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Originally Posted by fusili
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Three really good arguments. Here's my attempt at three rebuttals.
Rebuttal to: What About Us? The Forgotten SE LRT
The SE LRT has been on the books for 35 years. Let's imagine that the government of Canada was planning infrastructure 35 years ago; perhaps as we followed this plan, the five largest cities (Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Ottawa and Winnipeg) would get a new infrastructure project. There certainly wouldn't have been any thought about what was then the 9th largest city in the country, a little burg called Calgary. While a strategic plan is essential, we cannot afford to make tactical errors by ignoring changing conditions on the ground; a 35 year old principle may be decades overdue or decades out-of-date, and we need to be sensible about which that is.
The route for the SE LRT passes through primarily industrial lands, and industrial workers do not currently use the LRT in significant numbers. 39th Avenue is one example; the NE industrial area in Calgary has twice as many jobs as the SE industrial, but even though the LRT runs along two sides of the NE industrial district, transit use is low. While Quarry Park may be a good development - or just another modest suburban office park - the LRT station is almost 800m from the central intersection in the area along 18th St, and none of the residential development is within 800m of the LRT station. (But plenty of open field parks and surface parking will be.) The South Health Campus is perhaps the strongest employment centre along the line, but it will only employ 2500 workers, compared to the 150000 in the Centre City. These health workers will also have the option of a reverse-flow commute on Deerfoot on the empty southbound lanes in the morning, which is tough for transit to beat.
On the residential side, the case for the SE LRT also doesn't add up. The Southeast sector has 86,000 residents today, while the North has 121,000. While the SE is growing faster, it won't catch up to the North over the next 15 years, and perhaps not over the next 30. The north also has a regional component; Stoney Trail gives easy access to the Country Hills park-n'-ride for Airdrie residents, but there's no equivalent market in the southeast; Okotoks residents can already use Somerset for that purpose. The north has already proven a strong transit market; one LRT train could take a dozen buses (and their driver's salaries) off of the busy Centre street corridor; in the southeast, that one LRT train would replace... one half-empty "BRT" bus.
The southeast LRT is a massive infrastructure expense to service a corridor that may never produce enough ridership to justify the service or the expense. Prioritizing it over the shorter, denser, higher-riding north sector, or the much needed Stephen Ave Subway downtown to keep the trains serving the areas that do have high ridership would be a critical mistake.
Rebuttal to: Half the Length, More Passengers- The North Central Route
It sounds great, doesn't it? Build north, and cover half the distance. The problem is simple; length isn't everything. The planning of the north central LRT is barely past the conceptual stage; the much more complete southeast plans are ready to build, and we have an idea of the kind of ridership they could generate. There are three main routes to the north that are being discussed; a Nose Creek route that would interline with the NE/W LRT, and a pair of straight shot routes, up either Centre St. or Edmonton Trail. I'll call these the "urban" routes, since they share the same basic strengths and weaknesses. All three routes would be the same north of Beddington Trail.
The Nose Creek route runs through empty land, much of which will stay empty due to landfill and slope issues. The most transit-friendly station south of Beddington Trail would be in the Greenview industrial area, which is so transit-unfriendly that Calgary Transit's Spring Gardens facility needs a large parking lot for their own staff. This line would be an operational nightmare as well; it would require NC trains to share the tracks with the Northeast line, and increase the pressure on 7th Avenue, which is already well past it's limit. The Nose Creek alignment would also result in duplicating the service at Zoo and Bridgeland (the two least busy stations in the system), and on the West LRT which is predicted to have barely half the ridership of the northeast. So it's a low-ridership route that covers all the wrong tracks. This would be ameliorated if the Stephen Avenue tunnel were built first, which could enable this cheaper route to the commuter communities in the far north.
An urban route would run more directly north from downtown, starting from a tunnel along 2nd St that would be an extension of the southeast LRT. So it wouldn't have the same operational problems. But one km of train is not one km of train. The advantage of an urban route is that it would go through established urban neighbourhoods, with strong growth potential and high ridership. But the problem is those neighbourhoods already exist, and we didn't plan to put LRT through them. There would be citizen outrage no matter what was done, and there are three broad options. A surface-running LRT would take away lanes on a busy road like Centre or Edmonton Tr, but it would be a huge barrier dividing those neighbourhoods; either crossings would be limited, cutting access off, or there would be a huge number of conflicts, like 36th St NE on steroids. An elevated route would impose a heavy visual cost, and cast a permanent gloom over the communities. It would also double the cost, and create a potential construction nightmare. And a tunnelled route, which would please the most people, would cost twice as much again. It would be foolish to say that it would be cheaper; a route that the communities are willing to live with could easily be far more expensive than the Southeast LRT.
And that misses one huge advantage of the SE LRT; the ability to build the project in stages. It makes no sense to argue about which multi-billion dollar project we should build, when we can't afford either. What we can afford is a partial transitway, which could be constructed from Inglewood to Glenmore, and would significantly increase ridership in the SE. As more money comes available, we could either extend the transitway, or put LRT into place. There's no such option for the north central route; an elevated or tunnelled track would not be suitable for use by buses. If we did build a section of the LRT, we would not even be able to afford 16th Ave to Eau Claire, and transit riders would not take kindly to being asked to get off their bus, just for the privilege of taking a train one stop. If the Nose Creek route prevails, we would be building a high-speed route for buses... about 100 feet away from Deerfoot Trail, the highest-speed road in the city.
The north central LRT is simply too expensive to build right, and we can't afford to build it wrong. Prioritizing it over the much more practical southeast, or the much needed Stephen Ave Subway downtown to keep the trains serving the areas that do have high ridership would be a critical mistake.
Rebuttal to: All Strength Arises from a Strong, Stout Heart
The LRT system has been fantastically successful; riders from three of the seven major sectors of the city are served by this high-quality transit system, with the fourth opening up next year with the West LRT. The trains are pretty full, and 7th Avenue is "at capacity". So some would argue that we should increase capacity on the core lines before we build new lines. I have good news for these people; you've already won.
The truth is, 7th Avenue is only operating at 75% of capacity. Look at any station; when the train pulls up, there is a big gap at the end, just big enough to put another train car. The new stations at the ends of the lines are also under capacity; it's the other stations that limit train capacity, and they are being retrofitted as I type this; go to Sunnyside if you don't believe me. (Go to Fish Creek-Lacombe if you use a wheelchair and don't believe me.) On the South route, the busiest by far, there are three 15 minute periods per day when 7th Avenue is at maximum frequency (8000+ capacity per hour) and the demand is near the capacity. The four car extension will relieve these demands for at least 10 years, and riders may realize that they don't need to travel during the same 15 minutes as everybody else.
There are two basic sources of ridership growth on the existing lines; either an extension is built, or new residents move into the service area. The short extensions being built in the NW and NE move the train to the logical endpoints for the near future; especially since the NW is build out and future residential growth in the NE is focused more along Metis Trail and near Stoney. The south has no plans for an extension before 2020; there are plans being developed for a southwest BRT that would reduce the demand on the south LRT.
As far as new residents go, the city is divided into eight sectors for planning purposes. 58% of the new suburban growth over the next 15 years is forecast to go into the two fastest-growing sectors; the southeast (31%) and the north-central (27%). If our goal is increased transit ridership, surely providing new high-quality service to these markets at the edges of the city is the way to go. Even a partial transitway to the southeast would result in 15,000 more riders on the BRT; a Stephen Avenue Subway will mostly reallocate the riders we already have. It should also be noted that both the southeast and north-central (urban route) systems would create a new path into downtown for transit, not providing any additional demand on 7th Avenue. And there is no requirement to paralyze downtown with a massive two-tunnel construction project; if a roughed-in station under City Hall has survived since the 1980s, surely a roughed-in station on the NC/SE LRT at 2nd St and Stephen Ave could similarly survive until we have the money to build a full subway.
A Stephen Avenue Subway is a solution to a problem we're already solving. Prioritizing it over new lines that will build our transit ridership and tap underserved markets would be a critical mistake.
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