Search results

The people involved have probably become too committed to it. I'd expect if Green Line was estimated correctly at $8.5B+ for 40 km in 2015, they would have killed it then but after spending so much time and political capital on it, they just can't back away unless there's one last massive budget...

There's a bit of a cryptic statement regarding that: https://livewirecalgary.com/2021/06/02/green-line-to-go-ahead-with-a-two-phased-construction-process/

Richard White published the opinion, but it was written by Neil McKendrick who worked at Calgary Transit for many years in a number of key roles. McKendrick critiques the current Green Line on quantitative measures that have become worse and worse as the Green Line continues to go over-budget...

Check the Green Line presentation for the Transportation and Transit Committee meeting from June 2017, specifically attachments #1 and #3. https://pub-calgary.escribemeetings.com/Meeting.aspx?Id=cbf8472a-2b7f-420b-9ac7-e3a308214b1b&Agenda=PostMinutes&lang=English# They are big and CPU...

I think the Province in general over the years has supported transit projects pretty well. Even for the Green Line, the City's share of funding ($50M/year for capital, $24M/year for financing) came from education property tax room vacated by the Province. Along with the direct contribution to...

And I'm sure most councillors have transit projects in their wards that they would like to get funding for as well. But Gondek must be frustrated at the slow pace of Stage 1 and the RouteAhead team continuing to ignore the request to rank future stages of the Green Line.

You're correct. That section of Centre Street was always planned to be one lane each way. This is what they're envisioning for it: It makes sense when LRT has been built to a useful terminus and replaced many dozen buses per hour as well as car traffic. But I hate to see how it works when the...

For the part from 16th Avenue North to the original terminus in Panorama Hills. I used the $200M/km figure based on two primary sources. The May 2017 meeting when the details of Stage 1 was presented, a question was asked about costs for extensions to 96th Avenue and North Pointe. Additional...

Agreed, there's been a lot of focus on the downtown problems, but the NC section has also seen a major escalation in costs. Out of personal curiosity, I read the reports that informed the selection of Centre Street for the NC alignment and they were estimating $50M/km for an at-grade line...

The big report from December 2015 does suggest strongly that the Green Line was to be done in single stage. Note that even if the full funding wasn't available, the "core" of the Green Line was Beddington-Shepard. Nobody had considered something as short as the eventual Stage 1 because 16th Ave...

It might be politicized as of late, but ultimately the Green Line's problems comes from it going over-budget so much and predate the UCP government. If the Green Line was anywhere close to the original 40 km plan (even Beddington-Shepard) and where construction had already started by 2020 or...

No change compared to previous budget:

It may be ugly, but it still scored higher than the current option of the new bridge. Centre Street got two checks for Fiscal Capacity and Sustainable Development, while the new bridge (plus running at grade south of 16th Ave) option only got one for Fiscal Capacity. Both got strikes for...

Using the Centre Street bridge was one of the options looked at in the past, but in 2016 when money was no concern, they went with the deep tunnel. In 2019 when it became impossible to even reach Shepard with $5B, they had to resort to the second worst option (only ahead of elevated through...

Eyeballing the elevations and distances from plans presented in the 2015 "North Central LRT Corridor Study", may be 3.5%-4% depending on how long the bridge is.

IMO, I think they are getting these optimistic numbers because they need it to be that high in order to help justify the Green Line in general. Even with 11K at 16th, projected ridership is already pretty mediocre (55-65K/day) given the $5B capital and >$40M operating costs.

Do you have an example of what they could do. All I can think is that they create express route for the north of Beddington Trail communities that directly go to downtown using Deerfoot to bypass Centre Street altogether. Otherwise, the pitch for the Green Line as a LRT seems to indicate that...

But you can't blame Alberta solely for this, the City made its own independent decision to pick the SE in 2017 while ignoring all of the same reasons you listed. And given how little work has been done in the NC (no preliminary plan that was promised for 2019, few if any land acquisitions) I...

I think pessimism is warranted since the last last time there was good news for the Green Line was when it was originally approved in 2015 as a <$5B for a very useful 40 km to be finished by 2024. It's been downhill since then as the line exploded in costs, forcing the cut to a much less useful...

Yeah, I suspect that the Max improvements to the 301 is all that the NC can hope to expect for the next 25-30 years, even though the supposed capacity limitations of BRT for Centre Street N was a big reason why the Green Line needed to skip directly to LRT.