Twenty-one glass panels were smashed on Edmonton's 100 Street Funicular.
The City expects repairs to cost more than $70,000 this year. One person has been arrested, and City officials say the damage happened over several days.
Annual vandalism repairs to the funicular have been estimated at $40,000 to $70,000.
The glass is the expensive part
This has been the problem since the funicular opened.
In September 2018, vandals broke three panes. The repair cost the City $47,000 and closed the attraction for two days, the first time vandalism had forced it shut.
City spokesperson Suzzette Mellado explained why at the time. The glass along the funicular route was customized, which made it slower and more expensive to produce than standard glass.
"The city is looking into standard alternatives to cut down on those costs and wait times," Mellado said.
Eight years later, 21 panes are expected to cost just over $70,000. That's roughly $3,300 a pane, against about $15,700 in 2018.
The arithmetic suggests the City followed through on the cheaper glass. It's worth asking directly, because if that change was made, it has saved a substantial amount across eight years of repeat damage.
It's inspected several times a day
The City has said staff inspect the funicular multiple times daily, and cameras are installed on site. That's been the case since at least 2018.
Twenty-one panels were broken across several days anyway.
Whether that reflects a monitoring gap, a response-time issue, or the plain difficulty of catching someone in a public space at night is a question the City hasn't addressed.
There's a pattern here
Vandalism at the funicular goes back nearly to its opening.
In August 2018, profane graffiti appeared on a glass partition, one panel was broken at roughly foot height, and another separating the funicular from the adjacent stairs had been shattered since at least that June. When Global News asked about it in July, the City said the replacement panel was on back-order.
Then-councillor Bev Esslinger put it plainly.
"When I saw the damage being done, just by straight vandalism, it's just sad," she said. "I think the funicular is something that belongs to all Edmontonians."
What the funicular is
An inclined elevator connecting 100 Street downtown, just south of the Fairmont Hotel Macdonald, with Louise McKinney Riverfront Park in the river valley.
The Swiss-manufactured cab holds 20 people and covers 55 metres in 48 seconds, running parallel to a staircase with built-in seating and a bicycle rail.
Edmonton City Council approved the project in June 2015. Construction started in March 2016, and it opened on December 9, 2017 with a ribbon-cutting by then-mayor Don Iveson. It came in on time and on budget at $24 million.
In February 2020 it won a national urban design award for connectivity to the river valley.
It also has quirks. The funicular runs sluggishly below -25 and has closed during extreme temperatures.
What it's actually for
The funicular exists to solve an accessibility problem.
Edmonton's river valley is one of the largest urban park systems in North America, and for most of the city's history it was effectively closed to anyone who couldn't manage a long staircase or a steep grade.
The funicular is how someone using a wheelchair, pushing a stroller, or unable to climb 55 vertical metres gets from downtown to the valley floor.
Which is what gets lost when it's described as a tourist attraction. Every panel that has to be replaced is time it isn't doing that job.
What happens next
The person arrested has not been named and no charges have been announced publicly.
We will update this article as more information becomes available.
Sources
100 Street Funicular — City of Edmonton
Edmonton City Council records
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