[frinkprof]

A few things:

1. It is critically important to cross the Bow River to a station on the north side in Phase 1. The danger in stopping at Eau Claire is having the Nose Creek alignment go back on the table. Even a subpar solution to get the alignment on to Center Street is far better than this scenario rearing its head again. Still not out of the woods on that just yet (see below), but to have a phase 1 alignment that still crosses the Bow River is a huge win at this stage of the process.

2. Keeping it underground (mostly) downtown and Beltline is good. Having underground to surface portals, especially in Eau Claire isn't ideal, but given the musings were trying to shoe-horn in as much at-grade operation as possible, or have a SE LRT that ended in Beltline, this is as good as it gets in that context. Very workable.

3. Everyone (particularly Fuzz) should keep in mind that the conversation and information coming out right now is strictly dealing with the Phase 1 plan. 16th Avenue will be crossed, likely grade separated, in a future phase. The station built as part of Phase 1 may even be a temporary station until a future phase crosses 16th Avenue and builds a more permanent station closer to the intersection. This was done for Edmonton's north line where a temporary station was built at NAIT and a permanent station can now be built as part of a future phase. In Edmonton's case, they were waiting for the full closure of the municipal airport. In Calgary's case, it is building what they can with the pot of money they have now. The temporary station thing is very speculative on my part, but they are definitely leaving the 16th Avenue road crossing to a later phase on purpose, so that future decision makers can figure out how to do it based on the funding and priorities at that time, which I would guess will lead to a grade-separated crossing there.

4. There's potentially much more drama and disruption to come, likely at the hands of the provincial government. Without getting into just how incompetent, manipulative, vindictive and corrupt the provincial government has proven to be, I would fully expect more moving of the goalposts. This includes further delays to funding commitments, scrapping of funding commitments altogether, making changes to the composition of City Council (including number of councillor positions) ahead of the municipal election, and uploading the management and planning of major transit infrastructure projects to the provincial government (basically going back to the drawing board with the Green Line under the Province, putting Nose Creek alignment back on the board, at grade operation in the downtown or downtown scrapped altogether). For a case study, see the Ford government in Ontario in the handling of the City of Toronto and TTC projects.

All in all, yeah there's some stuff to figure out, and the transition from bridge to at-grade on Centre Street could be awkward, and continuing to need buses cross the Centre Street Bridge into downtown until more is built isn't ideal. However, the real alternatives here are far worse (and I'm worried they may still happen). Given the environment and developments thus far, I had strong doubts that there would be a workable solution come out of this. I think there is a workable solution on the table, and I'm taking that as a positive.