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

Best direction for the Green line at this point?

  • Go ahead with the current option of Eau Claire to Lynbrook and phase in extensions.

    Votes: 41 59.4%

  • Re-design the whole system

    Votes: 22 31.9%

  • Cancel it altogether

    Votes: 6 8.7%
  • Total voters
    69
darwink said:
There is no reason to wait on the SE, because by the time the NC is ready there will BE MORE MONEY.
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There will be more money, but will there be political will to direct most (and possibly all of it) again back to the Green Line in 2032, 2033 when nearly an entire generation of attention and transit funding (and bad news consuming political capital) has already been spent on it? I'd expect the other areas of the city will be demanding funding for CTrain extensions and BRTs, plus the desire for a train to YYC.

And that assumes the planners will actually do any work on the North alignment and acquire properties this time. The #1 enemy of the NC LRT has always been the Green Line team, who have time and again promised to deliver the functional and detailed design for it and proceed to do nothing, and delaying the plans long enough they no longer even have to provide updates because most people have forgotten about it. The NC alignment was supposed to be maybe 1.5-2.5 years behind the SE in development work, not decades. At this rate, it probably won't be ready in 2032 either.

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outoftheice said:
Somewhere along the way, people started to treat Stage 1 as if it needed to be a complete line in and of itself with no future expansion when in reality the entire point of it was to solve the 3 biggest technical complexities that have been a barrier to Green Line construction for the last 30 years. With these complexities solved, we can get back to more affordable, bite sized expansion of the network. Stage 1 was always going to be the most expensive part of Green Line. Despite the fact that that has been proven accurate in spades, moving forward with Stage 1 still makes a lot of sense.
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But IMO that blame lies directly on the Green Line and City because of their initial optimistic promises and their poor management of expectations over time. With full funding of $4.6B the Green Line was supposed to be constructed essentially in one stage and even when troubles mounted they were still making optimistic comments about finding cost savings and new funding to build more than the 2017 Stage 1 plan.

The previous lines were constructed more piece-meal, but they also had far less funding. The core of the Red and NE lines were built for around $1B inflation adjusted. Given the Green Line is consistently cited as the single most expensive public project in Calgary's history, it's hard for Calgarians to wrap their head around how there is so much money being spent for only half of a line, there's nothing to compare it to. And if the river crossing is cut, bite sized expansions are no longer enough to get the Green Line back to even just the minimal "core" (Beddington-Shepard) that was supposedly needed for a successful Green Line.
 
darwink said:
There is no reason to wait on the SE, because by the time the NC is ready there will BE MORE MONEY.

Then, we can spend both monies and get both.
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Hopefully this works. But as others have mentioned there is still plenty of risk here. At this point it's kinda hard to imagine extra funding coming towards this perceived white elephant before it is up and running. And even then, will it be there if its anything short of a smashing success? If the consensus among NextDoor and Facebook groups of politically engaged boomers (Gen X by the time it opens!) becomes 'most of the trains are empty', will the political will be there?

Ooph...what does that do to the timeline for making this thing really useful? It's unprecedented for Calgary to have a project go this over schedule and presumably over budget...do you have examples from elsewhere in the world where a controversial project has gotten additional funding before it proved itself?

We can all acknowledge that the SE is served poorly by transit...but lots of people still choose to live there! It seems likely that they may be more difficult to convert than the average Calgarian. I'd venture there is probably a lower proportion of downtown workers living there, too. This latest batch of Deerfoot "upgrades" should be done by the end of 2025...which probably won't be a sustainable improvement, but who knows? The best thing they could do is to schedule a full repaving of Deerfoot South for the months after the GL opens.

There are reasonable explanations for how and why we got here, but that doesn't mean it can't be a boondoggle.
 
lemongrab said:
At this point it's kinda hard to imagine extra funding coming towards this perceived white elephant before it is up and running.
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That is up to us really. Money will flow. Do we build political will by successfully getting into implementation or do we destroy what is left by pulling a plug.

If we hear the project is massively over budget at the end of the month there are relatively easy solutions. How much needs to be done changes on how much money needs to be trimmed. Changing the stations in the Beltline and possibly downtown will be the name of the game. Whether this would become a design sprint after the meeting, or it will be presented as a fait accompli for council to approve, I am not sure
 
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accord1999 said:
The core of the Red and NE lines were built for around $1B inflation adjusted
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IIRC the West LRT was close to $1.5 billion when all the ink dried, without accounting for LRVs, incremental maintenance capacity, and the like. A cool $195 million per km.

Run that through the construction cost index from 2009 to today, and you have $258 million per km.

It doesn't really make sense that parts of the city were confident for the Green Line that they could deliver 44 km for around $100 million a km a decade later.

And yet here it is, in a report from 2015:
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There’s no question the city and Green Line team screwed up when they initially budgeted, but at this point even with inflated costs, we need to build it.
We’re a wealthy city of 1.5 million that’s growing rapidly, and densifying heavily in the areas that this line would serve.
For me, I’m not worried about an inflated cost, give me the realistic cost and get the thing built at least to Eau Claire. I’m confident that after we’ll finish the NCLRT later.
 
outoftheice said:
A good review on how we got to where we. The unresolved question, of course, is where do we go from here?

livewirecalgary.com

Few concrete details when Calgary locked in $4.5 billion Green Line deal back in 2015

Back in 2015, nine years ago today, then-federal Minister of Defence and Multiculturalism, Jason Kenney, glowed during the announcement of $1.53 billion in Government of Canada cash from the Public…
livewirecalgary.com livewirecalgary.com
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The decisions on this project seems so misaligned. They made it low-floor, which should lower infrastructure cost and make the stations smaller/more integrated with the street. Then they decide to tunnel the downtown? Cities are not building overground subways, but this isn't a subway, it's a low floor LRT. If cities like Toronto and London can run at-grade streetcar/LRT networks, I fail to see why we must tunnel it. If anything, I'd prefer they build the street level, barebones Green Line, then spend the money to tunnel 7th Ave if congestion is really becoming a problem (I suspect it won't be, our streets are wide enough that losing a couple lanes for an LRT won't make a difference).
 
trtcttc said:
The decisions on this project seems so misaligned. They made it low-floor, which should lower infrastructure cost and make the stations smaller/more integrated with the street. Then they decide to tunnel the downtown? Cities are not building overground subways, but this isn't a subway, it's a low floor LRT. If cities like Toronto and London can run at-grade streetcar/LRT networks, I fail to see why we must tunnel it. If anything, I'd prefer they build the street level, barebones Green Line, then spend the money to tunnel 7th Ave if congestion is really becoming a problem (I suspect it won't be, our streets are wide enough that losing a couple lanes for an LRT won't make a difference).
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The team of councillors that went to seattle liked the urban section there. Now seattle is studying removing the urban section to increase speeds and reduce conflicts.

Aesthetics over performance, north amercian transit was ever thus.
 
trtcttc said:
The decisions on this project seems so misaligned. They made it low-floor, which should lower infrastructure cost and make the stations smaller/more integrated with the street. Then they decide to tunnel the downtown? Cities are not building overground subways, but this isn't a subway, it's a low floor LRT. If cities like Toronto and London can run at-grade streetcar/LRT networks, I fail to see why we must tunnel it. If anything, I'd prefer they build the street level, barebones Green Line, then spend the money to tunnel 7th Ave if congestion is really becoming a problem (I suspect it won't be, our streets are wide enough that losing a couple lanes for an LRT won't make a difference).
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Ideally yes. But it's advantageous to future proof our transit system for the next 100 years. I think a surface station at Eau Claire and a surface station at 4th street S.E. would be a decent compromise.

Construction should have commenced in 2018. It's very disappointing that it's taken this long. Build phase 1 from Shepard -> 4th street it's the easiest and cheapest section to build.
 
Red Star said:
Ideally yes. But it's advantageous to future proof our transit system for the next 100 years. I think a surface station at Eau Claire and a surface station at 4th street S.E. would be a decent compromise.

Construction should have commenced in 2018. It's very disappointing that it's taken this long. Build phase 1 from Shepard -> 4th street it's the easiest and cheapest section to build.
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4th St SE is more than a kilometre from the office core. More than half a km to other LRT. Even the minimal ridership this would generate would overburden the free fare zone, making service much worse for all three lines.

There is a reason this was rejected time and time again. It is only ‘close’ in a car.
 
Red Star said:
Ideally yes. But it's advantageous to future proof our transit system for the next 100 years. I think a surface station at Eau Claire and a surface station at 4th street S.E. would be a decent compromise.

Construction should have commenced in 2018. It's very disappointing that it's taken this long. Build phase 1 from Shepard -> 4th street it's the easiest and cheapest section to build.
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I hear this future proofing argument a lot and I think it partially comes from 7th ave not being tunneled. Edmonton chose to tunnel the central city portion, and sure they future proofed, but it cost them significant transit expansion and arguably the tunneling wasn't even necessary.

This is also a low floor LRT, and one of its core advantages is street level boarding that doesn't require significant station infrastructure, with the downside being lower passenger limits which in reality it does not come close to the capacity limits because people congregate by the doors since they don't want to be stuck in that narrow walkway between wheel wells. They just rebuilt Victoria Park station because they wanted the integrated street level experience instead of a disconnected station. Now, to save 2 lanes of traffic, we're building a disconnected underground station for the Green Line Stampede Park/Event Centre station and risking the entire viability of the project for these two lanes of roadway.
 
trtcttc said:
Now, to save 2 lanes of traffic, we're building a disconnected underground station for the Green Line Stampede Park/Event Centre station and risking the entire viability of the project for these two lanes of roadway.
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To save the crossing of the Macleod couplet.
 
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