Edmonton Metro Line Northwest LRT Extension

Evolving Edmonton’s public transit through creative, accessible, and sustainable design.

Transit stations are often designed with one goal in mind: to get people from point A to point B. But what if those stations could do more—could feel welcoming, connect people to their communities, and respond to the shape of a city in motion?

That was the vision behind the Edmonton Metro Line Northwest Extension. Rather than focus solely on function, the City of Edmonton wanted a system that felt integrated and intuitive—transit that serves the people who use it just as much as the routes it travels. GEC was engaged to design nine new stations and 11 kilometres of track, extending the existing line from NAIT to Campbell Road, just shy of the St. Albert border.

This extension responds to the momentum of a growing city, one expanding northward and eager for thoughtful, future-ready infrastructure. From the outset, the project called for a shift in thinking: how could we create transit stations that were both durable and deeply connected to the places around them?

Historically, Edmonton’s transit infrastructure had been separated from its urban fabric. In contrast, we were asked to bring everything closer together—people, public space, and the systems that connect them. Our approach prioritized accessibility, community integration, and flexible design that could evolve with its context. The stations span a mix of at-grade, elevated, and below-grade conditions, each carefully adapted to its location, whether urban core or suburban edge.

The first phase focused on two stations: one at the NAIT campus and another within Blatchford, a new master-planned community. These stations are rooted in their surroundings. Gentle ramps, plazas, and multimodal paths create seamless movement between transit and neighbourhood life. Design cues guide developers in shaping adjacent buildings, ensuring these stations stay embedded in the city’s growth. They’re easy to access, navigate, and use, regardless of age or ability.

Informed by decades of transit experience, we designed these two stations to be sleek, unobtrusive, and functional, with durable yet refined material choices. Solar panels are just one sustainability feature within overall designs that are meant for low-cost and low-effort operation and maintenance.

The results speak for themselves. We delivered the project under budget and a full year ahead of schedule. More than a transit project, the Metro Line Northwest Extension has become a framework for the future. The City adopted our work as a template for new lines and upgrades citywide and retained us to create a new LRT Technical Design Guideline for high-floor infrastructure.

Transit is more than infrastructure. It’s an invitation to move, to connect, to belong. And in Edmonton, that invitation now stretches even farther.