Observations from my trip to Edmonton

[middeljohn]

At first I was going to post this in another thread, but I didn't want to derail so I decided to make my own.

I'm back from my trip to Edmonton. It was my first time there and you guys have a great city. I went there to check the city out and see if it's somewhere I would want to live, and I can definitely see myself living there happily. It's probably a good thing that I went there during a cold snap too, because now I know what it's like and I know that I can handle it fairly easily by dressing appropriately.

The downtown is big and the skyline stretches out way further than I thought it would. The river valley is awesome. If I'm there in the summer I already know that I'll be spending many hours there!

It's also awesome to see all the development happening. Downtown has a lot of parking lots, but a lot of them already are slated for construction. I also found people there to be surprisingly educated about suburban sprawl and the height limit being removed. Not just us skyscraper geeks.

YEG has the feel of a borderline big city airport. It's nowhere near as intense as Pearson, but it feels eons bigger than London International Airport (as it should).

I found Edmonton's rush hour to be very mild. Apparently the bridges can get clogged up, but that's about it. The city is definitely still very car oriented but it's good to see an effort being made to expand the LRT system (which I didn't get a chance to ride).

The city is physically big. It takes pretty long to drive from one end to the other. Of course I knew this ahead of time, but it was cool experiencing it in person.

The only negative I can think of is that the sprawl is worse than I thought it would be. I knew the city isn't as dense as Toronto, Hamilton, Ottawa or London, but I thought that would be related to industrial parks and the river valley being huge. But the low density is noticeable. Buildings start very far from the arterial roads and parking lots were bigger than necessary I thought.

Looking at housing, prices weren't as high as I was expecting for buyers, but rents are pretty high. What this tells me is that it's a great place for landlords, haha. Overall costs of living seem cheaper than Toronto. Rent is slightly less. Gas is way less (only $1/L!!!). Food is about the same. Beer seems to be the same. That's pretty much all that my money goes to.

And of course I can't write this without commenting on the West Edmonton Mall. I was expecting a really big mall. I wasn't expecting three full-sized roller coasters, a full-sized waterpark, and a full-sized hockey rink. Not to mention sea lions! I don't shop at malls, but that was damn impressive!

All in all I'm happy I went and if all goes well I could very likely be moving to Edmonton in a month!