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

[CalgaryTiger]

Going on right now... Lots of maps to click through.

Going until the end of June: The objective of this project is to determine whether existing utilities along the Green Line route need to be relocated or can be protected in place. The utilities are owned by ATCO, ENMAX, The City of Calgary, Bell, TELUS and Shaw/Rogers.

Green Line utility investigations for the southeast

www.calgary.ca

Going until the end of August: Prior to main construction of the Green Line LRT, detailed geotechnical borehole drilling will be completed to test ground conditions at key structure locations. This is the final series of drilling to support detailed design.

Geotechnical Drilling Along the SE Segment

www.calgary.ca

So no visible construction until the fall, at the earliest.

 

[YYCguy]

Going on right now... Lots of maps to click through.

Going until the end of June: The objective of this project is to determine whether existing utilities along the Green Line route need to be relocated or can be protected in place. The utilities are owned by ATCO, ENMAX, The City of Calgary, Bell, TELUS and Shaw/Rogers.

Green Line utility investigations for the southeast

www.calgary.ca

Going until the end of August: Prior to main construction of the Green Line LRT, detailed geotechnical borehole drilling will be completed to test ground conditions at key structure locations. This is the final series of drilling to support detailed design.

Geotechnical Drilling Along the SE Segment

www.calgary.ca

So no visible construction until the fall, at the earliest.

If the utilities investigations and the ground sampling find that additional work needs to done or altered designs are needed, will this produce a further delay or has there been additional time already built in to the current timelines to deal with that work?

 

[CalgaryTiger]

If the utilities investigations and the ground sampling find that additional work needs to done or altered designs are needed, will this produce a further delay or has there been additional time already built in to the current timelines to deal with that work?

Other work would likely progress in other areas. That's the advantage to it being such a large project spread out over the quadrant.

 

[Zoom]

That’s correct, for now at least the construction will be from Victoria Park to Shepherd.

I thought the current phase of construction was Victoria Park to Millican/Ogden?

 

[CalgaryTiger]

I thought the current phase of construction was Victoria Park to Millican/Ogden?

I'm so jealous that you were not aware of the debacle that led to Shepard to Victoria Park being the first phase. I need to be more offline...

 

[accord1999]

Going on right now... Lots of maps to click through.

Going until the end of June: The objective of this project is to determine whether existing utilities along the Green Line route need to be relocated or can be protected in place. The utilities are owned by ATCO, ENMAX, The City of Calgary, Bell, TELUS and Shaw/Rogers.

Green Line utility investigations for the southeast

www.calgary.ca

What did the Green Line do between 2017-2024? Even if it's just a 3 month project, how are they still investigating utilities on the section that was supposed to be the most shovel-ready and reserved for a future LRT?

 

[CalgaryTiger]

Up until a couple months ago, I'm not sure any Provincial or Federal funds had gone towards the project. It was a purely City project. They seem to have prioritized downtown utilities, which was a year+ long project. Being that this is only 3 months, they likely put it off as they thought moving utilities downtown was the better use of time and resources. (Narrator: It was not a better use of time or resources since the work will need to be undone for a 10 Ave elevated line).

 

[trtcttc]

Not familiar with building infrastructure, but is this how it typically works? Local governments starts relocating utilities, building new walls and bridges before the project has provincial and federal funds? We've built two LRTs, the city definitely hired from the outside for this, yet the project seemed to have proceeded in a such a weird fashion.

 

[CBBarnett]

Not familiar with building infrastructure, but is this how it typically works? Local governments starts relocating utilities, building new walls and bridges before the project has provincial and federal funds? We've built two LRTs, the city definitely hired from the outside for this, yet the project seemed to have proceeded in a such a weird fashion.

Someone could probably have written a really niche and monthly blog for 2 decades on the Green Line projects to track all the plot twists and turns.

TL/DR: I think the "green line" project was first identified in the 1990s as a transit corridor, but then got serious in the 2010s when the real action started. Since the project got reimagined, sliced, diced, funded, defunded, reorganized a few times over a decade. Lots of politics.

I don't think it's followed the same delivery style as the 2000s and older Red and Blue projects, but the extended timelines/level of scope changes/political interventions seems similar to many other transit projects these days in Canada.

Obviously, lots of room for improvement in how we build and deliver transit that's getting increasing attention so that's positive.

 

[trtcttc]

Someone could probably have written a really niche and monthly blog for 2 decades on the Green Line projects to track all the plot twists and turns.

TL/DR: I think the "green line" project was first identified in the 1990s as a transit corridor, but then got serious in the 2010s when the real action started. Since the project got reimagined, sliced, diced, funded, defunded, reorganized a few times over a decade. Lots of politics.

I don't think it's followed the same delivery style as the 2000s and older Red and Blue projects, but the extended timelines/level of scope changes/political interventions seems similar to many other transit projects these days in Canada.

Obviously, lots of room for improvement in how we build and deliver transit that's getting increasing attention so that's positive.

I didn't live here during those times, but from the new Ontario Line in Toronto, previously called the Downtown Relief line, there was a lot of line drawn on the map, and design work (soil sampling, utility locate, etc.) but no construction was happening until all levels of government finalized and funded the project, then construction started full scale across the line. It seems weird that the city built new rail tracks for CP, bridges, demolished buildings, all without a finalized plan or funds to build the thing. Maybe that's just the AB gov not putting up the money? But I would've thought through progressive provincial elections with Calgary being the battleground (especially the South), it could've been leveraged in some way.

 

[CalgaryTiger]

The thing is, I don't think anything other than enabling work was actually approved until the end of this January so there was nothing to be leveraged. If I'm the province I'm not contributing to something that hasn't been approved. I'm not actually sure what the City was doing going ahead spending a billion dollars on all that work on something that very well could've been nothing? I know some of that money went to the design of the SE segment but still... The landfills that were remediated and all the work around Ogden would've needed to be done but not necessarily.

It is jarring how bad we got at LRT in what seems like such a short amount of time. The Blue Line west extension wasn't that long ago.

 

[whatchyyc]

This presentation is a good watch on the history of LRT delivery in Calgary:

 

[MichaelS]

Someone could probably have written a really niche and monthly blog for 2 decades on the Green Line projects to track all the plot twists and turns.

I'm hoping @accord1999 puts out a book eventually on this project. That poster seems to have followed the twists and turns pretty closely.

 

[lemongrab]

I didn't live here during those times, but from the new Ontario Line in Toronto, previously called the Downtown Relief line, there was a lot of line drawn on the map, and design work (soil sampling, utility locate, etc.) but no construction was happening until all levels of government finalized and funded the project, then construction started full scale across the line. It seems weird that the city built new rail tracks for CP, bridges, demolished buildings, all without a finalized plan or funds to build the thing. Maybe that's just the AB gov not putting up the money? But I would've thought through progressive provincial elections with Calgary being the battleground (especially the South), it could've been leveraged in some way.

A lot of this project was bass ackwards, but by the 2010s it was clear that some sort of transit project would go through that SE ROW, be it BRT or LRT. So there was little chance that anything from the Elbow River south would turn out to be wasteful or unnecessary.

OTOH, the downtown section was anything but clear. While I think this is probably an overstatement, one could argue that it almost seemed intentional to green light certain items (rolling stock, utilities relocation, MSF location, etc) in order to lock in a path dependency on this heavily debated alignment. It's probably more fair to say that when these items came up for decision, the fact that they locked-in a path dependency and precluded alternative options was viewed as a positive.

Tbf locking in a major path dependency isn't always a bad thing in the early phases of a complex project - even if it turns out to be a sub-optimal decision - because you have to start somewhere to build momentum and facilitate other decisions...but you don't really want to do it where the wrong choice represents an existential threat to the entire project.

 

[CalgaryTiger]

This presentation is a good watch on the history of LRT delivery in Calgary:

There was a hint at getting back to a consistent cadence of extensions. I hope that's the case. At this point we can probably spend 50 years adding on to the Green Line incrementally. The Blue and Red are closer to the end of their lines but still have a decade plus of extensions ahead of them. The thing about these extensions is you're not waiting for the city to grow to do them, you could do them now and almost have as much ridership as if you waited.

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to passenger rail too... For those who are interested there is a virtual session on Calgary and Area coming up on June 24, they say they're going to share an update on the development of the Passenger Rail Master Plan.

Passenger rail engagement

People living in Alberta are sharing their thoughts on the development of the Passenger Rail Master Plan.

www.alberta.ca

This is not the same as the sessions from March and April earlier this Spring, this is something new. On the website they say those earlier session were to "help crystallize the vision of passenger rail in the province". These new sessions are "an update on the development of the Passenger Rail Master Plan." So, not a final report but hopefully something newsworthy comes out of it. Probably not as why wouldn't they just announce something if there was something to announce.