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

[outoftheice]

A fixed price contract will easily blow the budget because then the contractor assumes 100% of the project risk and will charge a hefty risk premium as a result. If the province is holding up because of a fixed price contract they can easily solve it by plowing in the extra cash needed to cover the risk premium.

 

[JonnyCanuck]

Rick McIver was on QR77 yesterday with Danielle Smith. He stated that the province has always been in favour of building Ph 1 from the SE with a terminus somewhere downtown. What they are now objecting to funding, is Ph 2 from downtown, under/over the river and ending at 16 Ave N. They don't believe that phase is financially viable given the huge cost of tunneling or bridging. The ridership on Ph 2 terminating at 16 Ave/downtown is expected to be extremely low for obvious reasons. It is only if and when Ph 3, north of 16 Ave is built that the numbers start to look better but that is only after several more billions are spent.

I really think given current circumstances, the city needs to re-think transit paths. Does it make sense that every transit line in the city has to run through downtown. Will downtown be the business mecca in the future that it was in the past? Can a transit line servicing north central Calgary still work if it links with the existing NW or NE lines? Sure, it would not be a direct link to downtown but you could still get there without having to take a connecting bus. It would just take longer.

 

[darwink]

If the province is good with ending it at Eau Claire, say so, cut the losses, and everyone can claim victory (because the real issues are not with the river crossing or service up to 16th Ave).

but who cares. The tunnel will take so long to build the over the river part can be contracted later and completed concurrently.

 

[UrbanWarrior]

If they are cutting out the crossing (which I support), they need to extend the southern terminus to at least McKenzie Towne Station, though hopefully Auburn Bay Station would be possible.

 

[JonnyCanuck]

If the province is good with ending it at Eau Claire, say so, cut the losses, and everyone can claim victory (because the real issues are not with the river crossing or service up to 16th Ave).

but who cares. The tunnel will take so long to build the over the river part can be contracted later and completed concurrently.

It sounds to me like the province wants to take a north central line directly to and from downtown, out of scope. That would make the need for an Eau Claire station, or any more downtown stations redundant. I say just focus on the SE line from downtown (i.e Victoria Park or East Village) as far south as they can go within budget. That is the more critical need right now.

 

[darwink]

It sounds to me like the province wants to take a north central line directly to and from downtown, out of scope. That would make the need for an Eau Claire station, or any more downtown stations redundant. I say just focus on the SE line from downtown (i.e Victoria Park or East Village) as far south as they can go within budget. That is the more critical need right now.

Due to the relevance to the eau claire redevelopment and to have all the tunnel works crossing major avenues, I’d rather it go early. Plus without eau claire you need a crossover either before or after the station necessitating more works.

to me since the problem is the sand canyon, you keepthe south scope (or north scope) as is and you have even more built in contingency. Once the tunnel/station box downtown is completed you can reallocate to go further south. You’d either make that an option within the contract or have a second contract.

 

[ByeByeBaby]

Rick McIver was on QR77 yesterday with Danielle Smith. He stated that the province has always been in favour of building Ph 1 from the SE with a terminus somewhere downtown. What they are now objecting to funding, is Ph 2 from downtown, under/over the river and ending at 16 Ave N. They don't believe that phase is financially viable given the huge cost of tunneling or bridging. The ridership on Ph 2 terminating at 16 Ave/downtown is expected to be extremely low for obvious reasons. It is only if and when Ph 3, north of 16 Ave is built that the numbers start to look better but that is only after several more billions are spent.

I really think given current circumstances, the city needs to re-think transit paths. Does it make sense that every transit line in the city has to run through downtown. Will downtown be the business mecca in the future that it was in the past? Can a transit line servicing north central Calgary still work if it links with the existing NW or NE lines? Sure, it would not be a direct link to downtown but you could still get there without having to take a connecting bus. It would just take longer.

It's becoming a pretty transparent political attempt to prevent high quality transit being built in the mixed-income, mixed-race, multicultural north central, in favour of the affluent, white, UCP-voting southeast. Remind me again where Rick McIver's riding is again?

If the city is going to re-think transit paths, then the north part of the Green line should be moved to the top of the list; it will have higher ridership than the southeast, especially from day one, and the strongest argument for the southeast was it was shovel-ready. Since the province has no qualms whatsoever about delaying the project over and over, the shovel-readiness seems to no longer matter. A train barn can be built in Aurora as easily as in Shepard; there's enough preliminary design work for the 16th to 7 Ave N section to start as quickly there as anywhere, and the design is a hell of a lot quicker when you're just building at grade and don't need to investigate foundations and drill cores and so on.

The strongest signal from the province if you pretend it's not about anything "political" are that they are worried about project uncertainty; the highest uncertainty is tunneling, particularly in the downtown. The only part of the project that actually requires expensive tunneling rather than lane closures which are practically free is getting the train under the CP rail track to serve the southeast. If it's cost certainty and cheapness the province is after, going over the Centre St bridge to an at-grade terminal or loop is the clear winner.

Does it make sense that the busiest bus route in the city -- by a country mile -- should be ignored in favour of a BRT route that can be served with 20 person community shuttles? If the jobs aren't in downtown, where will they be and how will people get there without connecting? Why can't the southeast go to Somerset or Anderson? We could use the savings to establish high-quality east-west BRTs.

 

[accord1999]

It's becoming a pretty transparent political attempt to prevent high quality transit being built in the mixed-income, mixed-race, multicultural north central, in favour of the affluent, white, UCP-voting southeast. Remind me again where Rick McIver's riding is again?

But you can't blame Alberta solely for this, the City made its own independent decision to pick the SE in 2017 while ignoring all of the same reasons you listed. And given how little work has been done in the NC (no preliminary plan that was promised for 2019, few if any land acquisitions) I doubt the City will ever willingly change their mind without a lot of people at the Green Line team being replaced.

 

[Joborule]

But you can't blame Alberta solely for this, the City made its own independent decision to pick the SE in 2017 while ignoring all of the same reasons you listed. And given how little work has been done in the NC (no preliminary plan that was promised for 2019, few if any land acquisitions) I doubt the City will ever willingly change their mind without a lot of people at the Green Line team being replaced.

Quite frankly, North Calgary is really getting the short end of the stick by the line not going north first since that's the busiest part of the city without transit currently. The SE line won't even go far enough still to be beside the communities that it actually services; whereas the north line - right as it crosses the river - it's usage/value increases more and more with each km.

The city hasn't really done the best job at this since it doesn't have the ROW and functional design for the north done yet, when ideally it should've been done by now, but to be fair, it hasn't even been a decade yet when the city decided to change there mind on where the NCLRT would go, and funding for the greenline wasn't suppose to be here already. The federal government backing up the brinks truck for this has extremely accelerated this process; skipping the whole SETWAY/BRT upgrades phase to go straight to LRT. So the hiccups that are occurring currently (political or not) I suppose shouldn't really be surprising. So as long construction starts next year one way or the other, that's a big victory for transit since according to the Route Ahead plan, green line would be ahead of schedule.

 

[darwink]

I maintain that right now the NC has adequate access. Until recently, the NC was not considered for investment even in the medium term (which is now by 2050!). Because restructuring the bus network could drastically increase capacity and reduce overloads. That we chose to not force people to transfer to achieve this is a political decision.

The SE has been considered for higher order transit since at least 1995. Probably earlier considering the corridor provisions in McKenzie. It is just that the red line and the downtown interline reached capacity earlier than anticipated, so the city started planning to connect the SE corridor directly instead of as a red line spur.

As for the problem we are in right now. I think we were collectively hasty, and our politicians more so, in rejecting keeping an elevated alignment in play. We narrowed our decision tree too early, and for reasons that don't really matter (pleas by the downtown association and tower owners).

 

[accord1999]

I maintain that right now the NC has adequate access. Until recently, the NC was not considered for investment even in the medium term (which is now by 2050!). Because restructuring the bus network could drastically increase capacity and reduce overloads. That we chose to not force people to transfer to achieve this is a political decision.

Do you have an example of what they could do. All I can think is that they create express route for the north of Beddington Trail communities that directly go to downtown using Deerfoot to bypass Centre Street altogether. Otherwise, the pitch for the Green Line as a LRT seems to indicate that they could not increase bus capacity to meet expected future demand.

As for the problem we are in right now. I think we were collectively hasty, and our politicians more so, in rejecting keeping an elevated alignment in play. We narrowed our decision tree too early, and for reasons that don't really matter (pleas by the downtown association and tower owners).

The planners really hated that option from the start, giving it a score of 0 and supposedly not even cheap, unlike the nearly as bad Option E that the Green Line is now forced to use because it's run out of money.

 

[darwink]

Their evaluation was wrong. It might not be cheap, but it doesn’t have the same risk, and it would be cheaper. There was also the other side of the analysis included in financial sustainability: an assumption that an elevated line would destroy the property value of commercial towers. TBH that has already happened all on its own, and I think that isn’t an accurate analysis.

 

[CBBarnett]

This youtube channel does good summary work on transit projects across Canada. I think this Canada Line video is relevant now that the whole project is in jeopardy once again:

In summary, the argument is that Canada Line is a great model to follow, simply by focusing on very good service quality and cutting costs on everything else possible, notably the station size and the train capacity. The goal should be to be a overcrowded success, rather than a future-proofed mega train that looks expensive for what you get.

Back to the Greenline, the problem is only a small amount about transit technology and route design cultural biases that the video references. Either an elevated, tunneled or at-grade system could work fine if designed right - and I think how they finalized the route was the right balance given the biases in this city to like long trains and assume all at-grade trains will look like 36 Street NE rather than any tram network in France. I think there is some real value in exploring the light metro style of design, but there are other designs that solve our transit problems if we want them to be solved and can get over ourselves. It's not always clear that is the case (e.g. every transit project requires right-of-way expansion because the goal is actually to preserve automotive capacity in the corridor).

But the bigger problem is not a design one. Far more consequential is the political problem of having a sizeable faction of the province's political system not understanding the value of cities or public transit altogether, especially in a changing global economy. To appease this intractable group - which thinks they are arguing about design but really don't understand why we would build a train in the first place and are happy to through as much fear, uncertainty and doubt at the project until it collapses under it's own contradictions - requires design compromises that mean the project won't work anyways.

Appeasing the groups of politicians and rich Calgarians rallying against transit means that whatever will be built will be cheap in all the wrong ways, and expensive in all the wrong ways. It's a mistake we have made before.

 

[ByeByeBaby]

I maintain that right now the NC has adequate access. Until recently, the NC was not considered for investment even in the medium term (which is now by 2050!). Because restructuring the bus network could drastically increase capacity and reduce overloads. That we chose to not force people to transfer to achieve this is a political decision.

The SE has been considered for higher order transit since at least 1995. Probably earlier considering the corridor provisions in McKenzie. It is just that the red line and the downtown interline reached capacity earlier than anticipated, so the city started planning to connect the SE corridor directly instead of as a red line spur.

The investment schedule you're talking about excluded the Green Line and extensions; if the NC wasn't considered for investment even in the medium term, neither was the SE.

But gosh, the SE has had higher order transit planned for 25 years! Oh look, here's that 53 year old CALTS plan:

I don't think that who was promised transit first is actually a very good argument in principle, but it really isn't a strong argument for the SE.

 

[darwink]

Yeah. The NE didn’t exist. Neither did the SE. The deep SE didn’t have a reason to exist until Lougheed screwed with Deerfoot in the 70s/80s. The SW ended at 26th Ave and 37th street. Plus it was all heavy rail. Stations at the Holy Cross Hospital, two stations for the two halves of pre merger Chinook, an extra station at Briar Hill/Banff Trail and between Chinook and Heritage. All grade spectated. Wild times.