The Alberta government sends a “Dear Jyoti” letter;
“Any cost increases or escalations will be the responsibility of the city and no additional funding will be available for this project under any circumstances,” reads the letter.
We’re talking about Phase 1 of the Green Line LRT.
That’s the 18-kilometre stretch from Shepard in the city’s southeast to Eau Claire downtown.
It is a far cry from the original dream of having the Green Line LRT going from the far north of the city to the deep southeast of the city down in Seton.
We’re just talking about one phase and there is already chatter of cost overruns.
The Smith government is clearly not going to play in that sandbox.
Premier Smith seems to want to avoid the sh__show that is Ottawa.
I dunno if most SDA’ers are aware of the giant boondoggle with Ottawa’s Light Rail Transit (fancy word for train), but to summarize:
– idiot city politicians made decisions that should have been made by engineers
– the LRT is still expanding to cover the entire city and suburbs
– usage is a fraction of what it was originally planned for
(Incidentally, one reason why government wants public servants to return to work, so the LRT system gets some usage).
I hate to say it, but the engineers will do whatever the politician who is paying them wants, because they want to get paid more, and expand their business.
There is also some likely valid assumption that there was some collusion involved, because SNC failed on technicals, but still was approved.
YUP!
One glaring example: they didn’t know that the extension of the southern line was NOT electric.
And yet…
Remember when the designers of this project said if they use a different height train which isn’t compatible with the other train stations (due to lower height trains) so there will be cost savings?
Associates of SNC Lavalin are involved with this. After the #Libranos are turfed from federal politics, they’ll lose their wedge, and their desperate pleas for emergency funding will fall on deaf ears as everyone points to the imbeciles in orange and the ex Mayor of Calgary, the ex Premier of Alberta, for dreaming up such projects / bridges to nowhere, and then had it built with union labor.
Remember when Montreal Mayor Jean Drapeau said the 1976 Olympics can no more have a deficit than a man can have a baby? and the next day Montreal newspaper cartoonist Aislin had drawn Drapeau at about 8.5 months prego?
Well, will wonders never cease…
50 years later, and it turns out that men CAN have babies, so Johnny Flag (as the anglophones in l’isle de Montreal referred to him at the time) was right after all!!!
Go WEXIT!
In a related story … BART is financially insolvent, and demands higher taxes to remain in business …
https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/future-of-bart-likely-to-hinge-on-voter-approved-funding-measure-officials-say/
BART is operated like it doesn’t care about its customers. It’s raised fares to nosebleed levels, and still the cars smell like puke and urine … and the trains are the denizen of all criminal types. BART is unsafe to ride. And people aren’t riding germ-infested BART … not even with cdc-approved face masks. The COVID hysteria killed BART. So did closing 40% of San Francisco office space.
BART train operators who do nothing more than open and close doors … are paid well into the $6-figures to sit on their ass and do literally … NOTHING. It’s a cash cow for leftist-types who HATE cars and HATE suburbanites … their prime customers. Their proposed sales tax increase will push the BART Counties well over $10% sales tax.
I don’t know much about Calgary’s transit situation. I mean, is there an actual need for it?
Reminds me a little of Detroit Mayor Coleman Young’s “People Mover”. After spending god knows how much… no one uses the damn thing and it’s now to the point where you can ride for free and that’s just to jack up the usage numbers.
What a disaster.
I lived in Calgary for 12 years – it is a good city, but was becoming too NDP/Left for my liking. The city does not have a good public transit system. It is only good if you live along the LRT’s. I would take my car to the park and ride and board the Transit to downtown, but I rarely went downtown. Chinook Centre in the SW and Market Mall in the NW are excellent shopping centres with ample parking, so why would you go downtown? City Planners have not done a good job of planning vibrant, safe downtowns.
And on another note, I am totally NOT surprised that the Hudson’s Bay store in the Cornwall Centre will be closing next year. When I first moved to Regina 10 years ago, I would visit the Cornwall Centre once a month, on Saturdays, when you could get 2 hours of free street parking. The store was in dreadful condition, you could never find a sales clerk to help you and there really wasn’t anything that I wanted to buy. And I was a fierce Hudson’s Bay Store loyalist since my early teens – in Edmonton, in Winnipeg and in Toronto. Not any more!
” Chinook Centre in the SW and Market Mall in the NW are excellent shopping centres with ample parking, so why would you go downtown? City Planners have not done a good job of planning vibrant, safe downtowns.”
I was told, years ago, that Calgary had outrageously expensive parking downtown and that many of the office towers were half empty because of it?
Sounds exact like what ‘go green’ idiots would do: build towers but provide no parking. They tried that same thing (briefly) in Vancouver…it did not go over well, and they quickly abandoned the policy.
about 15 years of planning at several million a year of civil servants and they didnt have either endpoint or the middle figured out . will be a different type of car at a different level so incompatible with the existing two line system.
Budapest did better in 1896
In Montreal, at least in the early 2000s, the mass transit system generated more revenue than what its budget was by a factor of around 2.
Have you tried driving around Montreal?
Yep. Better drivers than Toronto or Vancouver, by a long shot.
That’s not saying much.
Not to mention the Underground City, with metro and walking connections to just about anywhere else downtown, they actually did something right..
Yep! Montreal has what I considered to be one of the best (if not the best) transit systems… not just because of the Metro, but also because of well planned, and connected bus network. And they are currently in the process of adding a commuter light rail system (the REM train – Reseau Express Metropolitain) to their network that will extend almost the entire length of the island.
You need a good transit system to get around in Montreal, because the roads’ conditions are just about third-world, and the endless construction makes it difficult to get around the city by car.
They should use only “renewable” power, cause there’s a “climate emergency”.
Or maybe get horses to haul the buses and trains when the wind don’t blow and the sun dont shine….
Yodel-e-i-o
Initially, I was in favour of the Green Line: it made sense to offload some of the problems with traffic on some of the main roads. And I agreed with putting it mostly underground, b/c there’s no room for it at surface without destroying circulation…or buildings. The C-train lines downtown are an effing joke: it’s the only place I’ve been where at-grade trains don’t have the right of way, and two lines share the same tracks. Adding a 3rd line at grade would be nuts.
Lately, however, it seems like there’s less need for it, thanks to the lockdowns destroying the core. I’m no longer sure it’s needed at all, especially since the current system runs like dog feces.
EVERYONE SHOULD READ THIS..!!
How the WEF through intermediaries are infiltrating our Rural Municipalities…right alongside Calgary & Edmonton
https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/content/?fromMember=%5B%22ACoAADg7KKQBWcwM2xPEHPP3M00knq8c0ws4lZI%22%5D&heroEntityKey=urn%3Ali%3Afsd_profile%3AACoAADg7KKQBWcwM2xPEHPP3M00knq8c0ws4lZI&keywords=kathy%20flett&position=0&searchId=7e8cc167-a382-4635-9bf1-a2d08a5b22bf&sid=eRr&sortBy=%22date_posted%22&update=urn%3Ali%3Afs_updateV2%3A(urn%3Ali%3Aactivity%3A7193239217185910784%2CBLENDED_SEARCH_FEED%2CEMPTY%2CDEFAULT%2Cfalse)