Quote:
Originally Posted by Barnes
There's almost 50,000 people living between Douglasdale and 22x along the Deerfoot corridor alone in the deep SE. Add in all of the people that live all over the city that work in and around the Ogden/Ramsey industrial area, Quarry Park, and soon Seton and the South Calgary Hospital. Access to Inglewood, East Village, Stampede and the Saddledome too.
While the West Line is needed and important for commuters, it is hardly needed more than the SELRT. It gone done first as it was low hanging fruit compared to the SELRT.
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Pretty much. The WestLRT will actually be a relatively low ridership line, but a solid ridership corridor nonetheless due to, as SCUD mentions, the high concentration of downtown employees. To be fair, bizaro's argument regarding the demographics does have some merit, but it hasn't stopped the bus ridership in that area from being very strong for many years. The 101, 104 buses in particular are some of the busiest in the city, and it took the 301 BRT service only a few years to go from a starter project to extremely busy.
The southeast line will have a sizeable ridership in the short term and a very high ridership in the long term (perhaps second only the south line). A lot of employment areas will be served, but quite honestly a lot of the industrial areas will still struggle to attract riders. Serving industrial areas with any transit is a tremendous challenge in the first place. The density is low, the pedestrian realm is poor, the built-form isn't conducive (low-rise buildings in odd configurations, uneven concentrations of people) and inherently low demand (lots of need-to-drive jobs).
As far as whether the west or southeast line should have gone ahead first, there were a few differences aside from short to medium term ridership that factored in. The west line required no new downtown infrastructure (very costly for the southeast line, it remains one of the biggest challenges), no new vehicle technology, no adding of traffic to the existing system chokepoint (downtown). The cost for the complete line almost to the edge of the current built area (minus the future Aspen Woods station) was less than half of the same thing for the southeast corridor, and the City didn't, and still doesn't have the funds to pay for the southeast line. The west line was also more ready to go ahead. The general routing had been in place for decades (it is for the southeast as well, just not as long) and much of the land use studies and consultation had been done.
The north central line will be a longer term need. The area south Beddington already has decent enough transit or is proximate enough to the existing northwest and northeast lines. As intensification in this area occurs, the demand could start to outstrip the achievable capacity. The demand for the line will be driven primarily by the growth in the areas north of Beddington. There are a lot of people in that area currently, but they are also not as far away from downtown as McDouglasdaletowne. In terms of planning and preparation, this one isn't nearly at the stage that the west and southeast lines are at, but that is starting to happen.