Written by Tobias Moulatsiotis
The Absolute State of Clareview Station
You know what? Clareview Station SUCKS!!!! Just look at Google Maps right now!
Image courtesy of Google Maps
You can't honestly tell me that this isn't in the bottom 3 LRT station placements in Edmonton ever! Why is there a FREIGHT RAIL LINE going right through the station (it's pretty cool though), a HIGHWAY, a giant STRIP MALL, and multiple ARTERIALS, all within walking distance??? All of these are sincerely not walkable destinations you want to go to getting off of transit, right? Unless you love walking through parking lots... Now you may be thinking (even more if you're not a north-easterner) that it can't possibly be all that bad, right? There's gotta be some useful destinations nearby, right?
There’s the Clareview Recreation Centre and Library. Umm yeah... And suburbs, and more strip malls.
And don't get me started on actually getting to the station itself. It has really non-accessible entrances; it's almost like you're meant to drive in there (oh wait a minute...). Nearly every entrance leading into the station by walking is somewhat dangerous to traverse. If you go by the north or south, you essentially have to cross a bunch of roads and go through a bus-heavy road. If you’re on the path coming from the recreation centre, it’s actually optional to cross into the direct paths of cars since there’s a sidewalk that leads you to the entrance. Though it winds around quite a bit and most people end up walking through the parking lot anyway.
But with all the flaming I’m going on about here, it's not all bad! Trust me, I live there. Going a bit east, less than a block's walk away from the station, I already mentioned we got the Clareview Recreation Centre and its library, and we got some baseball diamonds that get used in the summer, some ground squirrels, some rabbits (I petted one once, it was a cute little baby one), and some coyotes.
Well, now what is the crux of this? Why is Clareview Station like this? I mean if you know Edmonton for even two seconds without using your brain, Dr. Obvious with their 3 PhDs in Obviousity will crash through your roof in a stolen car they took on February 31st 8:46 am at the Burger Baron at 7920 118 Ave. They'll be sure to let you know that Edmonton is a car-centric and dependent city, with some relatively decent transit for its size. And Clareview's design? Definitely reflecting that.
The parking being all over the surrounding area tells us what the goal of Clareview initially was: it's a Park & Ride transit station. If you aren't super in the know, let me give a teeny recap on what it is. The goal of a Park & Ride approach to public transit is to bridge suburban commuters to transit instead of building a dedicated community around transit.¹ This is mostly characterized by a transit station surrounded by car parking. That's kind of really it, fairly straightforward.
Now let's also keep in mind that Clareview was built in 1981,² (yeah, I got my sources) and you know what didn't exist back then? My ROAT (road of all time), the Anthony Henday!!! See, let's take it from the perspective of Edmonton pre-Henday: we wanna get people around town and having cars go everywhere clogs up the roads. But they got the LRT and they’re expanding it, so what better way to ease the load of the roads than to have people use the train instead? Logically, adopting a Park & Ride system here is lovely! Getting people using the train means less people on the road, which means less traffic.
Fast forward to 2026, post-Henday. You can get to any part of Edmonton through that glorious ring. Now if I were a commuter using a car wanting to go to, let's say, the south side, I would have a few options: either park at Clareview and take the LRT, or use the Henday. What do you think a commuter would choose? I honestly don’t know, but my bet’s on the Henday, which is arguably a more convenient option since you don’t have to park your car and wait for the train, and stay with it through your entire journey.
But with all that in mind, why is there denser housing being built? It's inherently semi-unwalkable; it'd just be kinda really quite inconvenient to walk through. The noise from Manning Drive would be pretty inconvenient and annoying after a while. Sure, building denser here is seemingly helping to 'improve' the walkability and usability of the station; even the redevelopment sign put up on some nearby lots says it's “Transit Oriented Development”, but all it really is just condos. I don't see any mixed use or commercial here! You want my itty bitty bit bit on this? (You're reading this so I'm guessing you are) Clareview is going through a subtle retransformation into a more genuine transit-oriented community, with the new condo constructions in the surrounding area and the movement of the Costco being the precursors for such a transformation.
Let's take a larger look here. If you're not in the know, the Costco on 50th Street is moving up to Manning Town Centre. You can actually see construction for it happening right now, and it's actually opening up sometime in mid-November. This will mean that traffic will be redirected from the strip malls down south to Manning up north. With traffic being freed up in the Clareview area, could there be the potential to further revitalize it? Maybe the Walmart will move to the location the Costco used to be in and free up space in its former spot? I’m probably reading too much into it, and that area where the Costco is right now is too cramped for traffic, and that’s why they’re moving.
But do you see the dots connecting? Do you see the vision? So what I think is subtly going on with Clareview is that it's slowly but surely shifting into a more genuine TOD, and that the foundations for it to change further are being laid out.
The big problem here is that it’s already boxed in by the myriad of big, thick roads surrounding the station, impairing the development potential it can achieve. So there’s a chance that this may be a lost cause.
Now yes, I have been complaining about Clareview all along here, so...
What would I do with it?
Hey, we're at the part that the title's talking about!!!
Obviously, the parking lot and the surrounding area are something that is an immediate, glaring, shiny flaw. If we want to make this a nice, friendly, inclusive, vibrant, walkable community that revitalizes Clareview through sustainable practices and has activated space blah blah blah... Then I think it’d be good to break this down into different ~dimensions~ of feasibility.
One: Plausible Stuff
Let's start with some nice low-budget things that could realistically be done in like a year or two, or maybe three, or more... First is pedestrian accessibility: right now, to get into 2 of the 3 entrances, you cross roads with bus-heavy traffic, and in the winter those crossings get brown, slushy and a bit slippery.
How I would possibly fix this is maybe to rebuild the crosswalk itself, make it have better lighting for more visibility, and have it slightly raised so there would be less accumulation of snow and slush in the winter. These elements would better indicate that it’s a crosswalk. The stairs going down into the station (Sorry I didn’t provide an image, there’s a ton in here already) get icy and snowy in the winter, and I honestly find myself slipping down those steps at least three times a week. A nice addition would be a covered roof on top of the stairs so snow and rain won’t affect it. Sure, it might look a bit ugly, but from a practical standpoint it’s a small thing that could really help the quality of life of daily commuters.
Did you also know Lime and Bird scooters don't actually go up here??? It's kind of crazy, isn't it? The border of the usage zone is 137 Ave, quite literally a few blocks south of the station.
Approximate cutoff range for Lime and Bird. Image courtesy of OpenStreetMaps contributors. The red line marking the range was my modification to the image.
I think getting Lime to expand the range further north would quite help with people using the station. A good chunk of people (me included) don't have a bike. I Limed my fair share of times (and always put them in good parking spots, trust me), and my destinations are LRT stations around half the time.
So how would extending the range help? Well, LRT stations have a high volume of people moving through them; sometimes seeing a scooter parked in some spot could encourage you to use it by mere exposure. Also, the recreation centre and library are fairly popular locations, all the more incentive for expanding that range. Just saying, it could be a prime opportunity for Lime to capitalize on this, and expanding the range further north could encourage more people to Lime.
Now how would we get Lime to expand their range further up? Well... Be the change you want to make! Email the Lime people, tell them you think that expanding the range up and further above Clareview is a great decision that would get more people using Lime! Will it do anything to get them to do it? I don't know, but it's worth a shot. I know I'll be doing it. Outside of that, we can only hope that Lime would expand further north; even a little nudge by bringing it up to 144 Ave would help a ton.
And while I'm at it, let me plug the email for the Lime Edmonton team, so you can message them yourself:
Bike parking is something that's quite lacking at the station; right now, there are some metal racks you can park your bikes in. Do people use it? Sometimes... I only really see one or two bikes parked at the racks at peak hours. Expanding it to have better and more parking options, like maybe some dedicated covered parking, would help a lot and somewhat protect people's bikes from rain and snow, which could potentially encourage more people to use their bikes.
Two: Slightly less doable things
Why don’t we take a look inside the station this time? Because we do actually have some commercial! A Reddimart, which is just a little hole in the wall that sells some convenience store stuff.
The Reddimart in question. Image taken by Tobias Moulatsiotis
Not much… But a good space to start! Improving it? Well, it's underground, so we could definitely dig out more commercial space. I honestly don't know how much space that could be dug out to make it more usable, since there are three sets of train tracks just sitting on top of the underground portion of the station; you can feel the station shake a teeny bit every time there’s a freight train passing by on top. Adding more commercial within the station would definitely help with people's commutes by giving them the ability to buy items they might need on their way to work, and also on their way back home. It’ll also make the underground portion of the station feel less like a dull hallway. And by commercial, there really isn’t a limit to what it could be. It could be a larger set of convenience stores like the Reddimart already present; it could be a mini-grocery store, anything really.
The current hallway going to the north bus terminal. Imagine if there were stores lined up on either side of here. Image taken by Tobias Moulatsiotis.
Going back to that pedestrian accessibility, if more money were dumped into improving Clareview, there could potentially be some sort of overpass to make it safer to cross and link it to the shelters at the bus terminals. This could make it so you could transfer from the LRT to a bus with minimal exposure to cold weather, and so the buses don’t have to look out for pedestrians, which means less accidents!
There’s also that aforementioned entrance on the northeast which leads from the platform on the ground floor out onto the main area. I’d personally just make that sidewalk leading to the recreation centre to be wider, better lit, and be more direct in leading to it, possibly discouraging people from crossing straight through the parking lot.
Three: Money doesn't exist, and we can do whatever we want
First thing I'd do is get rid of the parking lots, all of em! Put in some new development! Some good 5-storey mixed-use EVERYWHERE!!! For that freight train? Put some walls on either side to absorb the sound!
For the streets, rebuild them to make them more pedestrian-friendly. Build some wider sidewalks, maybe some bike lanes on the road coming from the south. You know what? Consolidate Manning into one road instead of a highway! 137 Ave? Cut two lanes on either side and make them into bike lanes! Get rid of all the strip malls and put in dense residential! Expand the recreation centre and make it bigger!
Estimated area of effect if all proposed changes above were enacted (in red). Image courtesy of Google Maps, graphics done by Tobias Moulatsiotis.
Whew, I'm getting ahead of myself. If money didn’t exist, we could solve all our problems, couldn’t we?
So What Now?
Clareview Clareview Clareview... Much like most of the northside LRT stations, the placement isn't super great. Clareview specifically is wedged between a highway, strip malls, and big arterials with not-so-walkable areas. One of the only neat things it's got going for it is the recreation centre. And while there are active efforts to slowly improve the surrounding area, I feel like it might not be enough, and TOD is being imposed on top of an incompatible model of transit: Park & Ride. What’s happening now is the conflict of two different models of transit, each with differing goals. Though with the construction of recent developments, it seems like a nice future is on the horizon.
But I'm a planning student after all, and I don't super know everything, that’s why I’m in the program. Maybe what's happening with Clareview right now is the best that could be done, or maybe the city has bigger plans down the line after those condos are built. But I hope the improvements I’ve proposed can help you see the potential in what can be made better with a space that isn’t in such a great spot to begin with.
Written by Tobias Moulatsiotis
References:
¹https://www.edmonton.ca/ets/park-and-ride
Cover Photo: Aerial view of Clareview Station. Image courtesy of Google Maps, additional graphics done by Tobias Moulatsiotis.