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Originally Posted by Policy Wonk
By the time the SELRT is completed the need to take the 7th Ave LRT below or above grade like 8th Ave presumably will be should be a much more pressing need than the Nose Creek LRT. A couple people here doggedly insist that 7th will never need to be taken out of traffic, ever but this isn't the case. Calgary Transit can't operate their peak headways as scheduled today and their long-term goal is two minute headways on both 201 and 202 are simply incompatible with 7th Ave at grade. Surely they will be along shortly along with the anti-interlining people.
Oddly enough master planned high density development along new mass transit lines seems to work just about everywhere else on earth. Yet on this website the conventional wisdom appears to be that this is insanity and the only probable approach is persuading Grandpa Simpson and Maude Flanders of the virtues of massive intensification in the mature communities along Centre Street. Which would be a war of the likes this city has never seen. Is too costly to seriously contemplate and is unlikely to ever reach the suburbs north of Beddington Trail the NCLRT was intended to serve in the first place.
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I could easily see the W-NE line requiring grade separation through the core eventually. I don't think that is an argument in favour of interlining a North Line in the same tunnel. I could easily see 7 Ave on the surface handling W-NE traffic better than a tunnel could handle W-NE/N. If the NE LRT and N LRT were both to require two minute headways, then that would mean one minute headways in the tunnel. It would also add either the complication of some trains short turning downtown to return to their origins, affecting tunnel capacity, or the expense of over capacity along the W LRT.
I think that, for a Nose Creek alignment to not harshly limit total system capacity, it would still need to be either a continuation of the SE LRT or it would require a fourth downtown ROW for an entirely independent operation. The expense of either would quickly push the cost of a Nose Creek alignment much closer to that of a Centre Street route. That is ignoring the cost of competing with both the province and a freight railway for part of what could quickly become a very sought after ROW.
The Centre Street corridor will intensify with or without an LRT. I have serious doubts that freeway adjacent industrial parks, entirely cut off from existing residential services, will ever become attractive areas for redevelopment. I would imagine that the thirty year old 39 Avenue Station would be surrounded by condos if such an eventuality were likely. Besides, the entire plan would be built upon the already iffy proposition that we ought banish industry, and the decent paying blue collar jobs associated with it, from the inner city. As for the golf courses, Shawnee Slopes seems to counteract the notion that NIMBYs will be cool with their redevelopment.