Edmonton is finishing off the year with a budget surplus and they still keep fucking up the plowing.
People don't like bike lanes here because they don't plow them. We aren't the northernmost or snowiest city to have bike lanes - there's places in like Finland with more snow - but do have some pretty poorly maintained and poorly implemented bike lanes! You have to plow them, it's not impossible, you just have to pay people to do it and the city decides it doesn't wanna do that and instead give tax breaks to the guy that runs Rexall and give another couple hundred million to the cops on top of their (first in North America) automatic budget increase.
Edmonton is also the city that neolibs and chuds get to implement whatever stupid fantasies they like. Alberta is the home of the socred movement, dreamed up of in the UK by a STEM guy who "solved" capitalism by engineering it. Edmonton has the most unpaved parking lots because one guy in the 70s said parking was bad - which is objectively correct but you have to also pair that with mass transit or else you just get car-brain infrastructure without any of the convenience of having a car. Whatever stupid fantasy a neolib could want to implement can find its home here.
Our number one most powerful political figure here isn't the mayor (a former high level Liberal cabinet minister) but the totally unelected and unaccountable chief of police, so of course everything sucks except giving billionaires tax breaks for the Oilers to suck once again and to screw around with bike lanes and fuck up the LRT.
Edmonton is finishing off the year with a budget surplus and they still keep fucking up the plowing.
People don't like bike lanes here because they don't plow them. We aren't the northernmost or snowiest city to have bike lanes - there's places in like Finland with more snow - but do have some pretty poorly maintained and poorly implemented bike lanes! You have to plow them, it's not impossible, you just have to pay people to do it and the city decides it doesn't wanna do that and instead give tax breaks to the guy that runs Rexall and give another couple hundred million to the cops on top of their (first in North America) automatic budget increase.
Edmonton is also the city that neolibs and chuds get to implement whatever stupid fantasies they like. Alberta is the home of the socred movement, dreamed up of in the UK by a STEM guy who "solved" capitalism by engineering it. Edmonton has the most unpaved parking lots because one guy in the 70s said parking was bad - which is objectively correct but you have to also pair that with mass transit or else you just get car-brain infrastructure without any of the convenience of having a car. Whatever stupid fantasy a neolib could want to implement can find its home here.
Our number one most powerful political figure here isn't the mayor (a former high level Liberal cabinet minister) but the totally unelected and unaccountable chief of police, so of course everything sucks except giving billionaires tax breaks for the Oilers to suck once again and to screw around with bike lanes and fuck up the LRT.
Damn.
There's motorbike snowplows