Still time to avert the Green Line catastrophe

Decision day is coming to Calgary on the Green Line LRT and Calgarians will soon know if the line will go ahead as proposed or if sanity will prevail.

First, a tale of two cities. I’ve had the pleasure of living in both Edmonton and Calgary and using both LRT systems. They’ve developed differently. Edmonton made the decision to bury its line in the downtown from the outset; Calgary kept the downtown tracks above ground. Edmonton’s investment in costly downtown infrastructure came with the trade-off of fewer lines and fewer stations stretching shorter distances to the suburbs. Calgary was able to build longer lines and reach more communities, but it had to turn 7th Avenue downtown over entirely to transit.

So each city now has different challenges in building out their systems. Edmonton has to connect more communities to its downtown underground network, while

Calgary has to deal with a logjam of train traffic with downtown surface lines that are at capacity.

But while the debate on LRT expansion in Edmonton seems to have played out in the rational world of budget constraints, Calgary’s LRT expansion has taken a turn to fantasy.

Edmonton also has an LRT expansion underway. There was a robust debate in the fall about whether it should switch to a more cost-effective bus rapid transit instead of building the Edmonton Valley Line West LRT. The BRT would have cost half as much or even less, but in the end, LRT won the day. It is the second phase of a 27-kilometre Valley Line LRT, which will run from Mill Woods through downtown to the city’s west end. Its approval must have something to do with the price tag for the project, which is estimated to be a relatively reasonable $2.4 billion.

The project has the feel of the old way LRT systems used to be built in Calgary, where each leg is considered a separate line to connect a different quadrant of the city to the downtown core. When you do that, it creates a clear focus on the communities being served by the project and it simplifies the engineering.

Calgary is on the cusp of making a catastrophically bad decision to build an excessively expensive line that goes nowhere and never will.

It started out so grand — a sweeping 46-kilometre, $4.6-billion engineering marvel connecting commuters all the way in the deep south all the way to the deep north through the downtown. It had so much buy-in as the provincial and federal governments each kicked in a third of the cost. For years, there wasn’t a single critic to be found.

Then it all began to unravel. The city administration came clean that only half of it could be built and the cost escalated to $4.9 billion. Private citizen Jim Gray took a closer look at it with some engineering friends and warned that tunnelling seven storeys underground to get under the Bow River would be well nigh impossible without the cost of the project ballooning. The city reworked the plan but the cost didn’t go down. It has now escalated to be $5.5 billion once finance costs are factored in.

The main problem remains unresolved: it’s of no real use to anyone. It doesn’t go far enough south or far enough north to serve any of the communities that need it.

Meanwhile, residents are to believe that another $5-billion windfall will somehow materialize in the future to finish the job of building out both lines to where they need to go. Think again.

If you want realism in POST-COVID times, just listen to Edmonton Mayor Don Iveson. He is so concerned about the inability to meet his budget or get sufficient support from other orders of government he mused publicly about shutting down transit completely for the summer.

Here are the straight-up facts: The province and federal governments will not have the money anytime in the foreseeable future to finish the job. That much is clear.

Coun. Jeff Davison is spearheading an effort to split the line in two to build the full length of rail from the deep south to downtown and a BRT from the deep north to downtown and scrap the costly and over-engineered downtown and Bow River crossing. He’s got the right idea. It’s not too late to change course.