Imagine if you will, a young man or woman about 22 years old. Having just completed a four-year degree, they begin looking for a job.

At first, they go out the traditional way: trying to go door-to-door, handing out resumes. However, this soon becomes a much more cumbersome task than they expected. It’s not because of the effort itself, but because reaching these businesses without a car is tricky.

Being just out of university and unemployed, the young person can’t afford a vehicle yet and so they must rely on Edmonton Transit to get them where they need to go. Most places in the city, even if they would only be 10-15 minutes away by car, are at least 40 minutes away by bus and more often, an hour and a half.

Many business and industrial areas don’t have nearby bus access and so trying to get to them, if possible at all, means long treks on dusty, poorly maintained roads, or muddy, grassy ditches since many of these sectors don’t have sidewalks. They manage to get a few interviews, but most of them are in places where the closest bus doesn’t even start running early enough to make it on time.

Eventually, they are forced to compromise on a job that isn’t their chosen profession and with lower pay because it’s easier to get to, and hope that someday they can save enough for a car and find a job that will really get them started in life.

As someone who has lived in and taken the bus in Edmonton for the past 16 years, this city’s biggest infrastructure issue is accessibility: massive business sectors with the nearest bus stop at least a 25-minute walk through ditches, parking lots and busy roads; areas where the only bus available has no sidewalk, cutting off access to those with mobility issues and making the winter trek to work hazardous and harder than it should be; or even vast stretches of bus routes with no shelter and next-to-no lighting, so that the mother taking their child to daycare must brave the —30 degree windchill with no protection whatsoever, and the young woman on her way to work in the morning has to hope that someone might see through the darkness if anyone tried to cause her harm.

So many people are cut off from good-paying jobs and even decent minimum-wage jobs, because they can’t reasonably get to the location. This past summer, even though I have plenty of job experience and am currently a mature student with a 3.8 GPA, it took me two months to find a job, and much of the issue was finding something I could reasonably get to.

What would normally take seven minutes by car takes me an hour. If the buses are running even a couple minutes late when I head home in the evening then I have to walk for 30 minutes in the dark, and in a city where random stabbings have been all over the news.

If Edmonton wants to be a place where people can come and make something of themselves, it must have infrastructure that keeps in mind the issue of accessibility for all of its population: accessibility by transit, but also the journey after that, making sure that there are pathways and reasonable means for people to reach the transit in Edmonton’s often chaotic weather.

This means tackling the systems we already have in place, and not simply building new ones. Spending billions of dollars on LRT systems that are way behind schedule, while failing to make the current system usable, makes it seem as if Edmonton’s city council is only concerned with the appearance of improving things rather than actually sitting down with those of us who use these systems and finding out what needs to be done.

Monika Burns is a born-and-raised Albertan and longtime resident of Edmonton. She is currently a mature student entering her fourth year of study at Concordia University with plans to pursue her PhD in literature.