Calgary Transit

[CBBarnett]

Dulles finally has the DC metro going to it, many many years late. Although I don't know if they've fixed the problem of just having almost no rolling stock left to run the system properly.



Three things here.

28 min from YYZ to downtown Toronto is very generous with traffic, but I can't say I haven't done it. The UP is a weird concept, but I love how smooth the rails are and how fast it goes.

The SkyTrain is just yeah, I really wish we had that thing here.

And the top right box there sums up a lot of what should be improved with transit in Calgary. Driving is just so much faster... again I wish we had a train like the SkyTrain here.

Trains are great. But more broadly we should convince transit that competing with cars is its objective.

You can connect the airport a hell of a lot better today, spending the same money as you do today, if you want to actually be competitive to your competition. Just route that 300 down Deerfoot and you shave 15 minutes off per cycle.

That only can happen if transit wants to win here. We don’t need a train for that (although it can help).

TL;DR: make buses faster.

 

[ByeByeBaby]

I've added every airport people have talked about to this table that looks at travel time in a "perfect" scenario (no walks/no waits) for transit. The destination is somewhat arbitrary but always a centrally located transit station. All are single transit routes, no transfers. I didn't standardize this against congestion, so car routes (and some transit routes) will vary by time of day.

Of these cities, Calgary is:

• Longest airport to downtown time (44 minutes)
• Biggest absolute time-savings by taking car over transit (20 minutes shorter)
• Mid-pack in both travel distance and travel time by car

View attachment 555295

Here's some (pre-pandemic) numbers I put together showing weekday transit boardings at the airport stations of a selection of cities.

What they have in common is that they are low numbers despite generally being in much larger cities with much busier airports. The full post suggests that reasonable-to-optimistic expectations for Calgary would be ~2500 boardings a day, which is a Sunalta or a 39th Avenue; certainly a station worth building and stopping at, but not a station worth going out of the way to build a line to. (Green Line projections are ~55K boardings a day -- around 20x; that would suggest $250M as a comparable cost. Oakland's AirBART people mover shuttle is about the same length as from the airport to the Blue Line, and cost $500M US a decade ago, although maybe we can build cheaper than the Bay Area.)

 

[ByeByeBaby]

Well, looks like Portland's overall ridership on its metro system is between 1/3 and 1/4 of Calgary's. Parking rates at PDX look to be not dissimilar to the costs at YYC (parking at the terminal itself is cheaper at PDX but they don't appear to have the offsite options like ParknFly etc). So an educated guess might put Calgary at 10-12,000 a day? That doesn't sound like a lot but is nearly double the total daily ridership of Buffalo's entire metrorail system, and about the same as Baltimore's. As an aside, it never ceases to amaze me how low the ridership is on most US metro systems...

The better comparable (as in my table above) is not rail system use, but a measure of airport size such as boarding passengers. That represents both the passengers who are the talked-about market as well as workers (more passengers = more flights = more in-terminal shopping = more workers commuting to the airport). More people take the train to Chinook than to North Hill Mall, because Chinook's a bigger, more popular mall. Or, to put it another way -- imagine WestJet moved their hub to Edmonton and Air Canada shut down a bunch of flights so we had half as many passengers at our airport. Would you expect the number of airport train riders to not change, since the overall C-Train ridership wouldn't?

It's true that cities with ultra-low transit use, like Dallas and Phoenix will also have low airport rail use, (and car-optional megacities like London, New York and Paris have high airport transit use), but looking at cities anywhere in the vicinity of Calgary's transit share, there's not really a relationship. Conveniently, in 2019, Dallas, Minneapolis, Seattle, and Denver all had roughly 25 million rail boardings on their system - but they had 2K, 6K, 6K and 10K boardings. San Francisco/Oakland had 7 times as many rail boardings, and only 7.5K combined. Toronto had 460 million rail boardings -- 18x Denver, and as many as all 8 US metros on the table put together! -- and only managed 3K boardings. It's just so variable, where the boardings-per-passenger rate is much more consistent.

To compare to your Portland calculation -- since Toronto has 5 times the rail ridership of Calgary (and more expensive parking), an equally educated guess from this would put Calgary at around 300 passengers.

 

[Reecemartin]

I don't really love this video or this YouTuber, but:

A few years ago I heard that the wisdom was direct airport->downtown links might seem like a good idea when you're traveling and visiting a new city as a tourist, but are not worth the money as they don't do much for the city itself. But now we have 3 Canadian cities with airport rail links, and urbanism/planning enthusiasts like this guy

I have worked in the transit industry in a couple of cities on a bunch of projects, so I am not sure I'd label myself a "planning enthusiast".

calling for an Edmonton light rail expansion to its airport, of all things.

As for Calgary, I thought the people mover plan was more advanced than he seems to be saying in the video. I also don't think it's such a terrible idea. Direct blue/green line service to the airport would be more expensive, and also cut into service frequency on the other branches of those lines. Finally he doesn't really explain why he thinks Calgary is dropping the ball on LRT planning compared to Edmonton. I get that the green line has had setbacks, but when it's done it won't be less useful than Edmonton's new Valley line, and the stub NW extension they're building.

Having a connection to the airport lets you serve a major suburban job centre, and concentration, and use counterpeak capacity which tends to exist in spades. In London for example many ride the Tube out to Heathrow in the morning and take a bus to their final destination, be it in logistics, maintenance, etc. Especially in the case of Edmonton an almost entirely greenfield build should be extremely low cost.

The people mover is one option that has been kicked around, things are being studied in more detail right now. Direct Blue or Green line service should not be all that expensive, the airport has lots of space for maneuvering, and the tunnel under the east runway has the room and a people mover will require its own operations and maintenance facility as well as full grade separation.

I say Calgary is dropping the ball because while Edmonton has just opened half the Valley line and is flying along with the west leg, as well as just opening the Blatchford extension, there is also quite advanced planning going on on the southern extension, and the further northern extension towards St. A. Meanwhile in Calgary the high floor network doesn't have any extensions at an advanced level of study and half of the Green Line is all that's currently on the move - thats a big gap that should be closed, especially with the firehose of money being spent on transit in Canada right now. TLDR: Edmonton is just building way more stuff, and yes they have a smaller network, but Calgary could also be building a bunch of useful stuff!

Denver light rail comes right up to the terminal too. Integrated as well as the best European examples

Denvers connection is one of their new "commuter" rail lines, which runs on high voltage 25kV AC overhead lines and has high floor cars of the same model used in Philly. This line is quite high speed and high capacity compared to Denver's rather "meh" light rail which is a big network but with frequencies as low as half hourly and a small fraction of the ridership of Calgary.

That being said I concur that the integration at the airport is very nice.

 

[trtcttc]

You can connect the airport a hell of a lot better today, spending the same money as you do today, if you want to actually be competitive to your competition. Just route that 300 down Deerfoot and you shave 15 minutes off per cycle.

While that’s true, there’s no talk of this type of airport-downtown service in train form either. Our point to point traffic isn’t strong enough to support an UP Express like service (heck even in Toronto it’s mostly used as a commuter service to Weston and Bloor). The reason for the ctrain link is all the additional traffic along the way. Although I think a service similar to the TTC airport rocket (express service between last stop of subway and airport) can probably meet the demand for at least a decade.

 

[Surrealplaces]

I say Calgary is dropping the ball because while Edmonton has just opened half the Valley line and is flying along with the west leg, as well as just opening the Blatchford extension, there is also quite advanced planning going on on the southern extension, and the further northern extension towards St. A. Meanwhile in Calgary the high floor network doesn't have any extensions at an advanced level of study and half of the Green Line is all that's currently on the move - thats a big gap that should be closed, especially with the firehose of money being spent on transit in Canada right now. TLDR: Edmonton is just building way more stuff, and yes they have a smaller network, but Calgary could also be building a bunch of useful stuff!

I wouldn't say Calgary has dropped the ball in general. Calgary built their extensions back in the 90's and early 2000's and extending them more isn't something badly needed whereas Edmonton is just doing that now. The four branches of the two Calgary lines already go to the far ends of the city. Adding new extensions is something that'll happen, but isn't urgent.
I would say they've dropped the ball on the Green line, or at least a combination of the city and province has dropped the ball. It's a frustration as it should already be well underway, but it's a whole other story :-(

 

[whatchyyc]

Green line is already well underway, several years of enabling works have been completed and are ongoing. It's a massive project, and I'm not worried about the high floor network. The NE to 128 Avenue would be nice and has a completed functional planning study but there's no money right now anyway.

 

[Tarsus]

I wouldn't say Calgary has dropped the ball in general. Calgary built their extensions back in the 90's and early 2000's and extending them more isn't something badly needed whereas Edmonton is just doing that now. The four branches of the two Calgary lines already go to the far ends of the city. Adding new extensions is something that'll happen, but isn't urgent.
I would say they've dropped the ball on the Green line, or at least a combination of the city and province has dropped the ball. It's a frustration as it should already be well underway, but it's a whole other story :-(

I was gonna say the same thing, but you beat me to it. As far as the first two lines go, Calgary hasn’t dropped the ball at all. The system is a major achievement for a city this size. The stuff Edmonton’s doing today was done here a long time ago.
There’s no need for Calgary to build further extensions to those lines, at least in the near future.
As for the Green Line. Yeah, it’s frustrating but it’s getting built.

 

[Reecemartin]

I wouldn't say Calgary has dropped the ball in general. Calgary built their extensions back in the 90's and early 2000's and extending them more isn't something badly needed whereas Edmonton is just doing that now. The four branches of the two Calgary lines already go to the far ends of the city. Adding new extensions is something that'll happen, but isn't urgent.
I would say they've dropped the ball on the Green line, or at least a combination of the city and province has dropped the ball. It's a frustration as it should already be well underway, but it's a whole other story :-(

But that's exactly what I was saying, the city built a lot and then hit the brakes, which is not good if you want to have cost effective and effective projects down the road, you have to keep the "machine" running.

While Calgary's system is good obviously, it's not like there aren't a lot of improvements that can and should be made, and could have been better attacked in the past decade - for example, a connection to Mt. Royal, to Foothills, to the Airport, etc. or progress on undergrounding the Red Line downtown - ala OTrain in Ottawa where the downtown tunnel is one of the very good decisions they made.

The Green line is a positive project, but it's just taken way too long, the idea that it's "massive" is I think a bit overstated - there are a bunch of light rail projects in Canada and the US with similar scope which have moved much faster.

 

[JWhite]

But that's exactly what I was saying, the city built a lot and then hit the brakes, which is not good if you want to have cost effective and effective projects down the road, you have to keep the "machine" running.

While Calgary's system is good obviously, it's not like there aren't a lot of improvements that can and should be made, and could have been better attacked in the past decade - for example, a connection to Mt. Royal, to Foothills, to the Airport, etc. or progress on undergrounding the Red Line downtown - ala OTrain in Ottawa where the downtown tunnel is one of the very good decisions they made.

The Green line is a positive project, but it's just taken way too long, the idea that it's "massive" is I think a bit overstated - there are a bunch of light rail projects in Canada and the US with similar scope which have moved much faster.

I agree about the Green line, but not about the other parts. A spur to Mt Royal, or an airport connecter are nice to haves in the future but lots of money for minor gain.
The city spent a lot of money, extending out the existing lines where they would get the most bang for the buck and it has worked very well. The other nice to haves that transit nerds love will come when it’s feasible.

I’m on the fence about a downtown for the red line. It would be nice for the trains to be unimpeded, but it’s lots of money for a minor improvement, and frankly I’m not fan of underground stations other than allowing for the right of way. I like being able to have quick and easy access to the stations.
If the Ctrain had the right of way downtown, I would prefer that it was above ground.
I used the Ottawa train and it was kind of a pain in the ass taking 20 minutes to get down underground to a train station.

 

[Surrealplaces]

But that's exactly what I was saying, the city built a lot and then hit the brakes, which is not good if you want to have cost effective and effective projects down the road, you have to keep the "machine" running.

While Calgary's system is good obviously, it's not like there aren't a lot of improvements that can and should be made, and could have been better attacked in the past decade - for example, a connection to Mt. Royal, to Foothills, to the Airport, etc. or progress on undergrounding the Red Line downtown - ala OTrain in Ottawa where the downtown tunnel is one of the very good decisions they made.

The Green line is a positive project, but it's just taken way too long, the idea that it's "massive" is I think a bit overstated - there are a bunch of light rail projects in Canada and the US with similar scope which have moved much faster.

We’ll have to agree to disagree
I don’t think they’ve ever hit the brakes since the first LRT leg opened in 1981. There has been constant expansion, additions and planning, with much of the additions coming in spurts, but still constant.
It look like much hasn’t been happening with the last expansion being Tuscany in 2014, but it’s mainly due to the focus on the Green Line. That and because mostly the existing lines go as far as they need to go for the time being. The 68th st station and the Tuscany station are both less than 2 km from the edge of the city. Outside of rail, the city also built out a BRT network in the past decade.

The Green Line is a big project and it’s taking longer than it should but keep in mind the first phase of the green line is much longer and costlier than the first phase of the Confederation Line which took years of debates/approvals/construction etc.. before the first phase opened, and expansions are still ongoing. I think the green line will be a similar situation. It’ll take a while but it’ll be worth it.

As someone who likes rail transit projects, I would like to see those extensions, as well as a spur to Mount Royal, or to the airport, etc.. but there is only so much money to go around. Those other projects are still on the radar but will have to wait until the green line is done.
Who knows maybe with the help of the airport Authority and airport spur can be done.

 

[trtcttc]

Instead of building these spur lines, we should use those funds for multiple MAX/BRT services to build an actual connected transit network. Too many trips simply don’t work because one portion of the trip require a bus with 30 mins headway. The strength of networks like the TTC isn’t the spur lines or extensions, although those help bring new riders, but the extensive streetcar and bus service that actually enables people to get where they need to.

 

[Reecemartin]

I'll just say that I find the argument that Max has been a good use of time so far unconvincing, while some portions like 17 Ave Se and a few short transitway sections are nice, much of it is mixed traffic and the service levels are just not very good - like not even all day every 15 minutes (which should be a lot more common!), at the moment it feels like throwing good money after bad, at least the C-Train stuff gets a reasonable all day frequency.

 

[darwink]

at the moment it feels like throwing good money after bad, at least the C-Train stuff gets a reasonable all day frequency.

An unfortunate bit of timing to be sure. Should be rectified soon.

 

[Surrealplaces]

I'll be honest, I've only used the BRT once, trying the Max Purple on a Saturday after it first opened, so I don't have an opinion either way. I would say that any shortcomings are more about the mgmt of the system rather than the infrastructure. They can always increase the schedule more, now that the infrastructure is there. Others can shed more light on how useful it is, or which lines are useful, which aren't etc..