I've had several discussions with the City expressing concerns about the reduced park and ride to events. The City has drastically cut back on these. No park and ride any longer, any event, at Meadow, MWTC, or Davies. All discontinued, all events.
The city wants everybody on the southside to use Heritage Valley park and ride which is far away from most residents and for us would be driving the opposite direction to any event. So that the city is allocating one park and ride to the entire southside that now makes up over half million in population. They have 3 park and rides north of River and another in ST Albert. One could ask, and I did everytime why the city is servicing ST Albert park and ride and USING ETS busses to do this.I was of course emphatic that Edmonton tax payer money should not be going to provide services to ST. Albert who are not bellying up for this. The only thing ST AB. is providing is the actual parking facility. the city is also on the hook for the busses to Leduc, Beaumont. Those communities are not paying for ETS feeder busses.
The city wants people from Ellerslie, Millwoods, Meadows etc to be taking Valley Line LRT to Churchill station and then transferring to Capital line for events at Commonwealth. unfortunately this was a debacle as reported by many citizens for the Metallica concerts, Pink concert, and Elks most recent game. Basically people have been transferring to Capital line and not being able to get on those trains as wait for it, they are full.... Hundreds of people on reddit, other sites reporting they were left standing at Churchill station as the trains were already all full. In the case of the Stamps-Elks game the capital line was only running normal cars and normal frequency of 15mins. They had no event frequency or capacity running.
The city is acknowledging they screwed up, but they knew this to be a problem and due to cutting back (they actually stated this in midst of radical increases in property taxes) that they are having to cut corners.
Edmonton park and ride used to be the best possible service offered by ETS. The only one that a lot of population bother to take. I pointed out that there are people that used Park and Ride that are otherwise not comfortable using the slow and now dangerous ETS service.
I have no horse in this race. No big deal to me and it only prevented us from going to Heritage Festival. But hate to see a once pretty good service so poorly mismanaged. I used to take it a lot to Esks games or concerts at Commonwealth.
The Elks, Commonwealth, Heritage and other major festivals should all be concerned with this as well. The city continues to spout that you should take transit to major events but the service provision to do so is shit.