Administration settles on preferred Green Line route through Victoria Park
Recommendation that involves tunnelling under existing Red Line, will be presented to council
City officials have landed on their preferred route for the future Green Line LRT as it travels east through the Beltline to the planned Inglewood-Ramsay station.
Administration will recommend to council that the C-Train line go north underground from the Centre Street station on 12th Avenue to 10th Avenue, where it would come to the surface and travel parallel to the south side of the Canadian Pacific tracks.
In April, the city decided the new LRT route will run underground through the Beltline from Second Street S.W. to Macleod Trail S.E.
Its potential routes eastward have been complicated by the location of Calgary Transit's bus barns, next to the Elbow River at 12th Avenue S.E.
Planners have been examining four possible routes:
- Aligning the LRT north of the bus barns, an option officials said would slow the train down and cause too much wear and tear on train cars due to the the tight turns.
- Having the LRT run south of the bus barn and cross the Elbow River on MacDonald Avenue, an option that was met with opposition in Ramsay, where as many as 10 houses would have be torn down.
- Building the tracks in two stages, allowing the Green Line to skirt the bus barns until they are re-located — an estimated $300-million undertaking for which there is no immediate plan.
- Have the line jog north underground from the Centre Street station on 12th Avenue to 10th Avenue, where it would surface and run parallel to the south side of the CPR tracks.
After consulting with area residents and examining the technical pros and cons of each route, planners now say option four is their preferred route.
"No single option serves all stakeholders and meets all program objectives without trade-offs, but administration believes that Option 4: Transition to 10 Avenue S presents the best balance across all evaluation criteria," the city said in a release.
The route would minimize impacts to the existing traffic network, allow for faster travel times for the LRT, minimize impacts on the bus barns and limit the need to remove houses, it said.
But the plan would be more complex to build, requiring a tunnel under the existing Red Line LRT and some historic properties, the city said.
Administration will formally recommend the alignment to council later this month.
Coun. Gian-Carlo Carra says he's pleased with this route because the LRT and will not run through residential areas in Ramsay, yet it meets the needs of other nearby communities.
"This is underground. This is away from traffic. This is in no way gumming up the city streets. This is in no way sort of compromising the public realm. It does everything we want it to do," he said.
The multibillion-dollar Green Line, which will use low-floor trains, will eventually stretch across the city from Country Hills Village in north-central Calgary to the southeast community of Seton.