The 60% designs were presented but I'm not sure that that means things were "stuck" at that point. I recall seeing a couple station renders that were at the 90% iirc.
Based on what I saw and the amount of surrounding work that's been done at each of the station sites (from Crossroads south) I would hazard to guess that more than half of the stations are very close to shovel ready, although I can't speak for the track, tunnels, guide ways in between those stations.
I don't know about any of the design work west of the elbow; certainly a lot more complex design there. And that is the section that the province claims it will "fix" and that is clearly their justification.
Of course all of the stations south and east of the elbow that may be "complete" are designed for low-floor trains. If vehicle type is one of the things that is under review then it could certainly throw those stations back to the drawing boards.
Re: high floor vs low floor: Perhaps as another poster mentioned, one could just take those existing designs and dig the track down a couple feet to accommodate high floor trains, but something tells me it's not that easy; One can't just make up track grade willy-nilly, especially when these stations all have elevation constraints: Crossroads station immediately enters an elevated guideway that needs to maintain a certain elevation over road and track. Highfield station sits right up against a road and associated underpass with clearance requirements. Lynnwood immediately crosses a road at grade after the station head. Almost all of the stations have some at-grade pedestrian crossing to move between platforms. A couple feet of grade change would completely invalidate these designs. I really really hope that the UCP's review doesn't try to change the vehicles.
I think the average person has no idea how much work has gone into this right-of-way; how many ARPs, TOD sites, road alignments, streetscape upgrades, bike paths, public amenities, utility upgrades etc are hinged upon it and have been designed alongside. The risk of invalidating all of this associated work needs to be considered as part of the package of opportunity costs here. We are at serious risk of butchering a ton of associated planning work.
The reality is that this project is much more than just a train that goes some places; for as long as I have been engaged with this project (2015?) One of the stated goals has been place-making, I.e. avoiding the errors of 1980s LRT (looking at you, 36st NE) And creating opportunities for meaningful development around this line. It's the same stated goal as for the arena except there's a lot more tangible work that has been done to actually achieve that at a public level, at a much larger scale, and without the interference of a for-profit "tenant."
And so, It'll be interesting to see how much design work gets thrown out as part of this "review." I could summarize my greatest concern more succinctly and without prior sass: I don't trust a provincial party of rural grievances to properly understand this project, And I don't trust whatever private interests they're pretending are an "independent review" to understand this work either. Owning an abandoned traincar in High River and liking trains is not a qualification.
And to be clear, the narrative of these aforementioned ideologues is just far too transparent: Leverage collective sticker shock, ignore the scope of this project and reposition it as commuter rail, take advantage of rural and suburban voters biases and lack of awareness of urban place-making to dangle a carrot for vote buying. Then, over-emphasize the opportunity cost associated with capital spending while under-emphasizing opportunity cost associated with every other facet of this project and its delay. Use the per kilometer track cost as a talking point while ignoring all of the amenities that are costed in along this section, then extrapolate this per track cost to the rest of the alignment to overestimate the full project and position it as a boondoggle. Come up with an alternative design that looks cheaper on paper but won't actually get built during your tenure; use it primarily as a talking point during political debates. Carefully avoid communicating about what has been "lost" through the value engineering process so that the whole situation looks great on paper. Deflect all criticisms to the municipality. Ignore that inflation exists.
Bonus move: screw over the "radical downtown urbanites " who you despise and deliver some "benefits" to some donors while you are at it.
Anyway, please accept my apologies for being a bit sassy about this, I'm sure I'm not the only one who is a bit suspicious of users who joined the forum primarily to run PR for the stadium deal and now appear to be running PR for the provincial government while standing aggressively on decorum to deflect any criticisms of such.
