darwink
Senior Member
A small one at fares envisioned by studies that only considered the relatively high fare model. likely 10 years+ ago now, it predicted 3000 person of incremental growth.
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Calgary Regional Rail Transit
- Thread starter Oddball
- Start date
Dārayavauš
Active Member
I don’t think the train would go to Cochrane itself, it would be a stop on the train on the Banff-Calgary corridor, which has a different purpose than commuter rail.
Airdrie and Okotoks/High River would probably where the Commuter rail would start as a project in Calgary.
Albertasaurus
Active Member
I know the Premier talked about Red Deer becoming the next million plus city, but as a country we are probably 20 years out from even large-ish cities like Winnipeg and Quebec City hitting a million. I'm sure it would help Red Deer solidify its place as the province's 3rd biggest city but I don't really see it going beyond 200,000 in the coming decades, and not sure how much of a boost the rail hub would give. Even a couple decades out, our regional population along that corridor will be perhaps 5 or 6 million which is still small compared to the big rail corridors in Europe, China, Japan, the NE USA and even the corridor between the 3 big eastern Canadian cities.
CBBarnett
Senior Member
It would take a lot of investment - and a long time - for Red Deer to ever become the main - or even a competitively large - transit hub for Alberta. Essentially impossible on any foreseeable future over the next hundred years.
Leaning into the transportation investment theory about growth, improving access from Red Deer to the larger job markets in Calgary and Edmonton would certainly be a boom. If it's true high-speed rail, where each city is accessible in less than an hour from Red Deer even more so.
But Calgary and Edmonton have close to 1 million jobs each today and hundreds of billions of dollars of infrastructure, amenities, services and efficiency as a result of already being big places that grew up over the last 120 years.
That is an insurmountable lead. Any transportation benefit from better access for Red Deer to the cities would also help the cities in reverse, and continue their dominance for the same reasons - greater access for more people to reach jobs and services in the cities. Growth will continue in these cities so the gap to Red Deer will remain.
A bullet train would potentially allow Red Deer to access a new growth vector it currently lacks. Perhaps it would be able to supplant Lethbridge and pull into a clear 3rd place?
CalgaryTiger
Senior Member
Read between the lines... (Puts on tin foil hat): The UCP, like Egypt, Indonesia, and Brazil before them, are going to build a new million-person city around Red Deer thus justifying that Red Deer be the highspeed rail hub.
darwink
Senior Member
They need to sell this to not Calgary. Whatever stops someone in Stettler from complaining.
CBBarnett
Senior Member
It's not impossible, but arbitrarily fighting upstream on centuries of urban economic agglomeration forces pushing the other direction is a tough (and expensive) headwind to overcome.
Building cities from scratch is a classic move from authoritarian governments throughout history, with very limited success, particularly after municipal and national economic systems stopped concentrating nearly wealth and economic activity in a single person (i.e. wherever the King's court was, the economy followed).
If you really wanted to do this today, a better play than trains would be to move to the provincial capital to Red Deer and setup a new, fully funded major public university there at the cost of tens of billions of dollars over decades, with limited chance of success and zero chance of it being an economically efficient outcome.
Massive, government expansion of public institutions wasn't in my UCP playbook
This seems more likely the play with the rail plan - give something to everyone, even if that's not realistic in practice. Red Deer can be flagged as a "hub" when really it's just a freebee that will benefit from the true hubs being connected (Calgary and Edmonton).
The other motivation of this plan is shorter-term, trying to distract from many controversial policy decisions with something more interesting/positive - trains!
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darwink
Senior Member
I think they've realized there hasn't been much of the vision thing from this government, and not much interesting in the positive sense to communicate about.
I don't think you can limit that to authoritarian governments. Washington, DC was carved out out of both Maryland and Virginia, and built from scratch.
darwink
Senior Member
Yeah, something governments with a world view centred on ideas of ideal communities seem to do. Not only governments though, street car suburbs are this but privately initiated, and widely praised a century hence.
CBBarnett
Senior Member
Yep good points, there's been attempts at various scales by all types of governments and private sector to create cities from scratch.
Perhaps that's the better way to put it, governments that have an utopic or interventionist urban policy slant towards them have tried that, which top-down authoritarian governments often have, but not a trait exclusive to them.
There's lots of history here in trying to solve the perceived ills/political failures/chaos that major cities get tagged with by physically and structurally trying to change them or recreate them from scratch (but this time "better"). It's possible - and you can argue any government investment into anything is trying to do this - but when it's at the scale of creating a whole new city, it's often unsuccessful or highly inefficient. Cities are complex and top-down major interventions often mis-diagnose "the problems".
Back to trains:
- If the goal is to generate economic spin-offs, growth and a more liquid labour and employment market, rapid intercity transit is a solid proposed investment.
- If the goal is to make Red Deer the economic and political capital of Alberta and a new major city, rapid intercity transit isn't really going to get you there on it's own. That's why this is more of the sales pitch (I think) and less of the actual goal.
adamyyc
Active Member
And now a private company is proposing rail from Calgary to Montana.
lethbridgenewsnow.com
Alberta-Montana passenger rail service proposed
A non-profit in Alberta looks to build an international train route, connecting the prairie province and Monta...
lethbridgenewsnow.com
Interesting. I like the idea of linking up with Amtrak's network.
We're about the same distance (a 3-hour drive) from Edmonton's VIA station as we are to some of the stations on Amtrak's Empire Builder, like Browning MT.
Albertasaurus
Active Member
The Calgary-Montana link would be good to have also. There is an Amtrak station at Shelby that would make a convenient transfer point to Amtrak's network. Imagine being able to take a train holiday from Calgary (I don't consider the Rocky Mountaineer an option, as it is is just plain unaffordable).
Taking a look at the map, there is existing rail that goes from Lethbridge to Shelby, essentially a route followed by I-15 and then highway 4 here in Alberta.