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

Go Elevated or try for Underground?

  • Work with the province and go with the Elevated option

    Votes: 10 76.9%
  • Try another approach and go for Underground option

    Votes: 2 15.4%
  • Cancel it altogether

    Votes: 1 7.7%

  • Total voters
    13
Can anyone explain why the A option 'North' costs are only $6M while the other options are significantly higher?

My guess would be the for A that is simply the LRT OPEX north of 7 ave (ignoring bussing costs further north on Centre)? While the North BRT options probably aren't terribly different from current OPEX costs on those lines? Meanwhile the South LRT side presumably excludes the costs for feeder busses? It feels like a selectively narrow depiction of the options.
Yes, I think that's exactly how they come up with those numbers. But in other tables they still count the North BRT for ridership and catchment areas for A2 despite not including their OpEx costs while C2's number appear to just be for 64th-Shepard. Hence why I mentioned the bias, they had to fiddle with the numbers to make A2 look good.
 
Revamped Green Line website went live today


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Looks neat!

I know this isn't the main source of cost overruns on a project this scale, but the streak of making the roofs of all public buildings weird and curvy for no reason continues. I am starting to think our city's design community has lost the knowledge of how to even build a normal roof on a public building lol. It's like Roman concrete or Damascus steel in the middle ages - a mythical technology from a distant past :)
 
Year after year it becomes clear this thing has been cursed from the get-go.

by the time this line gets full build-out Calgary will probably be 2.5 million people and the low-floor tram design will be way overcapacity

Should just throw in the towel and regroup to build a REM-like light metro instead, even if it can only go to like Inglewood under current funding.
The Red Line will likely need capacity upgrades far earlier than will the Green. It is a major miss not roughing in an underground Red Line interchange station while tunneling for the Green Line.
 
Revamped Green Line website went live today

Not sure if its been specified before. But they've now stated that the tunnel will be built cut and cover between 7th ave and Eau Claire, and from the 4th Street station to the elbow. Curious how much of a disruption that will be to downtown cutting most of the way across north-south wise. The rest of the tunnel will use TBMs.
 
I know this isn't the main source of cost overruns on a project this scale, but the streak of making the roofs of all public buildings weird and curvy for no reason continues. I am starting to think our city's design community has lost the knowledge of how to even build a normal roof on a public building lol. It's like Roman concrete or Damascus steel in the middle ages - a mythical technology from a distant past :)
You're not inspired by their distinctive flowing forms based on a chinook cloud arch?
 
Not sure if its been specified before. But they've now stated that the tunnel will be built cut and cover between 7th ave and Eau Claire, and from the 4th Street station to the elbow. Curious how much of a disruption that will be to downtown cutting most of the way across north-south wise. The rest of the tunnel will use TBMs.
That’s awesome to know. The entry of Centre Street South Station will be right at my building, so I’ll be able to get some pretty wicked birds-eye-view shots of that construction. I was looking forward to getting pics of the tunnel if it was gonna be cut and cover, but the minimal noise will be nice 😊

I will say though, 4th Street Station is looking extra-eeemely under designed. Like… gurl, 2 doors??
 
Holy shite those stations are huge. No wonder there is talk of cost overruns.

Its a bloody low floor tram system lol. If the city wants to cosplay having a metro system maybe they should just - hear me out on this one - build a heavy rail metro.
I agree - from that package that’s released it’s clear the focus has been downtown. The station designs respond to inner/major city contexts.

As soon as we hit Inglewood the attitude is more “don’t worry about it”. Cheap, casual, and no efforts to integrate the lands. Perhaps that’s okay - it’s a hybrid system.

To be more critical, if a project can fund a 1,000 stall park and ride, surely it can at least do some land schemes that build TOD. For a project at such a risk of cost overruns, Weird a parking lot would be in scope for transit project when the lands that homes for transit users live on, is out of scope.
 
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The downtown station entrance buildings look way overbuilt. No wonder costs are out of control on this thing. Can these just be stairs / escalators popping up to the sidewalk with an elevator somewhere?
 
The downtown station entrance buildings look way overbuilt. No wonder costs are out of control on this thing. Can these just be stairs / escalators popping up to the sidewalk with an elevator somewhere?
Exactly, it doesn't have to be fancy. From what I recall when I was in Ottawa a few years back their downtown station entrances looked like an old school subway entrance, and there's nothing wrong with that.

I have to wonder if the skyrocketing costs of certain pieces of public infrastructure are due to overbuilding of components that used to be relatively simple.
 

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