Calgary Regional Rail Transit

[KrisYYC]

Massively improving local and regional transit should take priority over HSR by a huge margin. I'm an airline employee, so I've travelled a lot and have used many HSR networks. They are great, but the local buildout needs to happen first and in a big way. HSR in Alberta would be cool and all, getting to Edmonton in under 90 minutes. But it would be pointless if you have to drive or it takes you two bus transfers and over 90 minutes just to get to the HSR station in the first place.

 

[lemongrab]

Kinda long-winded and no earth shattering information, but a there's a bit of background on the Liricon/Parks Canada relationship and you can get a sense of what the proponents are like (IMO Adam is pretty reasonable; Jan seems out of touch)

Not sure if link is working - its vimeo dot com /1178952484/5bc00fb9df

 

[CalgaryTiger]

A couple weeks with no announcement has me wondering if this is the week?

 

[CBBarnett]

Massively improving local and regional transit should take priority over HSR by a huge margin. I'm an airline employee, so I've travelled a lot and have used many HSR networks. They are great, but the local buildout needs to happen first and in a big way. HSR in Alberta would be cool and all, getting to Edmonton in under 90 minutes. But it would be pointless if you have to drive or it takes you two bus transfers and over 90 minutes just to get to the HSR station in the first place.

Intercity rail v. local transit in Alberta is a "both/and" type problem where we so easily fall into the classic "either/or" scarcity trap where before we build anything, arbitrarily reducing ambition and applying resource constraints that are only hypothetical.

I've heard this argument many times before about how intercity rail won't be useful due to all these bus transfers and transit issues on both ends, but respectfully, these are always strawman arguments. If local transit was so poor how does both Calgary and Edmonton have 300,000+ daily ridership each? Calgary Transit and Edmonton each have current system ridership about equal to Boston (~4.5M metro). Each city have the system ridership about 75% of Chicago (~8.5M metro). How much more local ridership do we need to prove the system is useful to a lot of people?

Of course there's a million ways to improve and extend the local systems. We could "prioritize" building more local/regional transit in the cities and then hope to connect them one day. But, if we follow that plan, this will result in no intercity rail ever being built.

We need to change the mindset from scarcity to one of more ambition. Calgary and Edmonton could easily be metros of 3M+ in a few decades. We need all of it - local, regional and intercity options. If anything, the lowest hanging fruit in the public transit picture in Alberta is the intercity public transit options as it literally doesn't exist today. Having intercity connections probably is the step-change improvement that would truly transform these reasonably successful local networks into a really efficient regional/provincial system.

 

[trtcttc]

Intercity rail v. local transit in Alberta is a "both/and" type problem where we so easily fall into the classic "either/or" scarcity trap where before we build anything, arbitrarily reducing ambition and applying resource constraints that are only hypothetical.

I've heard this argument many times before about how intercity rail won't be useful due to all these bus transfers and transit issues on both ends, but respectfully, these are always strawman arguments. If local transit was so poor how does both Calgary and Edmonton have 300,000+ daily ridership each? Calgary Transit and Edmonton each have current system ridership about equal to Boston (~4.5M metro). Each city have the system ridership about 75% of Chicago (~8.5M metro). How much more local ridership do we need to prove the system is useful to a lot of people?

Of course there's a million ways to improve and extend the local systems. We could "prioritize" building more local/regional transit in the cities and then hope to connect them one day. But, if we follow that plan, this will result in no intercity rail ever being built.

We need to change the mindset from scarcity to one of more ambition. Calgary and Edmonton could easily be metros of 3M+ in a few decades. We need all of it - local, regional and intercity options. If anything, the lowest hanging fruit in the public transit picture in Alberta is the intercity public transit options as it literally doesn't exist today. Having intercity connections probably is the step-change improvement that would truly transform these reasonably successful local networks into a really efficient regional/provincial system.

I fall into this trap as well but the people that say there's not good connections in the city are usually the ones that don't transit. I lived in Toronto on primarily transit for a few years. While Toronto transit is probably better than Calgary, the rail network actually covers very little of the city. For example, the Toronto Zoo is much harder to get to than the Calgary Zoo via transit. But I just went to things that were connected to transit. And yes some things were difficult to get to so I just did less of those things. Now I own a vehicle and primarily drive, so I don't really care if my doctor, sports, activities are close to transit. So if I suddenly have to only use transit, it'd very inconvenient, because I haven't structured my life around transit access. If someone were to visit Edmonton or Calgary as a tourist, most major attractions are connected to the LRT or MAX that I don't think it's really that big a deal.

 

[darwink]

There is also the trap that spending equals cost.

Municipal transit recovers 0% of its capital cost (since most at least Calgary LRT trips involve a bus transfer), but high speed rail could recover a significant amount of its capital cost.