Edmonton just released its Fall 2025 budget and carbon updates. On the surface, you’ll find some small steps forward for transit, sidewalks, and active transportation.
But if you read a little deeper, the documents tell a much harder truth:
Edmonton is failing on climate.
Edmonton is failing on mode shift.
Edmonton is failing on traffic safety.
And the most striking part is that the City isn’t hiding it. They’re admitting it — clearly, directly, in their own words.
This budget cycle reveals a pattern many residents have already felt on the ground: we’re doing just enough to say we’re doing something, but nowhere near enough to actually change outcomes.
Here’s what’s in the documents — the good, the bad, and then the ugly truth that ties it all together.
Please write your councilor and let them know your thoughts: on this budget, on what needs to be funded in the next 4-year budgets, and about how they need to require admin align actions with words that have so far been hollow.
This will improve access for:
seniors
mobility-device users
transit riders
kids walking to school
This is a meaningful step toward making winter mobility safer and more reliable.
This is one of the simplest, cheapest ways to help more people combine cycling with transit.
When cities make it easy to mix modes, ridership jumps. This is a smart move.
215 Street widening
Parsons Road widening
167 Avenue widening
137 Avenue/Henday ramps
Enoch/Whitemud interchange upgrades
Every single one of these projects increases long-term driving — and Edmonton’s own carbon math confirms that increased road capacity means increased emissions.
It’s like trying to put out a fire while adding more wood to the pile.
Recommendation: arterial renewal projects like this are excellent opportunities to implement safety-first designs that move more people by prioritizing people outside of cars.
We’ve seen this pattern before at places like Davies, Century Park, and several older transit centres. When this happens, it undermines walkability, reduces transit ridership, and encourages more driving — the opposite of what transit-oriented development is supposed to achieve.
The presence of Park and Ride in the project description doesn’t guarantee this mistake will be repeated. But based on Edmonton’s past practice, it remains a real risk unless the city commits early to a people-first, not parking-first design.
Recommendation: Transit and LRT stations should be the centre of their communities. Walkable, full of destinations and amenities, and able to support car-free lifestyles for those who want that.
Recommendation: There should be a funding formula that ties snow and ice control funding to growth in the active and public transportation networks. People need to be able to reliably get around their city, even in the winter. We have already seen 43% growth in winter cycling between 2022 and 2024, so let’s lean into that progress and build momentum.
The budget documents and the Carbon Budget Update don’t spin or sugarcoat. They say — openly — that Edmonton is failing to meet its own goals. We’ve been warning about this for a while, but this is the first time we’ve seen them openly admit their own failure.
The Carbon Budget Update bluntly admits that Edmonton is not on track for its 2025, 2030, or 2050 climate targets. Community emissions rose 3% last year, hitting 15.2 million tonnes, and the City now expects to run out of its total carbon budget years early. Even more alarming, the Fall 2025 budget is described as having a “negligible impact” on reducing emissions.
Put simply, Edmonton is spending billions while its carbon curve keeps rising — the exact opposite of what the City Plan requires. This is a foundational failure: strong goals on paper paired with spending choices that guarantee those goals cannot be met.
2. Mode Shift? Not happening.
The City Plan relies on major increases in walking, biking, and transit. But this budget only introduces small, isolated improvements — nowhere near the scale needed for behaviour change. Administration even notes that while the walking network has grown significantly, maintenance budgets have been flat for a decade, eroding basic reliability.
Winter is where everything collapses. In August, administration presented a range of winter mobility options. Option 4 was the only transformative one — the version that would have made year-round walking and biking possible. But the previous council chose Option 3, a modest plan that improves some pedestrian routes but offers no winter bike network, no protected lane maintenance, and no fix for windrows.
Administration is simply delivering the option council approved, but the result is clear: every winter, Edmonton’s active transportation network fails for months. Without reliable winter mobility, real mode shift is impossible.
3. Vision Zero? Not working.
Edmonton is experiencing one of the deadliest years on record, including a shocking rise in pedestrian deaths. The City’s response in this budget cycle was to add peace officers — a reactive step taken because the situation has become unmanageable. Enforcement is important to remind all road users of their responsibility to behave safely; the evidence is overwhelming that Vision Zero depends on safe street design:
protected intersections
slower vehicle speeds
continuous 5A networks, and
predictable crossings.
Edmonton continues to rely on discretionary, piecemeal safety upgrades instead of redesigning dangerous roads at scale, and people are paying the price.
This section of the documents tells its own story: the City acknowledges the severity of the harm but continues to underinvest in the infrastructure proven to stop it.
Edmonton knows what it needs to do:
build safe, always available walking and biking options
expand frequent, reliable transit
maintain winter routes
design safer streets
and stop investing in wider, faster roads and expensive bridges that benefit a small number of commuters while imposing high costs on everyone else
But the city keeps choosing isolated incremental progress and the same car-centric decisions that created the problems we’re facing now.
This is why emissions aren’t falling.
This is why transit ridership isn’t booming.
This is why traffic deaths are rising.
This is why mode shift isn’t happening.
We’re saying the right words but doing the wrong things.
Here’s how:
Taken together, the documents show a city that knows what must be done — winter-reliable walking and biking routes, safer street designs, better transit access, and a shift away from widening roads — but continues to choose small, incremental steps while holding onto outdated, car-first patterns.
This is why emissions aren’t falling.
This is why transit ridership isn’t booming.
This is why traffic deaths continue to rise.
This is why mode shift isn’t happening.
We’re saying the right words, but we continue to do the wrong things.
Edmonton can change course. While this supplemental budget has limited opportunity for change, the next four-year budget arrives in the new year. That is what sets the tone for the rest of this council term: it starts with funding the full winter mobility plan, shifting to redesigning arterials with safety-first principles, building transit centres around people instead of parking, creating a citywide active transportation arterial network, and correcting the long-standing imbalance that makes driving the easiest and cheapest option.
Now that the City is acknowledging these failures in its own documents, the real question is whether council is willing to act at the scale this moment demands. Approve the good, call out the bad, and make it clear that the next four-year budget must finally meet the occasion — because small steps won’t deliver the safe, affordable, climate-ready city we’ve been promised.