I think they made the right choice to keep at-grade and the ridership speaks for itself - the system is immensely popular. Comparing the LRT to the feedermain break does have some similarities though, at least superficially. I don't have any insider knowledge, this is just the vibes I get from how transit plans and decisions are made over the years, and lack of visibility into an overall transit plan for downtown.
That
independent report about the feedermain pipe failure spoke to a lot of factors that helped contribute to the failure which I think, Calgary Transit and 7th Avenue / Downtown transit planning share to the long-term capacity, resilency and health of the transit system. Perhaps they aren't as acute or as life-critical as a water pipe but they:
- Distraction with suburban growth and competing priorities - Calgary Transit is classically pulled in a bunch of different directions, where sometimes they focus on growth, sometimes it's maintenance, sometimes it's cutting costs, sometimes it's disruptive political involvement (e.g. the whole Greenline planning process). Lots of effort and funding is given just to get people some basic transit service particularly in rapidly growing suburban areas, little effort is available to optimize and strengthen the existing system. Downtown only periodically receives attention, and long-term major game-changing upgrades are constantly shuffled down the list for new stuff that's easier, cheaper (e.g. bus-only lanes, Stephen Ave subway).
- Unclear decision authorities downtown - who actually decides what happens with downtown streets? Transit has some wins - 7th Avenue signal priority for example - but other decisions happen without fanfare and with transit losing (e.g. removal of the queue-jump bus turn signal onto Centre Street). Just like the water system, it seems like a murky decision process is occurring where operational teams, roads, and random other inputs are shifting and changing things, sometimes with no real transit benefit. It doesn't seem like there's a "big picture" of what transit is trying to do downtown.
- Single point of failure - just like the feedermain, 7th Avenue is the backbone of the system with most of the hundreds of thousands of daily riders interacting with it. When it goes down (car accident, pedestrian collision etc.) the whole system is impacted. It might not be as critical as drinking water and delays are usually fixable faster than a pipe, but it's a common occurrence several times a year to have a total system failure for a few hours due to a downtown issue. Had they built a tunnel on 7th Avenue, it would reduce some risks (less collisions) but still be a single-point of failure. Resilience is an obvious trade-off that was made here, perhaps understandably given how expensive building multiple lines or a tunnel would be.
- Lacking strategic governance to help focus priorities - Transit is at the whims of Council, and competes with other priorities. Just like the water utility, the decisions that happen get rolled-up, consolidated and streamlined to be understandable for a distracted councillor audience. Those decisions and budgets compete with others, so you get weird and someone random levels of Councillor involvement in transit planning decisions, fares and decisions. Meanwhile lots of decisions are happening all the time at the ground-level with little visibility (at least publicly) and are way to technical for a typical council audience to provide regular governance over. This may or may not be a problem, but hard to say without visibility. It's the exact thing that the report found about the water teams which resulted in delaying decisions, optimizing in silos and overall hurting the system because decisions weren't always being made by a technical governance body that could actually help make those strategic trade-off decisions.
That's the big tell for me - it seems like there's no real strategic plan for the future of transit downtown. Yes there's Route Ahead for citywide transit, but it's high-level. Yes, Transit often will mention a Stephen Avenue subway but it's forever 30 years away. What's missing is that next level of detail and public governance - transit-specific reports, statistics, updates, investment plans, strategies etc. - all centralized under a transit-dedicated, publicly visible governance system. Just like the water system, the transit system is too big, complex, technical and important to have the occasional check-in with Council as the main governance process.
When the LRT was proposed they were dealing with the traffic congestion issues of a city of 400,000. We are 1.6 million now, and still planning on using 7th Avenue as the main downtown route for the foreseeable future. Bus lanes are discussed but never formalized. What's the plan here for when we are city of 2 million or maybe 3 million in not too distant future?
www.sprawlcalgary.com
