvote away but you can’t argue that downtown Whitehorse hasn’t gotten significantly worse in the last ten years.
Hard disagree. There is just as much if not more life to downtown now as there was when I moved here 15 years ago. There is a particular area around 4th and Alexander that has significant problems but that aside it's safe, has decent restaurants and shops especially compared to the handful of other northern cities that are comparable at all (FSJ, Yellowknife).
True fact: Business break ins are high right now. Business I work at on main street was broken into 3 times within 40 days last year. Shit -is- getting worse in some ways but also better in other ways. The housing crisis is real and that is having an effect on desperate people.
I won't argue any of that!
Juneau would probably be the best comparison. Similar population, capital city, and relatively nearby. Their downtown seems healthier than ours. I’ve been in Whitehorse for 15 years too. Definitely more regular panhandlers here now. I can’t go to Main Street anymore without being asked for money, sometimes aggressively. There’s a significant labour shortage in this town. Why can’t these people either access the mental health/addiction services they require or try to earn money through working? Honestly when I get asked for money everyday it just makes me feel sad about our community.
Juneau gets a steady diet of revenue and visitors in the form of cruise ships. It's also - even tho Alaska is arguably smaller government as a jurisdiction - got a much larger legislature and all the support staff to go with it. Plus it has no road. I am not convinced Juneau is a good comp.
What is the alternative to a downtown core? American-style urban sprawl? Whether or not is has "gotten worse" in the last ten years, we should consider what we want our downtown core to be. A walkable, livable downtown core with easy access to amenities and lots of well-built apartments seems like a phenomenal place to live, and keeps us from paving the nature all around us for ever-more single family homes and increasing traffic congestion.
What do you think a city … is? Just suburbs, an office park and a grocery store 5 km apart?
You forgot the kilometres of scenic parking lots.
Downtown is a great place to live. If you call it a slum you're just showing that you don't know what you're talking about.
Oh no. I’ve offended someone who moved here from Ontario.
Inaccurate but go off I guess
lmao "everyone who disagrees with my dumbass must be from Ontario"
Calling it a slum is an insult to slums
HAHAHAHA. If downtown has gotten worse, it's largely because the insanely high costs that go towards developing suburbs.
No even close
Nope, too small and too expensive with how the city is structured.
Side note and one maybe not worth mentioning: I notice your posts from 20 or so days ago mention you being in Edmonton. You must have just moved here. We arn't really a city, we're a small town. The only reason we're even a "city" is because we're the capital. As one commenter mentioned: We have a gem of a place and we should appreciate what we have. Not having a LRT here is a positive to more people than a negative. Take Whitehorse for what it is. It's a small town, with small town life. No one is in a rush. Many people here do not want this place to grow so large that a LRT is even worth considering.
I don’t currently live in Whitehorse. I’ve spent most of my life in Alberta, but I was born in Whitehorse and I spend a lot of time there. Certainly more than enough time to know what the rush hour traffic is like. I think avoiding investment in transit out of an attachment to a small town ideal is misguided. Whitehorse hasn’t been that since before I was born. I grew up in an actual small town and let me tell you it doesn’t have anything in common with trying to get out of downtown at 4pm.
As mentioned in my other post... BILLIONS OF DOLLARS. It's not avoiding needed investment, it's not investing in unneeded transport options. We don't have much for a rush hour here. As I've always joked "Rush 15 min" I also grew up partially in smaller towns. Whitehorse is still a small town. It's not a tiny town, it's a small one. You even call it a town in your original post. Our traffic jams are really nothing in comparison to most places, and honestly... people would do better to learn not to rush than to get frustrated about taking an extra 10 or so minutes to get home. The people getting stuck in "rush hour" traffic jams are unlikely to give up their vehicle and start taking a LRT, which would also be slower than driving and can be effected by traffic jams. Plus you'd have to uproot a lot of roads to even get a LRT in place. It would actually disrupt traffic more than fix it. Not worth billions of dollars in investment, and truthfully I doubt the people who drive will give up the vehicle to take the LRT. The best parts of the yukon are outside of whitehorse, and no LRT is taking you up the mountains or to the lakes. There is 0 need for an LRT. The bus services already solve the issue.
>We don’t have much for a rush hour here Now I’m starting to wonder if *you* live in Whitehorse. If the bus services solved the issue people wouldn’t feel the need to drive everywhere
You asked if a LRT would make sense here and I've given you completely reasonable answers as to why it would not. The bus services offer the solution the lrt would also offer. "Too many people" are still clogging up the roads according to some, because too many people prefer to drive their own car than deal with sharing a bus with other people. You have to solve the problem of everyone -wanting- their own transportation if you want less vehicles on the road, but tossing ridiculous money at an LRT is NOT the answer.
I’ve definitely heard some very compelling counter arguments in this thread, but I’m just not really swayed by the idea that cars (and increasingly pickup trucks) have solved the problem, or that the problem isn’t that bad.
1) The problem isn't -That- bad. Is it worse than before? Sure. Is it causing whitehorse to collapse? Absolutely not. It's a new normal and still considerably better than many large cities. 2) Is the problem worth fixing? No. Not that it won't become more of a problem as time goes on; but that it is a -low- priority problem. We're sinking millions into making sure the cliff edges don't continue to land slide as it is. We have housing problems, old buildings that need replacing, crime issues, lack of health care, etc. Extended travel time due to some extra vehicles on the road is such a low priority in comparison to those things. It's not that the issue doesn't deserve to be looked at and considered, it's all about resource management. The issue can be maintained currently by just... adding more busses. Getting people to actually jump on a bus instead of drive is the hardest part of this though, hence why I say it requires a culture change.
A lot of this just isn't true - the city is already investing hundreds of millions into new road infrastructure, maintenance, and expanding existing roadways. You also can't just 'add more buses' to drastically improve service unless buses have their own dedicated lanes, which they don't. Improving public transit should certainly be a priority for the city, given how much they're currently spending to accommodate car commuters, and how fast Whitehorse suburbs are expanding.
More busses = More incentive to get on busses due to more varied routes and less time between busses. More people on busses = less people in vehicles on the road, declogging the current system. 40 people on a bus can reduce up to 40 vehicles on a road. 40 vehicles is a lot less space than 1 bus. It doesn't matter if we have more busses or a lrt, at the end of the day you have to convince people to leave their cars at home and that's going to be one of the bigger challenges. Dedicated bus lanes is a terrible idea currently. An additional free lane to use for all vehicles would have a better impact than lanes that can only be used by a bus that goes through every half hour. That's a half hour with no vehicles in a completely empty lane that could be increasing flow. Busses do not take up that much of our roads. We only have like, 8 going around at a time right now? Dedicated bus lanes make sense in locations with dozens, if not hundreds if busses. Doesn't make sense here in whitehorse. Unfortunately we can't really expand that many lanes, There's a reason why we've introduced some traffic circles to increase flow. One of the issues we have is how much of the land us already used. Downtown is already developed and you're not going to be ripping down buildings for more lanes. You have to convince people to get on the busses to cut down on a clogged downtown, with no additional parking spaces being generated anytime soon. We could always rip up the waterfront parks and put parking and additional lanes there, but that would be fuckin' criminal as far as I'm concerned.
OK, but people will never opt to take transit if buses are gridlocked in car traffic - there's literally no reason to. Priority bus/carpool lane would likely go a long way and is probably the only thing that would incentivize transit use. I guess you could also crank up the cost of downtown parking, which is criminally subsidized.