A single-slide show: Devin Dreeshen presents his Green Line map

When the province released its long-awaited study on how the Green Line LRT would get downtown, it presented the public — and city officials — with a single map.

On that map, the curving green bar standing in for the route is thicker than the downtown streets the project will loom above on elevated tracks. The white dots representing train stations are larger than city blocks.

Rather than release the $2.5-million provincially commissioned report that explains in detail how the UCP government intends to reauthor the City of Calgary's biggest transit decision, Transportation Minister Devin Dreeshen issued this map and a brief news release that boasted "Green Line back on track."

That release and map highlight that this revised plan extends down to Shepard — five stops farther southeast than the city's version, which included a tunnel downtown, for the same $6.2 billion.

But nothing in either the release nor the map spell out where the proposed elevated track will go. Most of those facts were gleaned through interviews with the minister: the train would roll on a concrete trackway above the Beltline's northernmost 10th Avenue, and then along Second Street S.W. downtown at the level currently occupied by three Plus-15 overpasses, before terminating above the existing Red and Blue Lines on Seventh Avenue.

Mayor Jyoti Gondek says the city didn't get much information from its hot-and-cold project partner, either.

At a 7 a.m. Friday working group session with Alberta Transportation and engineering firm AECOM, city officials and councillors were given a high-level briefing and a single-slide presentation — plus the promise of getting the full report later in the day and the expectation councillors would begin debating Dreeshen's take-it-or-leave-it proposal at Tuesday's meeting.

"We've been given no time to even look at what's been proposed, but the government has already put it out in the media," Gondek told CBC News.

Shortly after that private briefing and single-slide show to the city, a preview of the provincial news release showed up in a column by Postmedia's Rick Bell.

It's easy to understand why Dreeshen would want to protect the full, unredacted report that would include sensitive financial details and cost estimates, before construction companies bid on the project. But when he throws shields up around the entire report it keeps the public in the dark about how a multi-storey elevated track on two streets would function in the core.

The only other elevated station in Calgary's current LRT network backs onto the freight rail tracks at Sunalta, 15 metres above street level but well set back from street life by a plaza that's more than twice as wide as either 10th Avenue or Second Street.

By contrast, the Green Line's proposed El-tracks downtown would go directly down the middle of the road, wedged right in between highrises and above pedestrians.

The questions are many. What will be the shadowing impact? How are street parking and adjacent parkades affected? What sort of stairwells, ramps or — outdoor escalators? — will bring people down from the two proposed stations?

Impact on downtown traffic? There will be no driving lanes affected in the Beltline on 10th, Dreeshen told CBC News in an interview, but "I think there is one lane on Second [Street] that will be affected."