William D. Marriott is a retired economist who specialized in public policy analysis of the oil and gas industry.Calgary just dodged a nasty bullet. Thank God sanity has prevailed in the mass transportation sphere in Calgary. Unlike city council and city officials, the UCP government can clearly see the future. Despite claiming that it would not fund cost overruns for the white elephant, they knew that eventually the project would become too big to fail. They had to kill it now, before it became the proverbial ‘albatross’ we would wear forever. Good decision, Premier Smith.While the political fireworks are entertaining, there really hasn’t been much substantive discourse on why the Green Line is a really, really bad idea. Let me fill that gap.First, there is the essential question of current and future demand for transportation to Calgary's downtown. Sure, there would be some cross city traffic, say from Beddington to the South Campus hospital, but this is not the core demand that must be used to justify the expansion.Despite revitalization efforts, Calgary’s core is wasting away with office vacancy rates still above 30%. No amount of developer subsidization can bring back people to work there. The fact is the oil and gas industry and its supporting cast no longer need a central business district. This will get more acute in the future. Contrary to the popular adage “Just ‘cause you build it doesn’t mean they have to come.”Couple this with the increasing aversion to train travel because of ongoing safety issues and you have a real problem. If the homeless continue to use train shelters for winter accommodation and drug dealers use them as their marketplace, then increasing ridership cannot be guaranteed. In the particular south service area of the new line several serious investigations suggest that projected ridership can in no way justify the expansion.Second, the Green Line has been promoted as “an expansion of the light rail (LRT) network in Calgary”. In fact it is no such thing. It is a separate stand alone network that that does not interconnect with the existing Blue and Red Lines. The new design trains for the Greenline will not run on existing tracks and vice versa. The Greenline will have its own stops downtown and if a commuter wishes to transfer between lines they have to physically move between the different stations serving the two lines. The much vaunted 7th Avenue transportation corridor is essentially neutered by the new stations added to serve the separate line.Now this might have been the dream ‘super-duper train’ preference of the officials that first proposed the project and it did justify building extensive tunnels downtown. But you can’t help thinking that the promoters and cheerleaders of this concept just wanted to have a ‘real’, underground, subway like London, New York and Paris. The actual needs of commuters were secondary. This is where the ‘vanity project’ moniker has some legs.Third, the concept only seems to be viable because alternatives are deemed impossible. If the same train right-of-ways were dedicated to peak demand bus service, commuters would be equally well served at a fraction of the cost. For example, the Centre Street makeover to accommodate the line would have taken out several lanes of car traffic but would be empty of trains 23 hours a day. Parking is always a big problem around train stations and presumably there would be increased bus service to get to the new train. Why not just connect to high volume buses in the corridors in peak hours?Fourth, the Green Line discussion has sucked all the air out of any other transportation discussions in Calgary. With the multiple billions required, there is no room to even consider the badly needed train link between downtown and the airport. If you have dropped-off or picked-up anyone recently you know firsthand the congestion at YYC. Nor does the concept of a “Grand Central Station” connecting LRT and mainline rail North South East and West have a chance of attracting any energy. Demand is anticipated to be so large between Calgary and Banff that the promoters of that line say they will finance the whole project privately if they can get a link to the airport. This is where the future is, not in building tunnels under the Calgary Tower.Finally, the sunk costs rumoured at more than a billion dollars are not all wasted as some of the more excited council members claim. The only thing that has been lost is the wasted resources around tunnelling. Everything else can be re-purposed for the new line. The province now claims it can build the entire line to Seton for around the same cost as the stump proposal. We should wait and see if the new engineers and cost estimators agree with this claim. Until then let’s just be happy that we dodged a bullet. William D. Marriott is a retired economist who specialized in public policy analysis of the oil and gas industry.
William D. Marriott is a retired economist who specialized in public policy analysis of the oil and gas industry.Calgary just dodged a nasty bullet. Thank God sanity has prevailed in the mass transportation sphere in Calgary. Unlike city council and city officials, the UCP government can clearly see the future. Despite claiming that it would not fund cost overruns for the white elephant, they knew that eventually the project would become too big to fail. They had to kill it now, before it became the proverbial ‘albatross’ we would wear forever. Good decision, Premier Smith.While the political fireworks are entertaining, there really hasn’t been much substantive discourse on why the Green Line is a really, really bad idea. Let me fill that gap.First, there is the essential question of current and future demand for transportation to Calgary's downtown. Sure, there would be some cross city traffic, say from Beddington to the South Campus hospital, but this is not the core demand that must be used to justify the expansion.Despite revitalization efforts, Calgary’s core is wasting away with office vacancy rates still above 30%. No amount of developer subsidization can bring back people to work there. The fact is the oil and gas industry and its supporting cast no longer need a central business district. This will get more acute in the future. Contrary to the popular adage “Just ‘cause you build it doesn’t mean they have to come.”Couple this with the increasing aversion to train travel because of ongoing safety issues and you have a real problem. If the homeless continue to use train shelters for winter accommodation and drug dealers use them as their marketplace, then increasing ridership cannot be guaranteed. In the particular south service area of the new line several serious investigations suggest that projected ridership can in no way justify the expansion.Second, the Green Line has been promoted as “an expansion of the light rail (LRT) network in Calgary”. In fact it is no such thing. It is a separate stand alone network that that does not interconnect with the existing Blue and Red Lines. The new design trains for the Greenline will not run on existing tracks and vice versa. The Greenline will have its own stops downtown and if a commuter wishes to transfer between lines they have to physically move between the different stations serving the two lines. The much vaunted 7th Avenue transportation corridor is essentially neutered by the new stations added to serve the separate line.Now this might have been the dream ‘super-duper train’ preference of the officials that first proposed the project and it did justify building extensive tunnels downtown. But you can’t help thinking that the promoters and cheerleaders of this concept just wanted to have a ‘real’, underground, subway like London, New York and Paris. The actual needs of commuters were secondary. This is where the ‘vanity project’ moniker has some legs.Third, the concept only seems to be viable because alternatives are deemed impossible. If the same train right-of-ways were dedicated to peak demand bus service, commuters would be equally well served at a fraction of the cost. For example, the Centre Street makeover to accommodate the line would have taken out several lanes of car traffic but would be empty of trains 23 hours a day. Parking is always a big problem around train stations and presumably there would be increased bus service to get to the new train. Why not just connect to high volume buses in the corridors in peak hours?Fourth, the Green Line discussion has sucked all the air out of any other transportation discussions in Calgary. With the multiple billions required, there is no room to even consider the badly needed train link between downtown and the airport. If you have dropped-off or picked-up anyone recently you know firsthand the congestion at YYC. Nor does the concept of a “Grand Central Station” connecting LRT and mainline rail North South East and West have a chance of attracting any energy. Demand is anticipated to be so large between Calgary and Banff that the promoters of that line say they will finance the whole project privately if they can get a link to the airport. This is where the future is, not in building tunnels under the Calgary Tower.Finally, the sunk costs rumoured at more than a billion dollars are not all wasted as some of the more excited council members claim. The only thing that has been lost is the wasted resources around tunnelling. Everything else can be re-purposed for the new line. The province now claims it can build the entire line to Seton for around the same cost as the stump proposal. We should wait and see if the new engineers and cost estimators agree with this claim. Until then let’s just be happy that we dodged a bullet. William D. Marriott is a retired economist who specialized in public policy analysis of the oil and gas industry.
