Go Elevated or try for Underground?

  • Work with the province and go with the Elevated option

    Votes: 40 80.0%

  • Try another approach and go for Underground option

    Votes: 6 12.0%

  • Cancel it altogether

    Votes: 1 2.0%

  • Go with a BRT solution

    Votes: 3 6.0%
  • Total voters
    50
darwink said:
Very happy they are going to the next phase. I’d like to think we all acknowledge on here that that wasn’t guaranteed.
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All they are doing at this step is picking the team that will advance the design to the point that we will know with more certainty what it might cost to build - the question will be what the city, province, and Feds will still want to go ahead knowing those numbers.

I don’t see how it could have failed at this step.
 
ByeByeBaby said:
If you're running the same trains on the red, blue and green lines to save money by sharing garages, then you need some way that trains can drive between the lines to get to the garages. That's the connection that is required. It doesn't matter how much land CT does or doesn't have next to Metis Trail, they would either need to build a connection that connects red/blue above grade and green below grade track in the absolute middle of the downtown, or build some out-of-downtown connection, and at a minimum that **will** cost a billion dollars, whether there's one track or two.

Here's a question for you. Let's say I own a Toyota Prius sedan, a Toyota Highlander Hybrid SUV, and a gas-powered Volkswagen Jetta sedan. Do I take the Highlander to a garage for the SUV technology and the other two to the same sedan-technology mechanic? If not, why not?

There are a hundred technical systems inside a rail car; the height of the floor is only one of them. Actually, it's none of them; it's the result of a design that combines motors, brakes, bogies, controls, panels, etc.

There is a grain of truth in that there is an efficiency in operating a fleet of identical vehicles rather than a mix.That efficiency only goes so far; if we had two trains of one type and one of another and two of a third, there would be a benefit to ensuring we have five trains of the same model instead. But Calgary operates fleets of 50 to 80 vehicles of a given model; that's plenty large enough to get that increase in efficiency.
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Build an at grade non Revenue track south of downtown before the Green Line goes underground connecting to the Red Line? It could be single track down the middle of a street. Clearly if you're trying to be cost effective you are not building underground. AFAIK the Green Line is less than 1km from the red line (south of the tracks *and* above ground) when it goes into a tunnel? 1 billion for <1km of track seems . . . steep.
 
superelevation said:
Build an at grade non Revenue track south of downtown before the Green Line goes underground connecting to the Red Line? It could be single track down the middle of a street. Clearly if you're trying to be cost effective you are not building underground. AFAIK the Green Line is less than 1km from the red line (south of the tracks *and* above ground) when it goes into a tunnel? 1 billion for <1km of track seems . . . steep.
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$1billion is steep, but that’s the price of projects these days. In 15 years it’ll feel like a bargain.
 
whatchyyc said:
c'mon guys we're not broke... we can afford dissimilar lines like any other city
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But the project is broke, that's why it's been cut down 20 km in length, and made the extraordinary decision to go at-grade on Centre Street N to 16th Avenue with an at-grade station there.

Pretty much everything related to the Green Line has seen its corners cut, except the Shepard maintenance yard which was built on the assumption of needing to store and maintain upwards of a hundred LRVs. But they'll only need a fraction of that for Stage 1 because of low ridership.
 
accord1999 said:
But the project is broke, that's why it's been cut down 20 km in length, and made the extraordinary decision to go at-grade on Centre Street N to 16th Avenue with an at-grade station there.

Pretty much everything related to the Green Line has seen its corners cut, except the Shepard maintenance yard, which was built on the assumption of needing to store and maintain upwards of a hundred LRVs. But they'll only need a fraction of that for Stage 1 because of low ridership.
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Didn't the West LRT go from 700 million to 1.4 billion? I don't think it's that shocking that they were overambitious with the original project scope. We'll see what the next 16 months brings but I really hope there's not too many major changes from here on out or we'll never get anything built.
 
ahuch said:
Didn't the West LRT go from 700 million to 1.4 billion? I don't think it's that shocking that they were overambitious with the original project scope. We'll see what the next 16 months brings but I really hope there's not too many major changes from here on out or we'll never get anything built.
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But the lessons of the WLRT should have been to be more conservative like in the previous LRT lines. Instead they double-downed on the optimism and didn't make any hard trade-offs in the beginning so it needed to be reactively revised downwards as reality set it.

And at least much of the WLRT budget overrun happened during construction. The full Green Line has basically doubled in cost without even laying a single piece of track.
 
superelevation said:
Build an at grade non Revenue track south of downtown before the Green Line goes underground connecting to the Red Line? It could be single track down the middle of a street. Clearly if you're trying to be cost effective you are not building underground. AFAIK the Green Line is less than 1km from the red line (south of the tracks *and* above ground) when it goes into a tunnel? 1 billion for <1km of track seems . . . steep.
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The only place the Green Line is south of the tracks and above ground is indeed within 1 km from the existing LRT, but that LRT is the Blue Line and there's half of Memorial Drive, the Bow River, and Fort Calgary between the two. You keep talking like this is easy, but show me on the map where you're thinking of.

And this is beside the point; if it was free, it wouldn't be worth connecting the red and blue lines to the green.
 
accord1999 said:
But the lessons of the WLRT should have been to be more conservative like in the previous LRT lines. Instead they double-downed on the optimism and didn't make any hard trade-offs in the beginning so it needed to be reactively revised downwards as reality set it.

And at least much of the WLRT budget overrun happened during construction. The full Green Line has basically doubled in cost without even laying a single piece of track.
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They also porked up the West LRT with tons of road right-of-way, lane expansions and slip lanes everywhere.

There’s a lesson in the West LRT and all our transit projects that they generally shouldn’t be funding their competition, especially with such ridiculous over-designed standards, many of which run counter to the walkable, transit-oriented designs that make transit work well.

Bus bays aren’t transit infrastructure after all.
 
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