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

Go Elevated or try for Underground?

  • Work with the province and go with the Elevated option

    Votes: 57 72.2%

  • Try another approach and go for Underground option

    Votes: 19 24.1%

  • Cancel it altogether

    Votes: 1 1.3%

  • Go with a BRT solution

    Votes: 2 2.5%
  • Total voters
    79
CBBarnett said:
That stretch of Centre has everything:
  • 5m wide outside lanes, but also hilariously inconsistent and randomly changing in width block-by-block.
  • Bus bays that force endless merging in-and-out of traffic flow by countless busses.
  • Too many bus stops overall too.
  • Generally poor condition everything due to 15 years of uncertainty due to on-and-off-again Green Line alignments freezing the area from much investment to clean some of this stuff up.
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Great analysis, as always. But this had me cracking up.
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badc0ffee said:
Province still full steam ahead on elevated downtown Green Line alignment
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This is the song that never ends. Guess we'll see what a new council looks like and what the study says.

It will take until at least the end of this year to receive the study's results, Gondek said.

Also this...

A new provincial mandate letter also called for Dreeshen to finalize and implement Alberta's passenger rail strategy and to complete Calgary's Blue Line LRT extension to 88 Avenue N.E. by 2030.

Five more years for 1KM, we have to do better than that.
 
CalgaryTiger said:
Five more years for 1KM, we have to do better than that.
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How it integrates with a potential people mover, or in the interim, dedicated bus flyovers from airport rail, needs to getc close to functional planning. This government with such ambition, I think across files they're realizing that just doing stuff is pretty hard unless you have a budget to match your ambition. If your general response to costs that don't match 2004 expectations is 'more study will find a better option/reduce risk', you end up in the same trap as the city did with the greenline in the first place.
 
darwink said:
How it integrates with a potential people mover, or in the interim, dedicated bus flyovers from airport rail, needs to getc close to functional planning. This government with such ambition, I think across files they're realizing that just doing stuff is pretty hard unless you have a budget to match your ambition. If your general response to costs that don't match 2004 expectations is 'more study will find a better option/reduce risk', you end up in the same trap as the city did with the greenline in the first place.
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They are planning to go from 88 to the airport? Is the plan to tunnel under the runway? That's going to be $$$.
 
kora said:
Provincial claims that an elevated line saves money are simplistic and probably incorrect when taking into account projected loss of property values. Why isn't there a more holistic analysis of value?
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Incentives not being aligned. property values primarily fund municipal budgets (portion goes to provincial education), while savings from construction reduces provincial expenditures. A better comparison would be a functioning N-S Green Line, would that reduce car volumes on Deerfoot so we don't need spend hundreds of millions adding lanes and shifting exits.

Because Calgary has a relatively good downtown road network (compared to Toronto and Vancouver), could they save cost/speed up the underground work if they closed the road completely? I'd rather a full closure for 5 years than 10 years of partial closures, keeping lanes open during rush hour, etc.
 
trtcttc said:
Incentives not being aligned. property values primarily fund municipal budgets (portion goes to provincial education), while savings from construction reduces provincial expenditures. A better comparison would be a functioning N-S Green Line, would that reduce car volumes on Deerfoot so we don't need spend hundreds of millions adding lanes and shifting exits.

Because Calgary has a relatively good downtown road network (compared to Toronto and Vancouver), could they save cost/speed up the underground work if they closed the road completely? I'd rather a full closure for 5 years than 10 years of partial closures, keeping lanes open during rush hour, etc.
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If a provincial project impacts a City, there is an ethical obligation to consider City concerns. If the City pays for part of it, there is even more duty to consider City concerns like property taxes.
 
They finally published the executive summary of the airport connection study. Sorry if it was already posted here; it looks like the PDF was on Calgary's website since May, but it wasn't actually linked on the airport connection study webpage until today (prior to that, the latest updated on that page was from January), so I dunno how visible it was before.
 
badc0ffee said:
Sounds like the people mover will actually be a diesel shuttle a la UP Express? I'm kind of disappointed.
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I like the idea of simplifying the network for interoperability. It makes it more realistic to me to have a rolling stock that can be used for Regional and Airport. It also leaves the door open to using High-Speed between Edmonton and Calgary and on to Banff (if you need to do your own right-of-way might as well build it right). I would be fine to also have the same rail type and rolling stock operate Calgary to Banff, since it could do a milk run. It just isn't as exciting.
 
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