An unusable, years\u002Dbehind\u002Dschedule train line provides the city a grotesque daily vision of state incapacity
And, you know, Gerein is groping toward what we’ve found to be the truly sick part of this long-running comedy of infrastructure. It’s this: the Valley Line Southeast is really quite pretty. I mean, if you have to have an entire rail line nobody can ever use, it might as well look good. The trains themselves have a retro-futuristic badass feel and the stations are attractive, particularly the picturesque Muttart Station at the south end of the new Tawatinâ Bridge.
Edmontonians are used to disappointment when it comes to translating artist renderings of new architecture to reality, but in its visual aspects the Valley Line has largely lived up to the hype. Any visitor who doesn’t know the background situation must look upon the project and think, “Wow, this is a city that really has its act together.”Article content
And maybe that’s how we’ll feel about it in the very very long run. For now it feels just plain wrong to offer any praise to engineering firms whose physical parts are now somehow achieving negative service life — i.e., needing total replacement before they come into actual use! The new line was already delayed for a while because of bad rebar in overpass piers, which required engineering fudges to keep the concrete from crumbling.
If you believe the politicians, this is an inherent problem with the “public-private partnership” system of building infrastructure. If you believe the critics who would never have voted to build new light-rail transit in the first place, the politiciansThe builders, who are losing a thin slice of their capital with every month of delay, don’t seem to be playing any sort of media or communications game at all.
For now, Schrödinger’s Train, which both exists and doesn’t, provides taxpayers with a grotesque daily vision of state incapacity and civilizational decline.
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