
Green Line: Fewer stops, more money and an LRT project that runs on hope for the future
CBC
The Green Line's first phase will now end at Ogden Road, around 60th Avenue S.E.
Up until this week, the plan was to extend Calgary's next LRT route to the 130th Avenue retail area.
Its estimated daily ridership will be 32,000 trips. That's down from the projected 65,000.
It will open with seven stations — instead of 13.
Council approved this scaled-back ambition to save money. This project will now cost $6.2 billion, rather than the previously reported… uh, $5.5 billion.
For city hall, it's an entirely unappetizing dish of bad news to serve to Calgarians who at every turn keep having to make do with less, be it thanks to soaring housing and mortgage costs, grocery bill bloat or residential water restrictions that may soon enter their third month.
Now, a Green Line that one could argue looks more like a Green Stub.
The argument that councillors now make, albeit often in rosier terms: it's still better than nothing. Every option, including walking away, was worse.
"We have to begin somewhere," Mayor Jyoti Gondek told CBC Radio's Calgary Eyeopener on Wednesday.
Persuading Calgarians that a $6.2-billion, 10-kilometre project, the costliest in the city's history, is a mere start? That might be a hard sell, especially to a public that's voting in a new council next year.
"This is flirting with just below minimum viable size (for an LRT line)," Coun. Gian-Carlo Carra admitted in an interview.
He quickly added that it should work fine and that hopefully more funding will come in to build additional track and stations so the Green Line doesn't remain this size for long. But in a environment of political and economic volatility, hope can't even buy you second-hand rail spikes.
The degree to which the Green Line planners had to downsize the project speaks to some of the biggest challenges facing the mission of serving southeast Calgary with rail transit.
One of them is that the vast majority of residents along the long-dreamed LRT route live in the deep-south neighbourhoods — Douglasdale, McKenzie Towne, Auburn Bay, each with 12,000 or more residents.

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