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Edmonton also was much more fiscally conservative in the 80s and 90s than Calgary, and ended up with much less stuff as a result. Pools, what eventually became the Arts Commons, City Hall (with office component), and LRT expansion all happened in Calgary and not in Edmonton because Calgary borrowed money and Edmonton didn't.
yeah.. that's why Edmonton looks depression
Years after, the main planner of the Edmonton LRT project said he wished they had have gone the Calgary route instead of the tunnel. That was a few years back, and who knows he may change his mind now that the systems are built out more.
Wonder how much of the green line’s ultimate buildout could get done if the same street level design was down today?
How difficult is it to make one of the lines low floor? I'm curious if they'd lower the platforms or raise the tracks. Curious if any cities have done such a retrofit. If we were to build another surface line downtown, it should be low floor, so we don't have the massive station area which makes the street a surface subway station rather than a mixed use area.
Lots of stations are close to road crossings, so platform modification it is. Replace all the platforms, and for others, replace platforms, elevators, and escalators. It would take a long time, and any savings over the very long term when the platforms came up for renewal, would be taken up having to buy more, more expensive, vehicles for similar capacity.
I just don’t think we need 4 oversized one way freeways through the downtown (4th, 5th, 6th and 9th). Repurposing most of the 6 Ave ROW to serve LRT and bus lines seems reasonable to me and I would imagine it would reduce a lot of the bottle necks we see with capacity on 7 Ave currently. We have so much space at grade downtown in the ROWs I think we don’t necessarily need to go underground.
If we figured out how to complete the vision of the Bow Trail Connector (connect 4 Ave east to Bow Trail west, and connect 5th Ave east with Bow Trail east), it would be much easier to do.
Back in 2020, they released a document that looked at various options. If you didn't have to cross the CPR tracks and connect North and SE you could save a lot of money. For about 15% more than $4.9B estimate of the selected 2020 plan, you could have a NC line from 64th run down Centre Street to 6th Av S (at-grade) and a SE line go from Shepard into the core then elevated on 10th Av S to 2 St SW.
I'm sorry, but I'm going to keep saying this. You need to learn what a freeway is. These are one-way avenues with wide sidewalks, bus routes, street parking, traffic lights every 160 metres, buildings fronting them. Traffic moves 50 km/h when it's not stopped at a light. You can walk or bike down them, they're fine. Literally nothing could be further from a freeway.
