Green Line: Fewer stops, more money and an LRT project that runs on hope for the future
Downsized route nearly 'below minimum viable size,' councillor admits (even though he supports it)
The Green Line's first phase will now end at Ogden Road, around 60th Avenue S.E.
Up until this week, the plan was to extend Calgary's next LRT route to the 130th Avenue retail area.
Its estimated daily ridership will be 32,000 trips. That's down from the projected 56,000.
It will open with seven stations — instead of 13.
Council approved this scaled-back ambition to save money. This project will now cost $6.2 billion, rather than the previously reported… uh, $5.5 billion.
For city hall, it's an entirely unappetizing dish of bad news to serve to Calgarians who at every turn keep having to make do with less, be it thanks to soaring housing and mortgage costs, grocery bill bloat or residential water restrictions that may soon enter their third month.
Now, a Green Line that one could argue looks more like a Green Stub.
Short Line railroad
The argument that councillors now make, albeit often in rosier terms: it's still better than nothing. Every option, including walking away, was worse.
"We have to begin somewhere," Mayor Jyoti Gondek told CBC Radio's Calgary Eyeopener on Wednesday.
Persuading Calgarians that a $6.2-billion, 10-kilometre project, the costliest in the city's history, is a mere start? That might be a hard sell, especially to a public that's voting in a new council next year.
"This is flirting with just below minimum viable size (for an LRT line)," Coun. Gian-Carlo Carra admitted in an interview.
He quickly added that it should work fine and that hopefully more funding will come in to build additional track and stations so the Green Line doesn't remain this size for long. But in a environment of political and economic volatility, hope can't even buy you second-hand rail spikes.
The degree to which the Green Line planners had to downsize the project speaks to some of the biggest challenges facing the mission of serving southeast Calgary with rail transit.
One of them is that the vast majority of residents along the long-dreamed LRT route live in the deep-south neighbourhoods — Douglasdale, McKenzie Towne, Auburn Bay, each with 12,000 or more residents.
That compares with about 14,600 combined in the communities outside the downtown core that will be served by this shorter Green Line phase, in Inglewood, Ramsay and Lynnwood/Millican/Ogden, which gets the train's terminus at its northern tip rather than a second station near Glenmore Trail. (And in the middle of that, traverse a large industrial park.)
If those larger southern communities could have been served by a giant, precision-aimed catapult, that might have been a tempting transit solution. But alas.
By comparison, look at the city's last new leg, the west LRT. Completed early last decade, with its six stations and eight kilometres, it straddles well-populated, established neighbourhoods all the way along — and its initial daily ridership was a strikingly similar 32,400. (For a more modest yesteryear total price of $1.4 billion.)
Way downtown
Another challenge with the Green Line's sticker shock is that downtown was vastly the most expensive segment of the LRT line, because the city intends to tunnel underground.
At-grade wasn't an option, as LRT multi-car chains are too long to work on the core's north-south blocks, and elevated tracks would have destroyed part of the Plus-15 network, not to mention the streetscape and adjacent skyscrapers' value.
A well-organized group of critics had pitched ending the line at the City Hall LRT in downtown's east end, which would have more heavily burdened the main Seventh Avenue lines and have offered no future extension options to Calgary's north end.
Gondek reasoned that any other configuration of stops and routes the city examined would have had lower ridership than the 32,000 now forecast, making them harder sells to secure the $1.5 billion from each of the federal and provincial governments.
Inflation has been the other killer challenge afflicting all infrastructure and construction.
Council green-lit the project at $5.5 billion in June 2020, and the industrial project price index has risen by 30 per cent since then. Factor in the cost of labour as well, and it shouldn't be surprising how far things have spiralled beyond the city's financial means.
Had the city, province and Calgary Flames tried to resurrect the new arena for the $550 million agreed to in 2019 rather than the $926 million that's now dedicated to the project, it would have been a vastly stripped-down hockey venue, too. (Metal bleachers? Standing room only?)
Phase 1(b)
Officials have said the elements stripped from the budget — including a Beltline station at Centre Street and finishing at the 130th-Avenue area Shepard station — would have added an extra $1 billion to the upwards-revised budget for the Green Line.
That isn't much additional money — relatively speaking — to double the project's distance and service population, having already gotten the tracks through downtown and across Deerfoot Trail and the Bow River in the south.
But that extra billion doesn't seem to be anywhere near forthcoming from a provincial government that now labels the project as NDP Leader/ex-mayor Naheed Nenshi's fault. (Firing back, Nenshi charges that years of delay and further study ordered by then-UCP premier Jason Kenney is to blame. Which Kenney would dispute. Summertime, and the finger-pointing is easy.)
Gondek, Carra and other Green Line defenders say there could be money to tap from Ottawa's new Canada Public Transit Fund, though the Liberals, who pledged that money would start flowing in 2026, stand to be wiped out of office by the Conservatives a year earlier.
Federal Conservatives have tended to not feel the need to spend and promise their way to votes in Calgary, although it was before the 2015 election when then-prime minister Stephen Harper and then-minister Kenney made the first splashy promise of $1.5 billion to turn the Green Line hopes into serious LRT project plans.
On Tuesday, the 10 councillors who voted to plow ahead with the greatly scaled-back project are doing so with the confidence or hope that somebody, somewhere, at some point will make this train line a longer and more viable one.
They also did it with a dose of pragmatism that eventually Calgary's continually growing southeast and north will need rail transit, and if they don't bite the bullet and do so now — with more than $1 billion of work and land already sunk into the project — it will cost substantially more to resurrect the Green Line in the future.
Then there are the five other councillors who voted against the project, who appear to have read the current mood of frustration with rising costs and sacrifices everywhere in urban life, and concluded this is too little for too much.
None of them, with the exception of northern Coun. Sean Chu, serve communities anywhere near the Green Line's first phase, nor where the full city-spanning route is planned to go — assumedly, eventually, potentially, hypothetically.
Corrections
- An earlier version of this analysis stated that the LRT line's first phase was initially forecast at 65,000 daily riders. That larger projected figure actually includes two future stations north of downtown, as part of what the Green Line group calls "Stage 1."Aug 01, 2024 10:52 AM MT
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