Green Line LRT | ?m | ?s | Calgary Transit

Go Elevated or try for Underground?

  • Work with the province and go with the Elevated option

    Votes: 51 76.1%

  • Try another approach and go for Underground option

    Votes: 13 19.4%

  • Cancel it altogether

    Votes: 1 1.5%

  • Go with a BRT solution

    Votes: 2 3.0%
  • Total voters
    67
I'm not sure I understand why we don't just run it at grade? It's not like there's a shortage of roadways.

Of course the best long-term solution is to just underground it, but its risky, expensive, and investing in long-term public infrastructure is for some reason not a priority in Alberta.
 
Why not tunnelled?
 
Not sure if this has been mentioned in here before, so apologies if this has already been discussed.

Just a general comment I have rather than anything informative. Had a random thought of the Green Line's 7 Avenue station. Since that would be essentially be the central transfer point for all three of the LRT lines in the future (including Red Line Stephen Ave Subway), it made me think that westbound transfers would have to be from 1st Street Station, which is a block away.

I thought it would be ideal to make 3rd Street Station a double sided station to make transfers more direct, and wonder if there was any consideration to do so. Turns out from this report, there was/is when they redid the 7th Ave stations.


7AveLRT.png


7AveLRT2.png


I wonder when construction for the Green Line in downtown starts, if building this WB 3rd Street Station would be included.
 
I believe the issue was that they didn’t believe buses couldn’t pass each other reliably on the station block. I am not sure how many buses are left on 7th though.
 
darwink said:
I believe the issue was that they didn’t believe buses couldn’t pass each other reliably on the station block. I am not sure how many buses are left on 7th though.
Click to expand...
None. Calgary Transit (based on what I know) has an initiative to not run buses down 7th Ave anymore. All the routes that did use it have been rerouted through the downtown area, and cross the tracks instead - primarily at 1st St SW.
 
UrbanWarrior said:
Too bad. It's better to build for the future rather than running scared from building an effective system.
Click to expand...

I completely agree, we should focus on better long-term investments. Unfortunately it's still Alberta and that's the argument the people opposing the tunnels, including the UCP, are using.
 
Yeah I've seen that render as far back as 2017. Definitely not new and wondering why it's spurring conversation after all this time. It's not revolutionary at all... if anything it's extremely basic and unexciting.
 
Sure it's not new, but it's sparking a discussion around eliminating lanes in the CBD. Here's the traffic volume per day in 2019:

Traffic Flow.PNG



Notice how most streets are between 15k-25k vehicles per day. Here's some capacity figures from traffic engineering:

capacity.PNG

It shows that our streets downtown are largely too wide for the capacity they see. Also note the capacity figures are 2-way and many streets downtown are 1-way.

TLDR: eliminate as many lanes as necessary to make the green line happen, we have the space.
 
Theres no need for 9th Avenue to be 4-5 Lanes the entire length of the core, same goes for 6th as well. It never hurts eliminating a lane or two on roads that are under utilized to improve the realm for pedestrians and street level activities. Further more, where the station at 7th Avenue and 2nd Street is supposed to go it would hurt no one if the closed that section of 2nd street to build a decent square around the entrance to the station considering that this station would probably become a small transit hub.

 
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