St. Albert’s buses have a new home as of Sunday as the city’s newest transit centre officially opens for business.
About 40 dignitaries gathered at 15520 Campbell Road on a windy, sunny Thursday Aug. 27 for the grand opening of the Nakî Transit Centre and Park and Ride.
Construction of the $30-million facility started May 2019 and was still in progress as of Thursday.
The centre’s name stemmed from the Cree and Michif word “nakî,” which means “stop” or “stop here.” Indigenous language speakers at Thursday’s event said the name could be pronounced as “nah-gee” or “nah-key.”
Mayor Cathy Heron said this transit centre had been in the works for more than a decade, and stemmed from the shortage of park-and-ride stalls at the old Village Landing transit station, which had about 350 parking spots.
“Every September, every year since I’ve been elected, I’ll start getting emails from parents and university students (about how) there’s no parking at Village Landing and they’re late for class,” Heron said.
The Nakî Centre aimed to address that issue with its 800 parking spots, which could expand to 1,600 in the future. Heron said she hoped the additional spots would encourage more people to take transit, reducing greenhouse gas emissions and the need to build new roads.
“A little bit less than 70 per cent of St. Albert works in Edmonton,” Heron noted, and many Edmonton residents take the bus into St. Albert.
“If it’s easy for someone to work in Edmonton but still live in St. Albert, that helps St. Albert grow.”
New features
The Nakî Centre features an expansive bus lane with 16 bus bays, expandable to 24 in the future, said St. Albert Transit service delivery manager Ettore Iannacito.
“It’s so spacious compared to our Village Landing centre,” he said, and can handle any bus in the Edmonton region – something that would let it serve as a transit hub for the proposed regional transit commission. There’s also room to the south for a future LRT link to Edmonton.
Visitors to the Nakî Centre would arrive by bus, car, bike or foot from Campbell Road, the speed limit for which has been lowered to 50 km/h from 70 pending the installation of new traffic lights.
Upon arrival at the centre’s bike racks, parking lot, or passenger drop-off area, guests would walk past many planters full of trees to the transit area, which featured smooth concrete benches meant to resemble branches when viewed from above, Iannacito said. Guests could relax in the traditional glass shelters along the outer ring, hang out in open-air areas behind perforated metal screens, or step inside the heated transit centre building.
The transit building featured many seats, free Wi-Fi, a potential ticket office or coffee shop and, in a first for the city’s transit centres, public washrooms (although those won’t be open until the end of September). It would also be video-monitored and open whenever buses are active (unlike the Village Landing one, which was only open when transit staff were on site).
The new transit centre brought with it new bus routes, which kicked in Aug. 30. St. Albert Transit operations co-ordinator Dustin Creviston said drivers had test-driven the new routes with actual buses and believed they wouldn’t have much effect on travel times.
The new centre also puts the old Village Landing centre out of business. Creviston said that centre’s bus shelters would be redistributed throughout St. Albert, with the centre set to be demolished in about a year to make way for a replacement Fire Hall No. 1.
The Nakî Centre opens to the public Aug. 30. Visit stalbert.ca/city/transit/park-ride/naki for details.
