Agreed, there's been a lot of focus on the downtown problems, but the NC section has also seen a major escalation in costs. Out of personal curiosity, I read the reports that informed the selection of Centre Street for the NC alignment and they were estimating $50M/km for an at-grade line (~$500M in total) but it's now over $200M/km. That's a major factor in causing Stage 1 to be so short but nobody has explained why.
Where is the $200M/km coming from for the NC corridor? Do you mean that's their estimate for the portion not yet planned for construction (i.e. 16th Ave north) or the part that is planned (16th Ave south to include bridge) or the original wild plan of deep subway tunnels to 16 Ave?
Yeah - I still don't entirely understand how the central north section ended up out of control - I suspect utilities and wanted to maintain extra road capacity requiring additional property acquisition, but I don't remember seeing adequate explanations.
And yeah, high level estimates be high level estimates! This one grew as we added features (more underground stations is one), as we investigated ground condition (worse than expected), as the route was shifted to stop neighbourhoods from complaining (hello north Ramsay! It would have been cheaper to just expropriate all of north Ramsay!). The city also chose to clean up an environmental liability as part of the project instead of securing the cheapest land for the maintenance centre.
At every stage the city added features to assuage critics (less road crossings, more elevated track, more tunnel, moving what will need to be the largest station by platform size (the new arena) underground). From the outside it seems the project team's communication back to council on the costs versus benefits, and other options to meet goals in a different way was minimal at best. Decisions were made in isolation instead as one coherrent whole which led the city down several path dependencies in interest of getting work starting sooner.
What is clear to me is that this council, and who they trust to manage large projects, has let the city down now on two efforts: the greenline and the Olympic bid.
That doesn't mean the Green Line should be thrown out and restarted, but a quick as possible CBA on different features needs to be done to make the right calls by the new council in the fall/January, and a sharing as much information as possible needs to happen on contracting strategy. Then the province needs to get out of the way.
I agree with your assessment - the Greenline is a story of scope-creep and attempts to "have your cake and eat it to" all over the place. Checks and balances to manage these things weren't effective or lost effectiveness as the project dragged on.
On the local engagement side weird, expensive choices were made to appease small groups of stakeholders (North Ramsay) and on the larger-scale political gamesmanship (give both North and South a bit of what they want to build enough support to do any of it). Provincial meddling further exacerbated this process creating more spin, delays and politics in an already politically captured process.
A weird thing for me over the past years was the bizarre amount of power in the process individuals seemed to have. From those three politically connected old guys who got a special Council meeting just for them, to individual homeowners and landowners re-routing the route like in Ramsay, the whole thing had a weird amount of specific hands touching the conversation. I don't know if this is normal for Canadian transit projects but it certainly didn't seem to help.
All of this politics rests on a shaky foundation (by international standards) of more expensive, less effective transit infrastructure delivery in local, national and North American contexts.
A key problem with a political process that is so easily manipulated by vested, current stakeholders and individuals is that the real trade-offs - the ones that could have materially changed the cost or scope - couldn't really seem to be really considered. Consider two examples for which is cheaper. Both create an equally fast and effective LRT system:
- LRT added to Centre Street at grade, removing car lanes. To appease some current stakeholders, land is expropriated to allow road to be widened again. This cost is added to the LRT project budget.
- LRT added to Centre Street at grade, removing car lanes. The roads department is free to add expropriation and expansion of Centre Street to a future projects list where it get ranked and sorted with all other roads investments. Spoiler alert: vehicle capacity would never be prioritized again on this route so the expansion project would never happen.
Want a cheap, fast and effective transit for all 40km? Easy - get rid of all car access/expansion but keep the route at-grade and give it green light priority at every intersection. Make all funding conditional on zero expropriation of private land and 100% transit priority. Perhaps that's a bit harsh for a real-world example, but I think the principle of it is clear enough.
If we can't stomach the horror of transit being so obviously prioritized in a transit project, go the grade separated route with tiny automated trains, small stations and high speeds (Canada Line style). Yeah it might have capacity issues in a decade or two, but in the meantime you have 100,000 new riders with political capital of their own to help rally the next multi-billion dollar funding tranche. Play the political long game but do it on transit's terms.
In summary, the problem with transit in this city - which the Greenline is a key example of - is it's never actually about transit at all. It's about politics to mitigate the impact of transit to drivers. It's about the politics to pit one area against each other. Or it's the politics to pit one tier of government against another (funny that ring road projects never do this).
