[lemongrab]

Everyone talks about inflation as the reason the project has ballooned, but what exactly is causing the increase? Is it labor? materials? engineering? Or was scope changed? How do we make sure the next time a project doesn't get completely changed from proposal to construction.

A good start would probably be to not over-promise to such an absurd degree at the start. Just a total comms failure.

Like, you don't need to do all 4 levels of the Vince McMahon meme in your initial announcement. Show the map and tout the total length, stations, ridership, etc...but don't paint yourself into a corner by committing immediately to full LRT everywhere with a deep bored tunnel. Maybe allude to those possible options in the question period if you want, but leave yourself wiggle room. I don't think this is just hindsight...people would have been excited enough without those details.

 

[Ramsayite]

Just some rough napkin math to go with my post above:

Average cost to own a vehicle per year is about $15,000 (The Star says $16644)

Assume 400,000 cars in Calgary, that's $6billion annually.

In other words, Calgarians are collectively paying for an entire green line every year, just in personal vehicle costs. A decade of car ownership costs builds this project 10 times over.

That doesn't include any of the infrastructure costs, road maintenance, environmental or other effects etc. That's just the atomized individual cost of car ownership.

 

[ahuch]

Just some rough napkin math to go with my post above:

Average cost to own a vehicle per year is about $15,000 (The Star says $16644)

Assume 400,000 cars in Calgary, that's $6billion annually.

In other words, Calgarians are collectively paying for an entire green line every year, just in personal vehicle costs. A decade of car ownership costs builds this project 10 times over.

That doesn't include any of the infrastructure costs, road maintenance, environmental or other effects etc. That's just the atomized individual cost of car ownership.

There's over a million cars in Calgary.

 

[trtcttc]

Well, initially, council added things to the scope, and the project team treated those elements as sacrosanct, without accounting for cost or evaluating tradeoffs.

What was added/decisions which raised costs?

• A 100% requirement that the project be underground in the core.
• Avoiding crossing Macleod Trail at grade (very strong preference to underground in the Beltline)
• Elevated in Inglewood instead of property acquisition
• Crossing the Elbow in the CPR ROW instead of near MacDonald Ave to avoid property acquisition/'cutting a community in two'
• Community gardens
• Deciding on Centre St without a fulsome evaluation of costs
• Remediation of the Highfield Road landfill to support potential TOD
• Relocating the Lynnwood and Ogden stations to better for pedestrians but more expensive locations
• Relocating the entire quarry park segment including station to a new ROW
• Splitting the contract in illogical ways
• Insisting that city council would be an effective project management board despite not being best practice, and then pivoting to a management board model after many key decisions had been made
• Insisting for almost a decade that a fixed price contract was not only possible, but desirable

Not an active decision, but the key factor in my mind

• Not empowering staff when decisions were being made to speak up to say:
  • This is not best practice, we can report make to the next meeting with options, including best practice, for this decision
  • This is not the right time to make this decision
  • We do not have the information today to weigh the tradeoffs of this decision
  • This preference will have cost implications: is this preference a $5 million preference, or a $500 million preference so we can make this decision without coming back to council

The biggest one:

• Analysis paralysis on the 2nd St tunnel downtown: sticking to the plan despite all geotechnical obstacles and not being open to alternatives, insisting that risk could be mitigated by more information beyond starting to dig

Some of these ROW issues are exactly what happens when you have city councilors making decisions and nobody wanting to upset residents. When they account for project costs, are TOD sites like Highfield Road Landfill used to offset costs? If they include the remediation, logically some portion of the future land sale proceeds should go back to the Green Line.

 

[kempes_78]

Well as I mentioned before, Trudeau had a “wink wink nudge nudge” moment with Chow as he announced the new transit funding, probably meaning that no matter what Toronto will get all the funding they need for that project and more. Because we all know Toronto is the Centre of the. Understand how megaprojects work. Stability starts by having the right personnel in place from consultants to contractor to city staff to councillors. Another BigDig, Brandenburg is brewing. Was there collaboration to make the project work? Accountability is massive from all perspectives. How may Canadian megaprojects are being impacted in this fashion? in C

 

[kempes_78]

Understand how megaprojects work. Stability starts by having the right personnel in place from consultants to contractor to city staff to councillors. Another BigDig, Brandenburg is brewing. Was there collaboration to make the project work? Accountability is massive from all perspectives. How may Canadian megaprojects are being impacted in this fashion?

 

[kempes_78]

Well, initially, council added things to the scope, and the project team treated those elements as sacrosanct, without accounting for cost or evaluating tradeoffs.

What was added/decisions which raised costs?

• A 100% requirement that the project be underground in the core.
• Avoiding crossing Macleod Trail at grade (very strong preference to underground in the Beltline)
• Elevated in Inglewood instead of property acquisition
• Crossing the Elbow in the CPR ROW instead of near MacDonald Ave to avoid property acquisition/'cutting a community in two'
• Community gardens
• Deciding on Centre St without a fulsome evaluation of costs
• Remediation of the Highfield Road landfill to support potential TOD
• Relocating the Lynnwood and Ogden stations to better for pedestrians but more expensive locations
• Relocating the entire quarry park segment including station to a new ROW
• Splitting the contract in illogical ways
• Insisting that city council would be an effective project management board despite not being best practice, and then pivoting to a management board model after many key decisions had been made
• Insisting for almost a decade that a fixed price contract was not only possible, but desirable

Not an active decision, but the key factor in my mind

• Not empowering staff when decisions were being made to speak up to say:
  • This is not best practice, we can report make to the next meeting with options, including best practice, for this decision
  • This is not the right time to make this decision
  • We do not have the information today to weigh the tradeoffs of this decision
  • This preference will have cost implications: is this preference a $5 million preference, or a $500 million preference so we can make this decision without coming back to council

The biggest one:

• Analysis paralysis on the 2nd St tunnel downtown: sticking to the plan despite all geotechnical obstacles and not being open to alternatives, insisting that risk could be mitigated by more information beyond starting to dig

Escalation? A red herring: it has some validity but it is given too much weight. Start with the design basis and time allocated to achieve it. What was the business relationship between the City, designers and contractor?

 

[O-tac]

This LiveWire Calgary article goes into greater detail than the other media reports I've seen.

Green Line LRT cut down in south Calgary to stay within the budget

Scope changes on the Green Line LRT mean that the line will end four stops south of downtown Calgary, with one station brought to grade and another deferred to a later date. That’s the decision tha…

livewirecalgary.com

Of note are the quotes from Councilors Evan Spencer and Terry Wong (their wards are directly impacted by the Greenline).

Ward 11 Coun. Evan Spencer amended the main motion so work could begin immediately on finding the cash to extend the line right away – in line with the original Green Line alignment agreed in 2017.

Much of the alignment down to Shepard has enabling works already done, including work that’s ongoing in the Ogden area.

“After nearly a decade of delays and setbacks, this project is moving forward, and I want us to immediately begin thinking beyond the core,” Spencer said.

“While this is super important…. just the necessity of getting the downtown figured out the necessity of doing the open-heart surgery that’s going to increase the viability of this project into future iterations and to future extensions, we need to be immediately thinking about tomorrow. The hard work to get to this day isn’t just about today.”

They wanted a scoping report to come back to the Executive Committee in the second quarter of 2025.

So this confirms what I was thinking and hoping, that they will simultaneously be applying for funding to start the next phase that goes further south.

Ward 7 Coun. Terry Wong said that this is just a start, and that we need the Green Line.

“This is equivalent of building the chassis to the ultimate engine. If you don’t start the chassis, you don’t start with building the roof or the trunk. This is a startup, the starting point,” he said.

“Ideally we want to go down to Seton. Ideally we want to get to North Pointe, but we got to start somewhere. I know a lot of people would have challenged me by saying, ‘you know, as a conservative, why would you do this?’ It’s about city building. That’s what it’s all about.”

This is actually a really good point by Wong about building the chassis before the rest of the car. I appreciate a conservative stepping up to support the greenline and explain this reality.

 

[darwink]

When they account for project costs, are TOD sites like Highfield Road Landfill used to offset costs? If they include the remediation, logically some portion of the future land sale proceeds should go back to the Green Line.

I think so. But the site won't pay for itself, so it really is cost decision. Same is when the city bought out Lilydale chicken. was it the cheapest choice, or just solves another file at the same time?

Escalation? A red herring: it has some validity but it is given too much weight. Start with the design basis and time allocated to achieve it. What was the business relationship between the City, designers and contractor?

So, many things. There is the pure escalation. That exists for sure. Then there is scope creep, that existed for sure. Then less than optimal risk management. Then less than optimal procurement planning.

To try to make the plan better, there was lots of delay. Likely, waiting made the costs higher and the project worse than our current situation, but, it would seem very bad if had moved forward at the time and had lets say a $1 billion overage in the 16th Ave - Elbow River tunnel.

 

[lemongrab]

I'm just watching the council meeting. Sounds like there will still be an additional storage and maintenance facility required at Shephard eventually. Which doesn't sound terribly efficient.

 

[Red Star]

Honestly if the tunnel gets shortened any further I'd almost change teams and be for cancelling the whole thing. If we want to secure Calgary as a car dominant city then you spend (less) billions on, as I like to say, a really long slow electric bus on rails with 10-15 minute frequency. It won't get anyone around particularly fast, it will have to wait at traffic lights, will get into traffic accidents, and will force people outside more to wait at even more glorified bus stops. By the time this thing is build this city will be closer to 2 million population, we deserve big boy infrastructure, not something that again goes 40km/h on a street. I will definitely be driving if that's the case. It will also be very bad for any businesses on those streets where it would be street level.

I generally agree with your sentiment. Rapid-transit should be 'rapid'. People living in Seton and North Pointe are going to drive if the train ends up being too slow or gets caught in a traffic accident.

However; I think the whole purpose of a low-floor LRT system is that it moves less people than a metro and is suppose to run at street level. The trade-off is that it's suppose to be cheaper than a metro system and the stations can integrate into the streetscape better. But then again, I'm not a transit expert by any stretch of the imagination.

 

[DougB]

How many billion would have been saved had the UCP and Rick McIver not put funding on hold for 2 years during COVID when we were still the only major project of this kind in NA? And all to review it and find nothing worth changing. And now they will point out this insufficient, butchered Phase 1 and say: “see! It wasn’t worth doing.”

How much could have been saved if city councillors hadn't been self-congrulating themselves over 4 years of scope creep between 2015 and 2019 and broken ground during the NDP years? At one time, they dreamed of building the full north to south line with bored tunnels and deep underground stations. The original 3 LRT lines were less than 3 years from inception to opening.

 

[darwink]

I generally agree with your sentiment. Rapid-transit should be 'rapid'. People living in Seton and North Pointe are going to drive if the train ends up being too slow or gets caught in a traffic accident.

However; I think the whole purpose of a low-floor LRT system is that it moves less people than a metro and is suppose to run at street level. The trade-off is that it's suppose to be cheaper than a metro system and the stations can integrate into the streetscape better. But then again, I'm not a transit expert by any stretch of the imagination.

You're right.

The project was designed and decisions were made over a period of 20 years without defining what success looked like, and minimum service standards to avoid unnecessary frills and to insure the project delivered what we value as a community.

This led to decisions based on aesthetics and trends without evaluation of whether those decisions served the overall goals of the project.

In hindsight this is easy to see, but at the time, it certainly wasn't.

 

[darwink]

The original 3 LRT lines were less than 3 years from inception to opening.

They were longer than that, but yeah, your point stands for sure. Ended up in a loop of analysis paralysis for sure, not realizing that delay was contributing as much to problems as potential risks from choosing the good but less than perfect option.