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

One other issue with having the province take over transit projects is that the cities are still responsible for growth planning and their overall transportation network and a large disconnect between the project the province wants to build and the city needs to build can quickly occur. Look at the disaster of a project replacing the Scarborough RT has become in Ontario. It's not exactly something we should be aiming for.
 
outoftheice said:
One other issue with having the province take over transit projects is that the cities are still responsible for growth planning and their overall transportation network and a large disconnect between the project the province wants to build and the city needs to build can quickly occur. Look at the disaster of a project replacing the Scarborough RT has become in Ontario. It's not exactly something we should be aiming for.
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Toronto shouldn't be the goal, they are an example of what not to do. The Provincial / City interplay on the Greenline is an Alberta version, with the added touch of one party not clear they even believe in transit in the first place.

The two places (in Canada) that do it better are Montreal and Vancouver, both have provincial involvement to different degrees. Whether or not provincial involvement plays a positive or negative role is debatable, but their success in executing transit project is less debatable. While neither city has solved North America's weird transit cost escalation problem, where transit projects here cost 2 - 5x more per kilometre than Asia or Europe, they at least get the planning right: building transit where it should go at a high level of quality.
 
CBBarnett said:
Toronto shouldn't be the goal, they are an example of what not to do. The Provincial / City interplay on the Greenline is an Alberta version, with the added touch of one party not clear they even believe in transit in the first place.

The two places (in Canada) that do it better are Montreal and Vancouver, both have provincial involvement to different degrees. Whether or not provincial involvement plays a positive or negative role is debatable, but their success in executing transit project is less debatable. While neither city has solved North America's weird transit cost escalation problem, where transit projects here cost 2 - 5x more per kilometre than Asia or Europe, they at least get the planning right: building transit where it should go at a high level of quality.
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Actually the REM projects, and the Canada Line have both been only slightly above the global median cost.
 
A bit of a long read but a great blog post by Cllr Shane Keating that addresses the recent Green Line controversy and the comments made by Minister Ric McIver. Sounds to me like the City of Calgary has done its homework and is ready to start building if only the province will let them...

 
From the radio interview with the Minister the hold is the city not seeking a fixed price contract and not proceeding simultaneously with both phases. Sigh.
 
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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
darwink said:
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.
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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.
 
JonnyCanuck said:
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.
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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.
 
JonnyCanuck said:
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.
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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.
 
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ByeByeBaby said:
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?
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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.
 
accord1999 said:
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.
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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.
 
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).
 
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