Quote:
Originally Posted by accord1999
But it's also clear that over the years, interaction with his communities has completely changed his mind and the stub of 16th Avenue would be completely unacceptable, especially to his re-election chances.
We'll have to see how the actual sub-phases of construction are laid out. It might be that they build out from Shepard to downtown, saving the most expensive parts for last. I hope that they release the details of Phase 1.
Given the much larger scale of the SE LRT compared to any one of the original legs plus the challenge of the tunnel, I'm fully expecting that the SE LRT will consume all the resources of this boom. The NC LRT will have to wait for the next boom, decades later and where it will still have to compete with extensions to the existing lines. After all, the NC has been skipped over every other train building boom, why not the next several?
I see plenty of enthusiasm for light rail in the US, especially from the city level. It's only once projects get underway and the costs starting rising and promises are scaled back that the enthusiasm wanes. Honolulu was popular at $3 billion, but not so much when it's approaching $8 billion.
I also see no reason or evidence that Canadians or Calgarians are so much superior to Americans on project management and construction that Phase 1 will be built perfectly or that Calgarians will tolerate overruns or accept continual increases in taxes to pay for it. Even Vancouverites wouldn't accept a 0.5% sales tax increase to pay for mass transit.
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I think we're quibbling over a bunch of small, diverging topics, so I'll try to be concise and not multi-quote.
- Whether or not Sean Chu has changed his mind, it's too late. There wasn't a strong voice on the North Central LRT side early on, and even if he starts fighting now, Shane Keating has been a stronger advocate for SE LRT all along and will continue to be, and Chu isn't an effective councilor on pretty much any file. I think the only thing I can say for certain about Chu is that we don't know the depth of his ineptitude.
- There won't be subphases of what they build first (Phase 1), from a construction or project management perspective. Whatever the final approved Phase 1 is will be built on multiple fronts as one larger construction project. By the time any cost overruns become realized, the whole first phase will be under construction (or nearly completed) such that you can't cut it into "subphases."
- The NC LRT was "skipped over" every other time because the first three lines were built in the 80s and were higher value routes. When the West LRT was built, the North Central line was languishing in a sort of planning hell (official plan was Nose Creek valley). It is now planned and ready to be built. All this time, the North Central catchment area was very well served by buses because Centre Street worked so well for buses up until now where it is hit its capacity threshold.
- The transit tax plebiscite in Vancouver was a pretty bad political exercise. Right before the election the BC Liberals turned around and promised to fund the Surrey LRT and the Broadway Skytrain extension which would have effectively been what the Translink tax would have funded.
- There may be some want and political will in American cities for high capacity rapid transit projects, but it's a matter of scale in comparison to Canada. No metro area in the US of comparable population to Calgary has anything close to the network Calgary does, nor the clamor to expand it. Kitchener-Waterloo and Hamilton are in the stages of building LRT. No city in the US of comparable size even has that on their radar. In terms of transit ridership in North America, Calgary is fifth behind New York, Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver.