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: 40 60.6%

  • Re-design the whole system

    Votes: 21 31.8%

  • Cancel it altogether

    Votes: 5 7.6%
  • Total voters
    66
Alberta premier considers north LRT route ahead of key vote on Calgary’s Green Line

Place your bets now: Rather than designing a meaningful regional rail network independent of City LRT, The UCP is going to take this project over and turn it into their own commuter rail line. In doing so they are going to waste the right-of-way on a high floor train and consequently ruin multiple streetscapes, pathways, and sidewalk connections, diminish the feasibility of multiple TOD opportunities, ignore a decade of community voice and consultation, and create a decade-long mess that can't be cleaned.


And the ironic part is that when it's all done we will end up with exactly the same cost, if not more. We'll see half of that cost as capital spending on a more "economical" line and the other half of the cost will just end up atomized and externalized in ways that don't fit on the spreadsheet. Reminiscent of past conservative governments that run a surplus on the books while racking up infrastructure deficits that aren't as easily itemized so they can pat themselves on the back. A narrative trick and nothing more.

Absolute power corrupts absolutely. If Smith wants her commuter rail system so badly she needs to do the leg work and design it.
 
Ramsayite said:
Alberta premier considers north LRT route ahead of key vote on Calgary’s Green Line

Place your bets now: Rather than designing a meaningful regional rail network independent of City LRT, The UCP is going to take this project over and turn it into their own commuter rail line. In doing so they are going to waste the right-of-way on a high floor train and consequently ruin multiple streetscapes, pathways, and sidewalk connections, diminish the feasibility of multiple TOD opportunities, ignore a decade of community voice and consultation, and create a decade-long mess that can't be cleaned.


And the ironic part is that when it's all done we will end up with exactly the same cost, if not more. We'll see half of that cost as capital spending on a more "economical" line and the other half of the cost will just end up atomized and externalized in ways that don't fit on the spreadsheet. Reminiscent of past conservative governments that run a surplus on the books while racking up infrastructure deficits that aren't as easily itemized so they can pat themselves on the back. A narrative trick and nothing more.

Absolute power corrupts absolutely. If Smith wants her commuter rail system so badly she needs to do the leg work and design it.
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Yet Smith's commuter rail line makes sense. It is achievable if LRT utilises the northern freight line to Airdrie and combines the LRT within the configuration. A bit of thought and planning will achieve. Face facts, Alberta severely lacks rail systems.
 
kempes_78 said:
Yet Smith's commuter rail line makes sense. It is achievable if LRT utilises the northern freight line to Airdrie and combines the LRT within the configuration. A bit of thought and planning will achieve. Face facts, Alberta severely lacks rail systems.
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I don't disagree, but hijacking another project in order to deliver that one is pretty spurious.

These are two different conversations and conflating them demonstrates a profound ignorance, in my opinion.

An ignorance that would be very on-brand for this premier
 
Ramsayite said:
I don't disagree, but hijacking another project in order to deliver that one is pretty spurious.

These are two different conversations and conflating them demonstrates a profound ignorance, in my opinion.

An ignorance that would be very on-brand for this pThe Green Lin
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Ramsayite said:
I don't disagree, but hijacking another project in order to deliver that one is pretty spurious.

These are two different conversations and conflating them demonstrates a profound ignorance, in my opinion.

An ignorance that would be very on-brand for this premier
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This Green Line megaproject is following the classic Flyvbjerg's Iron Law of Project Management failure principles as expanded upon by Denicol: underestimating costs; overestimating revenues; undervaluing environmental impact and overvaluing economic development effects.
In addition, is the correct quality of staff and consultants on-board and in place, can major project decisions be made efficiently and effectively, is the project team allowed to function as a united team, is there too much Client interference, is the contractual basis correct, has the design been allowed to develop without interference, is the budget realistically managed both by cost and risk and are stakeholders managed correctly?
As Alberta is a major financier their contract with the City will have weasel-worded clauses that permits them to act as they are.
Calgary is subservient to Alberta and the latter is, obviously, dissatisfied with its performance of the project.
Alberta appears to be jockeying to make a Provincial infrastructure betterment gain utilising a City asset.
The Green Line is following a well-trodden path e.g. the Big Dig, Brandenburg etc.
 
Ramsayite said:
I think the average person has no idea how much work has gone into this right-of-way; how many ARPs, TOD sites, road alignments, streetscape upgrades, bike paths, public amenities, utility upgrades etc are hinged upon it and have been designed alongside. The risk of invalidating all of this associated work needs to be considered as part of the package of opportunity costs here. We are at serious risk of butchering a ton of associated planning work.
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This is a really good point. I'd suggest that BRT would preserve all of those elements while "respecting the work that's been done". While obviously the overall process has been a mess, I'd also say that we may have stumbled into something close to the ideal process for the concept of BRT converting to LRT in a few decades; starting from a mindset of 'just BRT' a lot of these ancillary elements and LRT specific design issues may have only been given minimal consideration. But we've actually made plans with full intention of rails from Shephard to 4th St; it shouldn't take too long to tweak for a few decades of BRT operation, and the eventual conversion would likely be faster/cheaper.

Shephard to 16th was a compromise plan that few people liked and we failed to deliver.
Shephard to Eau Claire was a compromise plan that even fewer people liked and we failed to deliver.
Lynnwood to Eau Clair was a compromise plan that nobody liked, and only some people tolerated as the least of all evils. We'll never even know if it would have been delivered...(and we also kinda know that it couldn't even be delivered due to political risk)

BRT is a compromise plan that few people like and we can absolutely deliver (fairly quickly, too). Overloading busses in the mid-term? Sounds like an absolutely wonderful problem to have! Especially compared to potentially under-utilized trains in the same time frame.


It's a missed opportunity and every month that passes without shovels in the ground for something/anything diminishes Calgary's capacity to deliver any kind of transit infrastructure. Even regular inflation erodes budgets, and there is only so much capacity to plan/execute/integrate projects. We've already burned like 10 years here that we'll never get back. Who knows how this UCP crap will pan out, but continued focus on SELRT means another 7-10 years of tunnel vision to the detriment of everything else...and I doubt we even get to a fully functional SELRT at that point (IMO that only starts to happen at McKenzie Towne)

How nice would it be to draw a MAX Green on the map in ink, and then move on to prioritizing next projects? 6th Ave BRT and/or NCLRT or NCBRT or GL through the core or other line extensions or MRU streetcar or 8th Ave Subway (some functional planning would go a long way to determining if/how the full GL could connect through the core...ie. what if a 'shallow' GL isn't actually incompatible with 8th ave).

I'm pretty sure that if we waved a magic wand and had an SEBRT in progress that our next priority would not be GL tunnel/elevated alignment. I don't think it would be the worst thing if that sat as a 'someday' item for a while, like the 8th Ave subway...
 
Woosh said:
It was a big part of their election platform if I remember.

Alberta sovereignty, axe the tax, and avoid falling victim to the classic Flyvbjerg's Iron Law of Project Management failure principles as expanded upon by Denicol.
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I must have missed that part...though I stopped reading after all that weird stuff obsessing about kids' genitals
 
Ramsayite said:
waste the right-of-way on a high floor train and consequently ruin multiple streetscapes, pathways, and sidewalk connections, diminish the feasibility of multiple TOD opportunities, ignore a decade of community voice and consultation, and create a decade-long mess that can't be cleaned.
Click to expand...
Substantiate how what in reality would be skeletal rapid transit for a city that will be closer to 2M population than 1M on opening day should not be a fast train with scalable capacity and frequency. If it should be, high-floor is superior in every regard plus it forces them to not be able to be lazy and make it a streetcar. Now realigning this to a totally different corridor and/or completely changing the scope is a different story. Permanent and scalable transit seems to really not be what either provinical government or the city government wants. The Green Line should follow the original ROW, should be a high-floor train (thus should be allowed to cross streets but realistically not run on them), and should be built with the intention of serving a city with double the density (near the corridor) and population.

Listen folks, the point is this is a foundational project for the city that is going to be built to possibly serve after we're all dead and gone (look at how old the New York subway is). Forcing people to either go up a ramp to a real train station, or use an escalator, does not ruin a streetscape, whatever that word even mean, more than making them play in traffic to get to a sidewalk in the middle of the road to get on a train that's slower than a Ford Model T. Just imagine that Centre St has the 40km/h "train" in the middle with its "stations" that are built like the average concrete median on a road with the only shelter being plopped down bus shelters that inevitably have been smashed into a million and one pieces, while in the only driving lane, Skip the dishes is stopped in the middle of the road (because they think they own it) to pick up Tim Horton's chili that hasn't even been put in the microwave yet while chaos is ensuing outside. Or imagine the same bus stop "train station" when the plow goes by in the winter and it gets covered in crud. And when people in this future complain when the system is hitting capacity, the government will tell us can't be scaled up anymore because the design inherently hinders any more meaningful expansion. Then people will wonder why billions were spent on something that was a permanent temporary solution. Then we'll be thinking damn we should've taken our time and done it right.

Cities really only get one shot at these sorts of projets and then they have to deal with it and move on to something else. What is happening right now is both the city and provincial governments want to say that they got it built (to their vision), whatever it actually is, for some price that they deemed acceptable, regardless of whether it was worth it, so that when election time comes, they can use it for campaign fodder. It has to be for this reason because otherwise what's the pressing matter that stops them from actually planning for tomorrow so that, whatever dollars they do spend, there is an actual lifelong return on that investement. If the only pressing matter is that Center St BRT is bursting at the seams, well make that better until something can be built that is a scalable permanent solution. Translink runs 1 minute headway BRT, until we're doing that, it's not dire.

Another anecdote as well; after not using the C-Train for a while, I started again. You know something, I really didn't miss it and am really contemplating why I shouldn't just cough up the money in parking and gas to avoid it. Transit effectively doubles the travel time from driving in rushhour traffic all said and done and I never even take the bus. Building our own version of the Valley Line will reinforce that driving is the faster (and more comfortable) option and is worth the added individual cost.

I say this again, the city (and province) needs to take their time, have some vision, and do this right. And while they're at it, gaslight the federal government into being helpful, after all, they are environmentalists, or is that only when it is convenient for them to be?
 
lemongrab said:
I don't think it would be the worst thing if that sat as a 'someday' item for a while, like the 8th Ave subway...
Click to expand...
Careful with this though. Who here honestly thinks the 8th Ave subway is ever going to happen. It's really just been a carrot on a stick.

In reality though, maybe it could have been something that could have been used to help develop the Green Line in one way or another with lower risk. The tunnel sections under city hall were designed for 2 different train lines converging at that one station and splitting again after. Red one way, Green or Blue the other, while the remaining one on 7th.
 
SlippinJimmy said:
Substantiate how what in reality would be skeletal rapid transit for a city that will be closer to 2M population than 1M on opening day should not be a fast train with scalable capacity and frequency. If it should be, high-floor is superior in every regard plus it forces them to not be able to be lazy and make it a streetcar. Now realigning this to a totally different corridor and/or completely changing the scope is a different story. Permanent and scalable transit seems to really not be what either provinical government or the city government wants. The Green Line should follow the original ROW, should be a high-floor train (thus should be allowed to cross streets but realistically not run on them), and should be built with the intention of serving a city with double the density (near the corridor) and population.

Listen folks, the point is this is a foundational project for the city that is going to be built to possibly serve after we're all dead and gone (look at how old the New York subway is). Forcing people to either go up a ramp to a real train station, or use an escalator, does not ruin a streetscape, whatever that word even mean, more than making them play in traffic to get to a sidewalk in the middle of the road to get on a train that's slower than a Ford Model T. Just imagine that Centre St has the 40km/h "train" in the middle with its "stations" that are built like the average concrete median on a road with the only shelter being plopped down bus shelters that inevitably have been smashed into a million and one pieces, while in the only driving lane, Skip the dishes is stopped in the middle of the road (because they think they own it) to pick up Tim Horton's chili that hasn't even been put in the microwave yet while chaos is ensuing outside. Or imagine the same bus stop "train station" when the plow goes by in the winter and it gets covered in crud. And when people in this future complain when the system is hitting capacity, the government will tell us can't be scaled up anymore because the design inherently hinders any more meaningful expansion. Then people will wonder why billions were spent on something that was a permanent temporary solution. Then we'll be thinking damn we should've taken our time and done it right.

Cities really only get one shot at these sorts of projets and then they have to deal with it and move on to something else. What is happening right now is both the city and provincial governments want to say that they got it built (to their vision), whatever it actually is, for some price that they deemed acceptable, regardless of whether it was worth it, so that when election time comes, they can use it for campaign fodder. It has to be for this reason because otherwise what's the pressing matter that stops them from actually planning for tomorrow so that, whatever dollars they do spend, there is an actual lifelong return on that investement. If the only pressing matter is that Center St BRT is bursting at the seams, well make that better until something can be built that is a scalable permanent solution. Translink runs 1 minute headway BRT, until we're doing that, it's not dire.

Another anecdote as well; after not using the C-Train for a while, I started again. You know something, I really didn't miss it and am really contemplating why I shouldn't just cough up the money in parking and gas to avoid it. Transit effectively doubles the travel time from driving in rushhour traffic all said and done and I never even take the bus. Building our own version of the Valley Line will reinforce that driving is the faster (and more comfortable) option and is worth the added individual cost.

I say this again, the city (and province) needs to take their time, have some vision, and do this right. And while they're at it, gaslight the federal government into being helpful, after all, they are environmentalists, or is that only when it is convenient for them to be?
Click to expand...
Substantiating a population growth is done through census records i.e. there is a population projection – a number against a year. This then allows for 5, 10, 20 year etc. plans to meet needs.

LRT routes linking the entire City have already been planned: these reflect a ridership number against a likely population by the years 2050, 2075 etc.

Train speeds reflect ridership usage, capacities and timetables. Platform sizing (street v high floor) is a function of alignment, headway and turn-around times. These are gauged to meet the most suitable rolling stock technology available.

The permanent way siting is the crux of the Green Line planning. There are classic examples of LRT’s worldwide which run both underground and overground: the selection must be a pragmatic one.

TBM's represent value for money solutions with station boxes for on-site construction.
 
SlippinJimmy said:
Careful with this though. Who here honestly thinks the 8th Ave subway is ever going to happen. It's really just been a carrot on a stick.

In reality though, maybe it could have been something that could have been used to help develop the Green Line in one way or another with lower risk. The tunnel sections under city hall were designed for 2 different train lines converging at that one station and splitting again after. Red one way, Green or Blue the other, while the remaining one on 7th.
Click to expand...
Every decision effectively creates 'someday' projects. Tunnel vision on SELRT as a 'maybe-hopefully-kinda-soon' makes everything else a 'someday'.

But the real kicker for me is that even getting to Shephard means that the SELRT is still a 'someday' until we have a budget and timeline to get to the middle of a real population. Use cases vary, but IMO there is a negligible difference between the interim phase of an LRT needing extension vs. a one-seat BRT with slower travel times. Door-to-door they could be pretty competitive for a lot of people (though using a park-n-ride would likely win out for many individuals if we just ignore the externalities of those car trips like we always do).
 
lemongrab said:
Every decision effectively creates 'someday' projects. Tunnel vision on SELRT as a 'maybe-hopefully-kinda-soon' makes everything else a 'someday'.

But the real kicker for me is that even getting to Shephard means that the SELRT is still a 'someday' until we have a budget and timeline to get to the middle of a real population. Use cases vary, but IMO there is a negligible difference between the interim phase of an LRT needing extension vs. a one-seat BRT with slower travel times. Door-to-door they could be pretty competitive for a lot of people (though using a park-n-ride would likely win out for many individuals if we just ignore the externalities of those car trips like we always do).
Click to expand...
8th Avenue tunnel design is well-advanced and fit for purpose. The concern over the tunnel is unfounded as the practice is a skilled art which is best suited for an inner-city LRT system.
 
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