The Rat Hole, the Roadway, the Relationships and the Rebuilding

Written By Rachel Rae

A conversation with bridge engineer Guy Boston about Edmonton's rat hole demolition is really a story about what happens when the people building things treat communication as seriously as concrete.

Infrasound Podcast | reVerb Communications

There's a moment in our latest Infrasound episode where bridge engineer Guy Boston describes walking out of a stakeholder meeting. Forty to fifty business owners packed into a car dealership boardroom on 104th Avenue. They'd been there an hour before Boston and his project manager Hugh Donovan arrived. The room was already at a boil. The City of Edmonton had come to explain a road closure. The crowd had come to fight.

Boston turned to Donovan and said, loud enough for the room: "We're leaving. We don't have to take this abuse."

Then he did something that tells you everything about how he thinks. He waited in the parking lot.

Two business owners followed them out. They apologized. They offered to reconvene properly. Two days later, a different venue, different tone, same group. The loudest voice from the first meeting sat in the corner. The rest of the room told him to listen.

That second meeting led to the value engineering exercise that compressed a full-summer road closure into a four-to-six-week sprint. The project won the American Public Works Association's Project of the Year. The engineering was excellent. And the engineering was shaped by what stakeholders said they needed.

The Project That Disappeared (Exactly as Planned)

The rat hole was a 109th Street tunnel built in 1928 to pass under CN Rail's downtown yard. It was dark, low and narrow. It earned its name from an unnamed city councillor who called it "a big dark rat hole," and the name stuck for 73 years. When the rail yards left downtown, the city filled it in. Two lanes became four. A bottleneck became an intersection.

If you drive through that spot today, there's nothing to see. A few lanes of asphalt. Students waiting for a bus. The Mechewana Pedestrian Bridge overhead. Boston's grandkids have no frame of reference for it. "There used to be a hole here." So what?

That's what success looks like in infrastructure. The finished product disappears into daily life. Nobody notices a road that works. The work worth examining is everything that happened before the road opened, the decisions and conversations and compromises that determined whether the project would land well or land badly.

Engagement That Moved the Engineering

Boston is an engineer who describes himself as a salesman. His peers told him he should turn in his iron ring. He took that as a compliment.

What he understood early in his career is that public opinion starts shaping project outcomes the moment a closure sign goes up. The businesses on 104th Avenue were convenience stops. Drive-by traffic was their entire model. Close the road and the revenue goes with it.

The original construction plan was technically sound. Shut down in March, open in October. Standard approach. The stakeholders, though, were focused on one thing: surviving the summer. The value engineering exercise that followed came directly from that input. It was scoped around their concern, reducing the timeline on the 104th Avenue corridor specifically.

The solution, hydraulic shears mounted on excavators that could cut through a foot and a half of reinforced concrete, sounds absurd. Boston described it as "the Bugs Bunny approach." The project partners, Standard General, Morrison Hershfield (now part of Stantec) and Wayward Construction, delivered the critical intersection ahead of schedule. The APWA recognized the project. The businesses survived.

All of it traces back to the parking lot conversation.

Setting a Boundary to Open a Door

It's worth sitting with Boston's decision to leave that first meeting.

There's a default posture in public sector engagement that says you absorb whatever comes at you. You're there to serve the public. You take the heat. Boston's own project manager told him as much: "We're here for the stakeholder meeting. You're going to have to take it."

Boston overruled him. And it worked because it changed the dynamic in a room that had no interest in dialogue. The two business owners who chased them into the parking lot were the most reasonable voices in the group. They needed the performative anger to clear the room before they could step forward.

This is a pattern worth recognizing. In any stakeholder group, the people you most need to hear from are often the quietest. They won't compete with whoever showed up to grandstand. Creating the conditions for those voices to emerge is part of the job. The traffic modelling matters. So does the room you build for people to talk in.

Austerity Forced Creativity

Boston placed the rat hole project in an interesting economic context. Edmonton was deep in austerity. The provincial government was cutting. The city was following. Projects were utilitarian. Get the job done. Don't spend a dollar you don't have to.

That constraint shaped the engagement. There was no budget for a charm offensive. There was no political appetite for overruns. The value engineering exercise had to deliver a faster timeline within the existing envelope. And it did, because the people closest to the problem were in the room when the decisions got made.

Boston drew a line from that era of austerity to what Edmonton eventually became. The rail yards cleared. MacEwan University went in. The Valley Line LRT followed. A suspension pedestrian bridge at Fort Edmonton Park was the first structure Boston can recall that carried any design ambition. Then the new Walterdale Bridge. Then the LRT bridge. Each one a statement about what kind of city Edmonton intended to be.

"The first fancy bridge that came here, I think, was an awakening," Boston said. "It's like we can be something better than a utilitarian northern city."

The rat hole cleared the ground for that transformation. And the engagement work that made the demolition possible set a precedent the city has been building on since.

What We Took Away

Guy Boston retired from the City of Edmonton having worked on over a hundred infrastructure projects. The rat hole is the one he wore a hat for.

The National Film Board of Canada shot the time-lapse. The concrete keystones stamped "1927" are still embedded in the ground at the site. The project hat lists every partner. And Boston still remembers the exact moment he and Donovan stood on the finished intersection, looked at each other and hugged.

He also remembers receiving the APWA award on September 10, 2001, and choosing the cheaper train to New York the next morning. A decision that, for reasons nobody could have anticipated, saved his life.

Infrastructure stories do this. They start with concrete and end somewhere profoundly human. The rat hole episode of Infrasound is about a tunnel. The lesson is about what happens when you treat communication as a line item with real budget and real accountability. When you let stakeholders shape the engineering solution. When you walk out of a bad room so a better one can form.

The physical thing you build matters. The trust you build while doing it is what determines whether the community is with you when it's time to build the next one.

Referenced in this episode:

Infrasound is produced byreVerb Communications. We tell the stories behind the infrastructure that shapes how communities live, move and grow.

Rachel Rae
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