If Sturgeon County and St. Albert plan on working together on transit plans for the future, it only makes sense the two start co-operating now to help alleviate the parking crunch at the Village Landing park and ride.
With classes resuming at Edmonton post-secondary institutions, and NAIT now on-board with U-Pass, parking space will be at a premium and will inevitably lead to individuals leaving their cars in spots designated for Village Landing businesses and the St. Albert Inn & Suites. No matter how many signs the city and the Village Landing proprietors choose to post, some park and ride users will return from school or work to find a parking ticket on their windshields.
If what the city and Mayor Nolan Crouse say is true — that about nine per cent of park and ride users are “out-of-towners,” mostly from Sturgeon County, then it stands to reason the county and its Mayor Don Rigney should be ready to help out both in the short- and long-term. Both the city and Sturgeon are looking for Green Trip funding for a park and ride location on St. Albert’s northern boundary, but securing the necessary funding is not guaranteed and use of such a facility might not be the magic bullet for our transit woes. Commuters, whether by car or by bus, will inevitably choose the shortest possible trip and adding 10 minutes to an already long trip from the north to the south side of town might be off-putting. The failure of the city’s pilot shuttle program from Kinex-Akinsdale arenas last winter and the demise of Morinville’s Interlink commuter bus program at the end of April due to lack of ridership prove that users would rather face a parking ticket than an extra stop or two.
The city’s idea to lease parking space from the Petro Canada on St. Albert Trail and Gate Avenue is a fast, reasonably short-term solution that could help relieve a bloated situation, but with an eye on controlling costs, the city is not going to pay hand-over-fist for its use. The letter it sent to Sturgeon County — to chip in for some of the cost — is entirely appropriate and an idea that Rigney and his council should act on, even if Sturgeon’s mayor has, in predicable fashion, already dismissed it. It stands to reason that if one municipality’s citizens are incurring extra costs on another, it should help offset some of those costs.
It was a similar debate over cost and use of services that led to the regional bickering and infighting before the province was forced to step in and help settle, through the creation of the Capital Region Board, an entity for which Rigney’s disdain is common knowledge. And the county’s unilateral withdrawal from the intermunicipal development plan (IDP), a joint planning document, will make negotiating other land-use concerns difficult in the future. A north-end park and ride might be an answer in the future, but it will not come without extra costs above and beyond simple land acquisition and construction. Who will buy the buses or pay the drivers? That cost will fall predominately to St. Albert. Hopefully Sturgeon will be willing to donate to that cause.
While the blame for overcrowding does not rest solely with residents from out-of-town, it is a contributing factor. If the county is in such an “enviable financial position,” as Rigney told the Gazette in last Wednesday’s edition, a contribution towards a short-term solution would not break Sturgeon’s bank account and would serve as a gesture of good faith. Regional co-operation, though not as vitriolic in years past, has been largely absent between both St. Albert and Sturgeon as of late. Starting somewhere small might help resurrect an amicable sense of goodwill.
