O-tac
Active Member
Wow no surprise there at all. The UCP is making the old PC’s look like the picture of transparency and good governance.
Green Line LRT | ?m | ?s | Calgary Transit
- Thread starter Surrealplaces
- Start date
O-tac
Active Member
It kind of surprises me that Nenshi had an assistant there at all. Was this just to keep tabs on his opponents or is he walking a fine line? Was that person the one who leaked this to the media? Also, why in the hell do these rich old bastards need donations to support their 'work'? Is that just entry into the influence club? Or is it leverage to use as blackmail against any city staff who pay it?
O-tac
Active Member
We need to push back against these UCP lackeys. I think the next time they decide to hijack a council meeting we should have a contingent there to call them out. They need to be identified for what they truly are and the media needs to stop calling them "Respected businessmen" or "concerned citizens". They are UCP operatives in yet another Kenney backed attack on democracy.
Silence&Motion
Senior Member
If there aren't shovels in the ground by 2023, the NDP can and should blame the UCP and use the Greenline as a major wedge issue in the next election - similar to how they used the Cancer Centre in 2015. Unambiguous support for "getting it done" is a winning issue in this city.
zagox
Active Member
I think it was smart on Nenshi's part. Send a junior staffer so you don't give them too much respect, and then leak the contents of the meeting to make them look bad.
UrbanWarrior
Senior Member
This is Quebecois levels of corruption. Jesus christ, I'm getting really sick of this government and their constant bungling of the economy and integral infrastructure projects and subsequent nullification of tens of thousands of possible jobs.
accord1999
Active Member
If the Green Line does get delayed, or stopped, it won't be because of people like Jim Gray or the UCP Government, it'll be because of the continuing terrible management of the Green Line project. The Green Line Technical and Risk Committee just reported the following:
The Green Line is only so vulnerable because it's gone massively over-budget and where even the more supposedly more "manageable" Stage 1 has pretty much used up all contingencies. Without the group led by Gray calling out the downtown issues last summer, would the Green Line team even admitted the problems then and provided some public engagement? Or would they have just hid the bad news until they had unilaterally decided on a solution, just like they unilaterally decided to cut the North Central LRT in 2017 when they realized the full Green Line would cost $3+B more than the 2015 estimates.
The Green Line is only so vulnerable because it's gone massively over-budget and where even the more supposedly more "manageable" Stage 1 has pretty much used up all contingencies. Without the group led by Gray calling out the downtown issues last summer, would the Green Line team even admitted the problems then and provided some public engagement? Or would they have just hid the bad news until they had unilaterally decided on a solution, just like they unilaterally decided to cut the North Central LRT in 2017 when they realized the full Green Line would cost $3+B more than the 2015 estimates.
Silence&Motion
Senior Member
Show me a transit line in North America that hasn't gone wildly over budget. If the Green Line doesn't get built, it will be because Conservative establishment in this city set it up for failure. The only way a transit line gets built is if the political leadership makes it a priority and puts up the money to get it done. The UCP and their ultra-rich cronies really don't give a sh*t about public transit and they are actively working to kill the line in a way where they can pin the blame on city staff (because the line itself is wildly popular). Where was the concern with financial risk when this same group of oligarchs were pushing Calgary to host the Olympics?
accord1999
Active Member
And common consequences of these projects going over-budget has been cutting back on the usefulness of route, and/or the reduction of other transit services to pay for them. You can see that in the numerous projects in the US where LRT is built but overall ridership declines (as bus service is sacrificed to pay for the shiny new train) and farebox recovery is a tiny fraction of the operating costs. Or for that matter, the truncation of the Green Line to point where it doesn't really solve any of the transportation problems it was originally designed for and will have a large $40M net operating cost that the City will need to find in future budgets.
Even for the latest crisis with the downtown tunnel, that occurred barely two months after the UCP won the 2019 election. And they certainly had nothing to do with the explosion in cost from the 2015 estimate of $4.5-$5B to $8+B by May 2017.
If anything, the city and provincial levels of government had too little oversight and gave far too much leeway to the Green Line team.
Which they did, given the Green Line is by far the most expensive project in the City of Calgary's history.
The City should take the opportunity to reboot the Green Line and use the UCP Government as cover. It's clear that the $8-$9B Green Line version 1 is far too expensive to build and they should go back and see what the most useful line is possible for the $4.5-$5B they do have.
O-tac
Active Member
You have clearly never driven Deerfoot in the far SE before in rush hour. What exactly is your idea of a better value line? An entire quadrant of the city has been built with the promise of future lrt service. Quarry Park and Seton have been planned as essentially greenfield TOD's. The North Central line is also of great importance. Unfortunately the SE is by far the most isolated quadrant of the city and requires better transit connectivity.
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accord1999
Active Member
I wouldn't necessarily expect the Green Line to replace that many car trips; their estimate is about the equivalent of 6000 cars.
And is that more important than resolving the overcrowded buses of the Centre Street N corrdor?
Greg Morrow suggested splitting the lines:
Another option is to go back to high-floor trains, and have the NC swing west and come into downtown using the same bridge as the NW line. From that direction, 7th Avenue has plenty of capacity if train scheduling is adjusted.
Other options would be to go proper BRT for both. After all, the primary reason the Green Line upgraded to LRT was because of Centre Street N.
These are better options than building a line that still needs billions of dollar to be useful, with an era of austerity with the UCP Government and a big chunk of City finances already tied up for the next 25 years just to pay for Stage 1.
And that's the problem, the Green Line tried to do too much and the City badly underestimated the costs and the Green Line is now gutted to where it's of very limited benefit given its high capital and operating costs. And a lot of the Deep SE's problem is simple geography, it is just very far from downtown. Nobody would think of building an LRT in the near future to Livingston/Carrington but it's actually no farther to downtown by track than Shepard.
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darwink
Senior Member
The problem with every solution is that they all require a downtown tunnel (or removing significant downtown road capacity) to not be phenomenally bad. To solve the problem takes money. There isn’t a magical solution that is good, on the 2012 value budget, and has a long length. We can only have two.
Colinfill
Active Member
Isn't the 7th avenue transit corridor already full with just the red and blue line? Imagine adding the green line through it as well. We would just be delaying the inevitable, which is a tunnel through downtown.
accord1999
Active Member
It's full in the East direction with the very high ridership South and high ridership NE. But from the other direction, you just have the high ridership NW and medium ridership West. With careful scheduling of the trains, there should be enough capacity for one more high ridership line (NC) coming in from the west. Instead of the Nose Creek alignment shown in the figure (which was always flawed since in entered downtown from the far busier direction), something like a 10th Ave W alignment. The peak hour ridership of the NC, NW and W nearly match the peak hour ridership of the S and NE.
UrbanWarrior
Senior Member
That is the worst of all possible options short of not building it at all. Sorry if that's somehow offensive.... but holy good god that would be just terrible. Three lines using 7 Avenue. I'd actually probably rather them just not building it for decades until they can smarten the f*ck up and build it correctly. We need to stop building as a city of 750 000 and start acting like the city of 2 million that we will be by the late 2020s/early 2030s.