New bus rapid transit changes to Whyte Avenue in concept stages: city

The city is hearing from Edmontonians about its plan for high speed rapid transit in the Whyte Avenue and university areas.

The City of Edmonton is configuring options for its bus rapid transit, also known as BRT, routes down Whyte Avenue ahead of changes to the busy Old Strathcona central strip.

City transportation project manager Carole Cej said public sessions held Tuesday and Wednesday night were meant to help determine final drafts of what BRT stations and transportation would look like in core city areas.

“The city did a mass transit study to see what would best serve the city in that regard, and there are two main routes that are recommended as sort of the top priority,” she said Wednesday.

Route B1 is north-south, connecting Castle Downs to Century Park. Route B2 is an east-west route that connects West Edmonton Mall to Bonnie Doon.

The meetings hone in on the second route’s impact on the Whyte Avenue area between 109 Street and 83 Street. A proposed option would remove street parking from most of the Whyte Avenue to University of Alberta area, reduce vehicle travel lanes to one in each direction and allow emergency vehicles to use the BRT lanes.

Similar to LRT, BRT uses dedicated bus laneways for mass transportation in busy city corridors. There aren’t many Canadian examples. Ottawa had a BRT system that recently transitioned to using light-rail. The BRT project, which has been in talks since 2024, would be Edmonton’s first.

“One of the biggest problems with bus service is that there’s traffic in the way. Cars are traffic, but buses move a lot more people than cars … Giving dedicated laneways to buses means that they’re not competing with cars for the road space,” Emily Stremel, chair of Edmonton Transit Riders, said at Wednesday’s meeting.

She said getting high volumes of people down Whyte Avenue has been a challenge in the works for “over a decade.”

“We don’t have room on Whyte for more cars … Either they’re going to be in a bus in a more compact space with more people, or they’re going to be in a car taking up far more space. We can’t make a double-decker Whyte Avenue. We can’t make a tunneled Whyte Avenue.”

Whyte Avenue is already undergoing changes to scramble pedestrian crossings that slow down buses as the road is home to Routes 4 and 8, two major cross-city loops.

Area Coun. Michael Janz previously told CTV News that Whyte Avenue is in dire need of a makeover: “We need to rip it up and redo it.”

Draft plans for BRT designs will be presented to city council for feedback in fall 2026.

With files from CTV News Edmonton’s Brandon Lynch