Battle over Green Line heats up
City is once again looking at possibility of putting LRT down MacDonald Avenue
The team behind a 46-kilometre, multibillion dollar light rail transit line is reconsidering an alignment from the Beltline to the Ramsay/ Inglewood area, which would cut a historic neighbourhood in two.
The city’s Green Line team is re-exploring a street-level LRT on MacDonald Avenue S.E., much to the disappointment of Ramsay residents who previously opposed that route and believed it was “taken completely off the table” in the fall.
“We’re preparing to fight,” said Erin Joslin, Ramsay Community Association vice-president external.
“We’ve been in constant engagement with the city and I thought we were working well together. Now we’re in a position where we have to fight it. Instead of working with the city to find solutions, we’ve got to push back.”
Joslin said if the Green Line travels down MacDonald Avenue S.E, it would cut off the north tip of the tiny inner-city community of Ramsay, make the area a “dead zone,” destroy heritage properties and contribute to growing concerns about community access.
The re-evaluation of MacDonald Avenue S.E comes after several Green Line alignment options in the densely populated Beltline were narrowed down to just two in December: a 12th Avenue surface option and a 12th Avenue combined tunnel and surface option.
In an interview Thursday, Green Line project manager Fabiola MacIntyre said further evaluation since December has revealed challenges for the 12th Avenue alignment east of 4th Street S.E., around the Victoria Park Transit Centre.
“That facility, it currently stores and dispatches over 300 transit vehicles a day,” MacIntyre said.
“When we looked at the alignment ... the Green Line LRT sharing that north side (of the transit facility) and we got into the technical engineering and drawings of that, we could see there were operational challenges for both the Victoria Park Transit facility as well as the LRT.”
As a result, the team is considering alternative options of how the Green Line would travel between the Beltline at the west end, Victoria Park in the middle and Ramsay on the east end.
Those options include a surface LRT on MacDonald Avenue S.E., and a combined surface and tunnel route on the same road.
In a 12-minute video about the matter, posted online Thursday, area councillor Gian-Carlo Carra said the Green Line team “stepped into a hornet’s nest of dissatisfaction and anger,” and he outlined four issues concerning the MacDonald Avenue alignment.
MacIntyre stressed that considering an alternate route is par for the course on a major project like the Green Line and all possibilities are being evaluated.
“Our job is to look at all the options. Nothing has been decided,” she said.
Citizens are being asked to provide their feedback at a public meeting on March 2, and the Green Line team is scheduled to present area alignment options to the city’s Transportation and Transit Committee in midMarch before recommending a single alignment later this year.
The final route for the 46-kilometre LRT, which is slated to begin construction in mid-to-late 2019, won’t be approved until June. Councillors and city officials have recently conceded the entire line will easily exceed the initial $4.5-billion estimate and take far longer to complete endto-end than initially expected.
The federal government has committed $1.5 billion in funding for the Green Line and city council has pledged $1.56 billion over 30 years.
The cash-strapped NDP government has signalled support but hasn’t yet committed any funds.
We’ve been in constant engagement with the city and I thought we were working well together. Now we’re in a position where we have to fight it.