Speaking of Shepard, there's an article today in the Herald again questioning the value of the Green Line Stage 1 given its current costs and terminal points with comments from Jim Gray and Neil McKendrick. McKendrick has some harsh words concerning ridership:I like that they put Shepard on it because whose to say where the other end of the line will stop... Haha
McKendrick agrees and adds that not many people will voluntarily get off the Bus Rapid Transit bus they use now — Route 302 — and transfer off of it to ride the rails into downtown.
The City, however, predicts that Phase 1 will serve 65,000 people per day. McKendrick counters those are “pie in the sky” numbers, “not based on any true analysis.”
“That means an additional 48,000 riders per day will start taking the LRT even though the LRT serves no new destinations,” said McKendrick.
“Those ridership projections were developed on the premise that downtown employment-related travel would continue to rise as it had been doing prior to the downturn in 2015,” he explained.
But, if you build it, surely the people will start to use it, especially if they can experience a significant time savings in their commute?
“Not if the line ends at Shepherd,” says McKendrick. The LRT line, he says, is too short to make up for the time lost by transferring.
A Calgary Transit staffer, who said they must remain anonymous for fear of losing their job, agrees. “Nobody in all of Calgary Transit really believes that Phase 1 will attract even one-third of what’s projected — nobody.”
Not something I can back with any sort of statistics, but a lot of people that I know (in general conversation) will consider taking a train but the second you talk about a bus they're hopping in their car. A dedicated transit way would probably fix a lot of that with a reliable schedule and increased frequency, but buses in this city right now have a serious image problem.Speaking of Shepard, there's an article today in the Herald again questioning the value of the Green Line Stage 1 given its current costs and terminal points with comments from Jim Gray and Neil McKendrick. McKendrick has some harsh words concerning ridership:
The article also throws in a statement from supposedly a Calgary Transit staffer:
Corbella: Is the Green Line LRT on the right track? Many say it's past time to pivot on costly rail line
"When you look back when we built the south line, northwest and the northeast lines, the buses that served those corridors were operating nose to tail, jam packed w…calgaryherald.com
People in North America often say that but most of the new LRT lines in the US haven't grown overall transit ridership. In some cases, the cannibalization of bus services (due to needing to pay for the expensive trains) or re-routing them to feed train stations means overall ridership went down even before COVID hit.Not something I can back with any sort of statistics, but a lot of people that I know (in general conversation) will consider taking a train but the second you talk about a bus they're hopping in their car. A dedicated transit way would probably fix a lot of that with a reliable schedule and increased frequency, but buses in this city right now have a serious image problem.
“When you look back when we built the south line, northwest and the northeast lines, the buses that served those corridors were operating nose to tail, jam-packed with people all day long. So the next logical thing to do is to put in LRT, which is a much higher capacity and provides a time advantage,” explains McKendrick.
“That condition doesn’t exist in the southeast. Those buses are some of the poorest ridden services in the city.”
These guys love to beat this drum, every so often someone listens; today that person was Corbella. Best to know your sources (from the article):Speaking of Shepard, there's an article today in the Herald again questioning the value of the Green Line Stage 1 given its current costs and terminal points with comments from Jim Gray and Neil McKendrick. McKendrick has some harsh words concerning ridership:
The article also throws in a statement from supposedly a Calgary Transit staffer:
Corbella: Is the Green Line LRT on the right track? Many say it's past time to pivot on costly rail line
"When you look back when we built the south line, northwest and the northeast lines, the buses that served those corridors were operating nose to tail, jam packed w…calgaryherald.com
Be VERY CAREFUL with this line of thinking. $700 million will seem cheap if it ends up costing $10 billion to make only Eau Claire to Shepard work (just a wild ass guess from me, we have no idea how much until the agreement with the chosen RFP partner is released in about a year I think).Yes, it's not going as far as we'd like south or north, but it was the dragging out of the process that did that. I would argue the green line is by far the most complicated line the city has ever built. It has cost a lot of money, but imagine spending 700M and getting nothing from it.
Yes, it's not going as far as we'd like south or north, but it was the dragging out of the process that did that. I would argue the green line is by far the most complicated line the city has ever built. It has cost a lot of money, but imagine spending 700M and getting nothing from it.
Secondly, I've finally found the person responsible for the current transit system. Hello Neil Mckendrick, I'd like a word about your not so fine work over the past couple decades.
The question in piece was about what do you get for 700M and what else it could've bought. That's spilt milk, you can't recover that money and do those other things. So my point is more imagine getting nothing, no green line and none of what they mention. As you point out, maybe we should imagine how that feels if this thing is that far gone.Be VERY CAREFUL with this line of thinking. $700 million will seem cheap if it ends up costing $10 billion to make only Eau Claire to Shepard work (just a wild ass guess from me, we have no idea how much until the agreement with the chosen RFP partner is released in about a year I think).
"We have to spend an additional $4 billion more than we thought, because we already spent $700 million on this thing...." is not a great way to prioritize limited capital resources.
Actual Green Line project risks aside.... I patiently await the monthly critique Herald piece on city and provincial road and highway expansion planning by Herald columnists and this strangely visible and politically connected cabal of random bored retired engineers "led by the inexhaustible dean of Calgary philanthropists and business leaders, Jim Gray" as Corbella impartially describes.
On the Green Line, surely if everything has changed and no one commutes anymore, we don't need any highways and the ones we have don't need to be as wide right? We should scrap half the lanes on all the arterials in the core tomorrow - they are no longer needed apparently! Starting next week, we should expect an endless series of Herald attack pieces slamming the city and province for failing to build more economical cycle-tracks fast enough on all these obsolete major roads everywhere that no one needs, right?
Where were all these prestigious engineers complaining about the cost and overbuilding on the ring road project before it was built? I don't recall 10 years of monthly Herald columns supporting the speculations of groups of concerned engineers that critiqued the unsubstantiated traffic projections and opaque project financials. The ring road project only cost about ~$10B and counting - not that we know or ever will know the exact number of course.
It wasn't dragging out the process that caused, it was the Green Line team massively under-estimating costs and over-promising how ready it was. The original plan was to start construction in 2018 and finish all 40 km in 2024. What dragged it out was the Green Line team having to revise things to meet realistic cost estimates and turnover of top management.
It may not be the romanticized European tram system that urbanists fantasize about, but in terms of ridership/capital costs it's the best LRT system in North America. It's too bad McKendrick wasn't in charge during the initial days of the Green Line, we likely have had reasonable estimates of costs from the beginning and therefore made informed choices on where the Green Line should go, rather than scrambling for the last 6 years trying to build anything.