Sorry. I should have been more clear. I think the new route is probably fine (it's quite similar to the tunnel route after all). My concern is that the costing seems like it's not much better than napkin math, and the proposal from what I've seen doesn't address questions like "how should the guideway interact with the street and the plus-15s and so on along the route?" The answers to those sorts of questions could potentially drive a lot of cost that may make the napkin math quite wrong.
The report answers this a little bit (though it seems the +15 integration in the report was pretty sloppy), but the only way to get more clarity is more design work. The province and AECOM aren't sitting on answers to these specific questions the city seems to be asking them. The city should actually have a better idea of these things than the province, IF the city actually gave elevated a fair shake ~9 years ago and developed a good faith elevated option (which would identify some of the big inherent challenges/drawbacks, but also have a preliminary idea for how to mitigate them). But as we too often see with non-preferred options, the final publicly available reporting tends to
emphasize the challenges while ignoring possible mitigations.
A big thing overlooked in the city's plan is that grade-change transitions have the most detrimental impact to the public realm and create dead zones. There is a chicken/egg thing where a lot of these dead zones don't seem so bad, because they are tucked up against a car-sewer-stroad like Macleod or 16th or Bow Tr or Memorial...but those were mostly self-fulfilled prophecies.
Transition to underground is arguably better than to elevated (red line along Macleod Tr, or Hounsfield Hts to go under 16th), but fewer transition zones is best of all. (lots of examples of elevated transition zones: Bow River crossings, Blue line @ Millenium Park, red line up the hill to SAIT, etc)
Some sort of transition is inevitable near Olympic Way. Elevated is mitigated by being right beside the heavy rail tracks (a hostile barrier in themselves), but the tunnel would have seen it on 11 Ave (unclear exactly where since they changed 4 St station to surface level).
But then in Eau Claire we would have had a double whammy going from underground to elevated, whereas a continuous elevated option is actually a lot less disruptive. Going to surface along Centre St would also likely mean transition zones near 16th.
So on the whole I'm not convinced the tunnelled alignment is significantly less disruptive to the public realm (and none of it is the end of the world either way)
