MF YYC Politics - there, I mega did it

[powderjunkie]

Originally Posted by Mazrim

They're relevant because so much of the current discussion is about the earlier decisions made that set the scope and layout of the project. If these so-called obvious problems in the methodology of choosing the alignment type were so obvious, why didn't the province raise the red flag then?

Because it previously resulted in an acceptable scope of delivery for the given price tag. The problem isn't the alignment itself, but the price...which clearly can't be resolved on this alignment as they've already drawn every possible ounce of blood from it.

The selected alignment can be justified as 'the best' for a whole bunch of valid reasons (that not everyone would agree on which is fine)...but cost and risk and deliverability were poorly weighted. It's hard to fathom how anyone could resort to appeal to authority at this point.

The UCP are clearly idiots. But that does not mean the city is infallible. The absolute best anyone can say in good faith is that the Lynnwood terminus is the least bad of awful choices.

Originally Posted by Torture

Nah man, you can just write out a plan for a major transit system on a hockey forum in 3 minutes. Nothing to it.

And the experts can spend 9 years and $2B without laying an inch of track. Many of the same experts who said in 2015 they could build 40kms for $4.5B opening on *checks calendar* next Thursday.

[Locke]

Originally Posted by PaperBagger'14

Buy the land, flatten out the top of the hill, lay down an asphalt tarmac, paint a large H with a circle around it, park your helicopter there.

I tried that. The City's not selling.

Thanks Gondek!

[iggy_oi]

Originally Posted by pepper24

Green Line LRT was going to cost too much and be way over budget if we wanted everything that was originally planned. $15B like posted above. Way too much and good to see it being cancelled.

Instead...

Extend the south line at Somerset-Bridlewood station east along the south part of the ring road all the way to the deep southeast (McKenzie Towne, Cranston, Auburn Bay etc.) with tons of rapid bus transit from surrounding communities and park and ride at stations.

Extend the NE line from Saddletowne station to airport. Up 60th St NE then west on Aiport Trail. Hopefully no issues with Airport tunnel and if tunnel was built without considering LRT expansion then that's just bad city planning.

For North Central. Increase bus capacity into downtown along Center Street and add more car pool/bus lanes.

Get back to 4 cars for each LRT, not sure why I only see 3 cars and full LRTs.

Firstly, welcome back to the thread. It’s always good to get as many differing opinions heard, even if I often consider some of those opinions to be less than well thought out.

Secondly, the idea of extending the existing red line to seton would be completely impractical and make the existing lines far worse. They already have plans to go further south to 210 ave, but additionally crossing an entire quadrant heading east would not only make the commute time to downtown using the lrt longer than driving, but would add way too many riders for 4 car trains to handle.

Basically it would service fewer communities, ruin the existing service and still cost an arm and a leg. Our governments do a good enough job of planning like that, we shouldn’t be encouraging it.

[fotze2]

Trust the science. That’s all we all need to do. Is trust the science.

[Mazrim]

Originally Posted by powderjunkie

The UCP are clearly idiots. But that does not mean the city is infallible. The absolute best anyone can say in good faith is that the Lynnwood terminus is the least bad of awful choices.

Oh, the Lynnwood terminus is bad. This was my reaction to that announcement.
https://forum.calgarypuck.com/showpo...postcount=4038

Originally Posted by powderjunkie

And the experts can spend 9 years and $2B without laying an inch of track.

Would you have rather they wait to acquire property and relocate utilities until they had the design locked down 100%? That was the right call.

[Torture]

Originally Posted by Mazrim

Oh, the Lynnwood terminus is bad. This was my reaction to that announcement.
https://forum.calgarypuck.com/showpo...postcount=4038


Would you have rather they wait to acquire property and relocate utilities until they had the design locked down 100%? That was the right call.

Nah, just put the track over buildings and whatever else is there. Moving utilities is for suckers too, just plow that train track right through.

[PepsiFree]

The good thing is that prices for things historically go down, and more favourable terms are given to builders who have shown they could pull the plug at any minute, so really this situation can only get better.

[GGG]

https://pub-calgary.escribemeetings....umentId=131775

Read through the assessment report. I still dont think they made the correct decision at the time with the information in the report. The North LRT south BRT is better yet in the ranking they hammer it. It was 1 billion cheaper at the time and because of the limited tunnel and bridge scope (bridge ran down center st).

One egregious example of a plain to see error is in the Cost section for A2 they say the north segment will cost 8 million per year and the south section will cost 28 million per year opex. (A2 is 16th to Shepard B1 is North BRT / South BRT). Then for B1 the operation costs for North BRT is 56 million. Based on the alignments those costs should be in the same ballpark. It appears they didn’t include the costs for the existing North BRT system in the considerations.

This is a report written to justify a selection it is not a dispassionate evaluation.

[powderjunkie]

Originally Posted by Mazrim

Oh, the Lynnwood terminus is bad. This was my reaction to that announcement.
https://forum.calgarypuck.com/showpo...postcount=4038


Would you have rather they wait to acquire property and relocate utilities until they had the design locked down 100%? That was the right call.

I'd rather they recognized the actual magnitude of the project(s) and reverted to more sensible phasing. Namely BRT for the "shovel-ready" SE. There was even a time when the experts thought it was the best phasing.

Because really there are three projects here - each of which would be the largest infrastructure project in the city's history (North, SE, core tunnel).


I don't want to throw shade at administration - they are wonderful and smart people, and they only have a small portion of blame for steering the ship into the rocks. But it's also clear that a lot of the information they provided for analysis has been wrong time and again. It was just fundamentally piss poor risk management.


But there's one thing I'm sure we can all agree on: this is mostly Sean Chu's fault.

[para transit fellow]

Why would Calgary continue to operate a BRT alongside an LRT line?

[BlackArcher101]

Really at this point I'll take any bonafide legit form of transit in the SE. There's a reason ridership is low down here, no one takes it because they don't want to waste 2+ hours of their day. Currently I just Uber over to the red line.

[GGG]

Originally Posted by para transit fellow

Why would Calgary continue to operate a BRT alongside an LRT line?

In A2 they have LRT to 16th ave and buses continuing to run from the northern communities to downtown per the alignment sheet

In B2 you just have BRT for both North and South.

In A2 they say the northern operating cost is 6 million, in B2 the cost of Northern BRT is 56 million.

So if this is an accurate comparison running the BRT between 16th ave and downtown costs 50 million a year. This does not make sense if running the rest of the BRT network costs only 6 million in A2. What is most likely happening here is the BRT costs for the existing transit is not being considered in A1 and A2 and the BRT in B2 does not get credit for the replacement of existing buses.

Either way there is no way that the same BRT service level is being compared in A1 and A2 vs B2.

To answer your question though the alignment sheet for A2 shows continuing Bus service all the way to downtown so they planned on running BRT from the North to downtown for the selected option.

[Joborule]

Originally Posted by GGG

https://pub-calgary.escribemeetings....umentId=131775

Read through the assessment report. I still dont think they made the correct decision at the time with the information in the report. The North LRT south BRT is better yet in the ranking they hammer it. It was 1 billion cheaper at the time and because of the limited tunnel and bridge scope (bridge ran down center st).

One egregious example of a plain to see error is in the Cost section for A2 they say the north segment will cost 8 million per year and the south section will cost 28 million per year opex. (A2 is 16th to Shepard B1 is North BRT / South BRT). Then for B1 the operation costs for North BRT is 56 million. Based on the alignments those costs should be in the same ballpark. It appears they didn’t include the costs for the existing North BRT system in the considerations.

This is a report written to justify a selection it is not a dispassionate evaluation.

The only thing to me from that evaluation that would make the NCLRT/SELRT unpalatable is how would the NC terminus in downtown actually fit on centre street by 7th Ave? The proposed two car length stations I feel wouldn't be able to fit the N/S blocks along that area. Closing off an entire major E-W road there is a deal-breaker. I'm okay with the green line being on ground crossing MacLeod in the Beltline since it doesn't close the road, but closing 6th Ave at Centre? Nah. So they would have to tunnel/elevate still.

But I agree with your assessment that it felt these studies were done with a thumb firmly on the scale to justify the full tunnel of downtown. The other study posted in here by accord from 2016 ( https://pub-calgary.escribemeetings....ocumentId=8291) was comparing the downtown alignment options was heavily biased against the elevated option, although it actually ranked comparatively close to the hybrid option (at grade Beltline, tunnel 2nd Street, bridge over Prince's Island, at grade on Centre for 9th Ave station, underground 16th ave) and the bridge & tunnel option (still mostly same as hybrid, but centre street is fully tunneled to 16th ave), it never got any overall star rankings for any of the categories.

The only criticism for that option that I was seeing was "elevated is aesthetically unappealing", "blocks out the sky." But costs rankins, train service, and deliverability were favorable for it. If they made those weighted more, and "community wellbeing" items weighted less, it likely would've been the best or second best option of the bunch.

The city really, really wanted their tunnel. Now they may get nothing at all. But hey, at least 2 Street will see the blue skies. It's what the city is know for after all.

[powderjunkie]

Originally Posted by Joborule

The only thing to me from that evaluation that would make the NCLRT/SELRT unpalatable is how would the NC terminus in downtown actually fit on centre street by 7th Ave? The proposed two car length stations I feel wouldn't be able to fit the N/S blocks along that area. Closing off an entire major E-W road there is a deal-breaker. I'm okay with the green line being on ground crossing MacLeod in the Beltline since it doesn't close the road, but closing 6th Ave at Centre? Nah. So they would have to tunnel/elevate still.

The practical answer is shallow cut/cover from 4th-7th. Presumably that would be comparable or cheaper than a separate bridge over the Bow, but more disruptive in the short term.

Just another example of preference seeking by not spelling that out a bit more.

Options B2 and C2 are similar in terms of elevated along the beltline, but not crossing the tracks into the core...even though it is $500M cheaper than the preferred option...where that $500M could have been used to resolve the [intentional] drawbacks of that alignment

[You Need a Thneed]

Originally Posted by pepper24

Green Line LRT was going to cost too much and be way over budget if we wanted everything that was originally planned. $15B like posted above. Way too much and good to see it being cancelled.

Instead...

Extend the south line at Somerset-Bridlewood station east along the south part of the ring road all the way to the deep southeast (McKenzie Towne, Cranston, Auburn Bay etc.) with tons of rapid bus transit from surrounding communities and park and ride at stations.

Extend the NE line from Saddletowne station to airport. Up 60th St NE then west on Aiport Trail. Hopefully no issues with Airport tunnel and if tunnel was built without considering LRT expansion then that's just bad city planning.

For North Central. Increase bus capacity into downtown along Center Street and add more car pool/bus lanes.

Get back to 4 cars for each LRT, not sure why I only see 3 cars and full LRTs.

Airport Trail tunnel was built with room for LRT.

We don't have enough LRVs for 4 car trains for most trains. Need another $400 million or so in LRVs to be able to do that.

[You Need a Thneed]

Originally Posted by GGG

https://pub-calgary.escribemeetings....umentId=131775

Read through the assessment report. I still dont think they made the correct decision at the time with the information in the report. The North LRT south BRT is better yet in the ranking they hammer it. It was 1 billion cheaper at the time and because of the limited tunnel and bridge scope (bridge ran down center st).

One egregious example of a plain to see error is in the Cost section for A2 they say the north segment will cost 8 million per year and the south section will cost 28 million per year opex. (A2 is 16th to Shepard B1 is North BRT / South BRT). Then for B1 the operation costs for North BRT is 56 million. Based on the alignments those costs should be in the same ballpark. It appears they didn’t include the costs for the existing North BRT system in the considerations.

This is a report written to justify a selection it is not a dispassionate evaluation.

Setting aside which route is better / cheaper - a big part of the reasoning why the SE was chosen is because Councilor Chu was actively against the LRT going to his ward, and Councilor Keating was the biggest supporter for the project.

[powderjunkie]

Originally Posted by You Need a Thneed

Setting aside which route is better / cheaper - a big part of the reasoning why the SE was chosen is because Councilor Chu was actively against the LRT going to his ward, and Councilor Keating was the biggest supporter for the project.

So...it wasn't the experts' decision after all?

[pepper24]

Originally Posted by You Need a Thneed

Airport Trail tunnel was built with room for LRT.

We don't have enough LRVs for 4 car trains for most trains. Need another $400 million or so in LRVs to be able to do that.

Good info thanks.

That's good that airport tunnel can handle a future line expansion. Hopefully extending to the airport is being planned for the future. Probably taxi lobby groups have been success in stopping it because the Saddletowne station is so close. I think to keep being a leading city that ranks consistently in the top 10 liveable cities in the world tying the airport to downtown would be huge. Vancouver and Chicago have that while cities like NYC and LA don't.

$400M to add more cars seems like a cheap investment compared to the $6B+ we're seeing on a green line that keeps changing to less stops and less riders with an ever balloning budget compared to what was initially approved. I see so many 3 car trains completely packed during rush hour or sporting events that I think it turns people away. They spent tons of money expanding old Olympic era stations to handle 4 cars so best to spend a bit more to complete this. Make what we currently have the most effective it can be seems logical while also adding new lines or expanding current lines.

[Bigtime]

Originally Posted by powderjunkie

So...it wasn't the experts' decision after all?

From what I remember at the time Keating became a champion for the SE portion of the line, while Chu was silent/invisible. Politics still plays a role and I have to think he definitely helped move things towards the SE being done first.

Related/unrelated: Keating was one of the good ones, asking lots of questions and wasn't afraid to change his mind/opinion on things after getting all the information and feedback. Definitely missed from council.

[You Need a Thneed]

Originally Posted by Bigtime

From what I remember at the time Keating became a champion for the SE portion of the line, while Chu was silent/invisible. Politics still plays a role and I have to think he definitely helped move things towards the SE being done first.

Related/unrelated: Keating was one of the good ones, asking lots of questions and wasn't afraid to change his mind/opinion on things after getting all the information and feedback. Definitely missed from council.

Chu campaigned in 2013 on NOT having the green line go to his ward.