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

Go Elevated or try for Underground?

  • Work with the province and go with the Elevated option

    Votes: 49 79.0%

  • Try another approach and go for Underground option

    Votes: 9 14.5%

  • Cancel it altogether

    Votes: 1 1.6%

  • Go with a BRT solution

    Votes: 3 4.8%
  • Total voters
    62
So the tunnel will now be nixxed for sure? Is that basically the conclusion?
 
Silence&Motion said:
There was a time when building Calgary up into a model city was a centrepiece of the Alberta Conservative agenda, and part of what made the PCs such a big tent, dominant party. Remember when Ralph Klein was the champion of the LRT network?

Now that UCP is a rural grievance party focused primarily on identity politics and scraping off just enough suburban and ex-urban Calgarians to maintain a slight seat advantage in the legislature. They have basically ceded most of Calgary to the NDP, which they can do so long as all the ridings outside Calgary, Edmonton and Lethbridge remain in lockstep with the party.
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I agree. I tend to lean right fiscally and think that robust transit investment is fully compatible with conservatism. It's far more cost effective than building more freeways and interchanges, allows people the opportunity to downsize to one or even no car, thus helping lower and middle income earners save money, and is certainly a more efficient way to lower carbon emissions than EV subsidies.

Unfortunately, as you've alluded to, the modern day UCP seems more interested in petty culture war fights than in actually building any sort of big tent.
 
darwink said:
The downtown tunnel ate the rest of the project.

The downtown tunnel is now gone.

Where the project ends up now is a total guess.

Buying Aspen Square, and making it grand central, solves many problems. The can even make it no tunnel, even stay on the south side of the CPR, and still be mostly functional, without breaking the Red and Blue lines (unlike the Steve Allen group proposal).
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Or, as you're advocating, make it elevated through downtown. Considering it's a low floor train, and it's going to be bridged over the Bow for the northern crossing, I don't think elevated is a bad trade off if it could contribute to significant savings.
 
Joborule said:
I don't think elevated is a bad trade off if it could contribute to significant savings.
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It would. Don't need to put a single pile into the bad soil if it really that bad, don't need to ever have empty volume if it is only mostly bad. Now it will create other problems, but whatever.

Here is the profile with the structures needed to clear in purple (CPR also needs 12 or 14m rail to structure iirc):
1725471724348.png
 
Definitely would be good to revisit the idea of elevated. It would solve a lot of headaches and get this through DT without intersecting the Blue/Red line.
 
How about a line from Seton to Chinook Centre. Skip the downtown. Not ideal by any means. I wonder how ridership would look given that people would have to transfer downtown.
 
Someone remind me what the CP clearance has to be? Doesn't really matter as the line would have to be even higher than that to clear the city parkade entrance off 9th Ave and the +15 that's there. I also don't know how you can support an elevated line with all that in the way. I'm not worried about the rest of the +15s along 2 Street, you can integrate them into an elevated line. The issue with elevated is where do you cross the CP tracks? Very few places can accommodate the turn radius required coupled with the need to cross the tracks. Every option comes with its own alignment affects, it's actually why I think they stick with what they have.
 
CalgaryTiger said:
Someone remind me what the CP clearance has to be? Doesn't really matter as the line would have to be even higher than that to clear the city parkade entrance off 9th Ave and the +15 that's there. I also don't know how you can support an elevated line with all that in the way. I'm not worried about the rest of the +15s along 2 Street, you can integrate them into an elevated line. The issue with elevated is where do you cross the CP tracks? Very few places can accommodate the turn radius required coupled with the need to cross the tracks. Every option comes with its own alignment affects, it's actually why I think they stick with what they have.
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If can do the turn slowly, can turn just fine. All a matter of trade offs. It is all a matter of optimization. Digging a big hole turns out after 7, 8 years of trying to mitigate it, turns out to be an awful nut to crack.
 
CalgaryTiger said:
Then isn't the answer 1 Street? Elevating between between first streets on 11 Ave, turning north through the parking lot at 11 Ave and going over the tracks? 2 Street was fine when going underground but, to me, looks impossible to make work elevated.
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The elevation over the CPR (line between the two purple bits on the profile) is similar to what's needed over the spiral ramp.
1725475336066.png
 

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thecivilengineer said:
Elevated is best idea, but they spent money on relocating utilities .
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Be careful of the sunk cost fallacy. Also, this highlights the poor procurement strategy the City implemented. Spent a lot of money "preparing for the project" before they even confirmed if they could actually do the project or not.
 
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