Green Line LRT | ?m | ?s | Calgary Transit
- Thread starter Surrealplaces
- Start date
trtcttc
Senior Member
Clearer Green Line cost to come in June: CEO
Sounds like we'll find out soon how much it'll be and how much more it'll be to cross the bow.
Sounds like we'll find out soon how much it'll be and how much more it'll be to cross the bow.
CalgaryTiger
Senior Member
Saved 400M already. This may be an odd idea but to save money could you hold on statins south of Douglas Dale and just build the track and maintenance facility? I think that's only one station that's at the maintenance facility so maybe the savings is small? May you do Douglas Dale too?
ahuch
Active Member
Stations are a lot more peanuts when you start talking low floor LRV, especially one like Douglas Glen where the parking lots already all built out for park and ride. You'd just be cannibalizing ridership at that point.
trtcttc
Senior Member
I hope they can get funding to get across the Bow, which then makes it easier to justify extending it North. But if they don't, chances are the North extension will be dead for at least a while. I'm kind of glad the province didn't give the city the funding for the BRT North (half a billion?!) and hopefully put more of that towards the actual line.
Joborule
Active Member
I don't even see the benefit of the 301 BRT Max upgrades. The 301 and Route 3 seem to operate fine right now, and have rapid frequency throughout the whole day. Unless it's to build a transitway to setup the foundation of the NC Line (like how SETWAY was suppose to be foundational work for the SE Leg before the jump to the Green Line), seems like it would be better to put that money to other bus routes instead, or to other LRT lines to improve service throughout the city.
CBBarnett
Senior Member
I can see some value as Route 3/301 is the busiest combo route by far in the city. Lots of improvements to do:
- Consolidate some bus stops and ensure they have actual priority (no bays or merging)
- Allow for all-door boarding and implement app scanning at backdoors.
- Repurpose lanes from general traffic to permanent bus-only lanes where appropriate.
- Upgrade some pavement, sidewalks and crosswalks to facilitate better boarding and connection to stops.
The city's strategy so far to speed up the route 3/301 has been queue jump lanes. Basically there's a signal phase that allows buses to go straight forward from the right turn lane, while other traffic waits. It's not always as cheap as you might think - one such improvement on Centre St required property acquisition to enlarge the intersection, and involved building a bunch of retaining walls on the shortened lots.
trtcttc
Senior Member
That’s just ridiculous. Unless this work is needed for the actual line as well? Why spend so much for the marginal time saved when putting more of that money towards the actual Green Line?
CBBarnett
Senior Member
I mean that's the whole problem - the cost of the project is because we aren't actually prioritizing transit. The only reason this costs so much and we need expropriation is that we want to maintain priority of car capacity along the corridor.
Yes, on occasion a bus will get a head start by a few seconds. But most of the time that bus will immediately stop in a bus bay on the other side of the intersection and then be forced to merge back into that same traffic.
Why should the transit budget pay for this? It does almost nothing for transit and costs are substantial because we must maintain the competitive advantage of cars on a corridor where the majority of people ride transit. Makes no sense.
whatchyyc
Active Member
I noticed that of nearly every queue jump in the city, the project included maintaining or increasing vehicle capacity so much so that the vast majority of the time bus drivers don't even bother waiting in the queue jump lane
Transit Apologist
New Member
The 301 is the oldest rapid transit-branded bus route in the system, with its first day being August 30 2004. It’s also easily the most successful one: in a FOIP a friend did for 2023 ridership data the 301 averaged 6109 riders per day, vs 1544 for the 300, 2405 for the 302 and 2847 for the MAX Purple (the only MAX route that even comes close is the Orange with 5285). Therefore, 6109 riders are putting up with dirty, graffitied 20-year old red-painted versions of regular shelters at every stop. Even if 301 MAX-ification turned out to be nothing more than a rebrand and new shelters it would be an improvement IMO. As a frequent user of North Pointe and the 301 in particular I’m fine with the SE Green being built first, and I’m not happy about a fairly simple improvement suddenly requiring $500 million. However, I can’t help being a little jealous & frustrated watching every other rapid transit route have improvements completed or on the way while the most-used one only has an outdated brand and a single queue jump to show for itself.
whatchyyc
Active Member
I would rather that we maybe throw in another $50-100M to MAXify the 301. The $500M is definitely for land acquisition and other work to create a convertible corridor because even for only 2 general traffic lanes there's not enough space. IMO there's no point to build a convertible BRT because it would just reach failure even faster than SETWAY would have and we decided to skip that too
accord1999
Active Member
Even more annoying for NC Calgary is that the SETWAY was skipped because they said BRT wasn't adequate for the Centre Street N corridor in the medium term. And now, it probably won't even have that in the long term.
I suspect the $500M ask is a bone to throw to NC Calgary for when the Bow River crossing gets canceled and whatever money remains is used to extend the SE LRT. But like so much of the NC Green Line segment, the BRT will never get any follow through and is forgotten in the future.
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CBBarnett
Senior Member
Within reading the rest of the report for additional context, seems like a weird conclusion - I think I am missing the assumptions that were used here. The biggest part that's missing is what do they mean by "transitway"?
Two possible definitions:
- If "transitway" means full dedicated lanes, while preserving all car capacity - yeah that's prohibitively disruptive, expensive and a terrible idea. Glad it was rejected
- If "transitway" means reallocated existing road space to increase quality and capacity of transit service - that's affordable and won't disrupt the neighbourhood at all.
But there's also a larger point here in the subtext that seems to be ignored - clearly, bus corridors with far higher capacity, ridership and frequency than Centre Street exist all over, without dedicated lanes and aren't "hampering" the ability of these corridors to develop into Main Streets. If anything it's actually reverse - you need a successful Main Street and density to run the transit you want as it's where the riders and density are.
Almost every urban corridor in Toronto and Vancouver are examples, such as this one on West 10th in Vancouver towards UBC. That stop has like 30 (!) buses/hour most of the day and yet through some sort of magic they didn't tear down the neighbourhood with a bunch of property acquisitions and there are no lay-bys to slow busses down (and trigger more expropriation). The most expensive thing is the actual service to run buses that frequently:
All this is to say, transit on Centre Street (or any main bus corridor) can be substantially better without widening the road and wasting a ton of money to keep cars (the competition) running faster than ever on the same corridor. The trick is to not see this as a major engineering capital project with a fixed requirement to not impact car capacity. It's a small amount of capital, a better focus on operations, and a far more aggressive land use development approach to boost transit's usefulness.