O-tac
Active Member
How can anyone trust anything the UCP says when they contradict themselves and speak out of both sides of their mouth?
Did they orchestrate it? Or, did their warnings just turn out to be entirely accurate? Imagine if we listened to them 6 years ago, instead of stubbornly assuming that "train = good!!!!" no matter what the costs.
I've seen a lot of news about the water main problems in the west end, are the centre st utils of a similar age?Getting that far north is an issue. Centre St has a lot of utilities under it. Probably cheaper to take a row of houses out on either side of Centre than try to move all those utilities. Given how construction is now way more expensive, but houses are somewhat flat.
To remind people of a preliminary look at elevated from 2016's TT2016-0483:
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yess I agree!! that would be a good use of the bridge. It would also be cool to see a bike lane beside it too. lessen the bike traffic on street level.Might be cool if they had a High Line style pedestrian walkway as part of the elevated LRT
I agree that we shouldn't pit road and transit investments against each other, in part because lack of transit investment will ultimately create negative impacts on roads as well. With the collapse of the Green Line, Calgary's existing road network will have to absorb the bulk of increased car and bus traffic as the city's population grows. And with no way to meaningfully increase the capacity of the road network within the interior of the city, congestion will continue to get worse and worse.Roads and transit are both important transport infrastructure but transit should not try to compare with roads, because roads carry more passenger-trips as well as freight and scales well from low usage to high. Expensive rail transit should try to justify their existence based on their own benefits.
I don't think this is really true. The GL Board's mandate was actually pretty narrow: to deliver the project as already planned. A plan arrived at through much acrimony, and amidst the darkest days of COVID:They manifested their BS warnings into reality. The City did listen to them 6 years ago... back when Gray was engaging in good faith. His group's top ask was an independent board of experts to deliver the project because they were convinced those experts would agree with them about dropping the tunnel and building their SE LRT dream.
So the City created an independent Green Line Board and hired top project experts to take project management out of the hands of the politicians. Suprise, surprise, those project experts confirmed the City was on the right track with staging and risk management and the Gray group was out to lunch.
From that point on the Gray group was no longer engaging in good faith and instead set out to create so much fear and uncertainty that the market would walk away from the project or the politicians would. They finally found a premier willing to ignore years of reviews and studies from actual experts and instead listen to 9 retired guys with large chequebooks and a few napkin sketches and we find ourselves where we are today.
However, in late January (2020), a special committee formed by Ward 6 Coun. Jeff Davison reworked the alignment of a section of the Green Line from Centre Street and 16 Avenue North south to the Elbow River in the Beltline in order to bring the project’s cost estimates within budget and manage construction risk.
The updated alignment includes a street-level track on Centre Street North with a bridge over the Bow River and a 2.5-kilometre tunnel in the downtown core and Beltline. There would with six stations in total (two at ground level and four underground).