Western Standard - September 17, 2024


Dreeshen Alberta to Build Proper Calgary Green Line

Mentioned
Nahid Nenshi Seton
Trudeau complains Conservatives 'called their friend, Elon Musk,' to build cheaper internet solution Minister Ellis Unveils Alberta Sheriffs Fugitive Task Force

Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

166.8

Word count

848

Sentence count

44

Harmful content

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Calgary's Green Line project has been in the news lately, and there's a lot of misinformation about it. So let's set the record straight. To understand the Green Line, we first need to take a look at the history of the project, and exactly how it is that we got where we're at today.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.320 There's been a lot of talk about Calgary's Green Line project lately and
00:00:03.600 unfortunately a lot of misinformation as well. So let's set the record straight.
00:00:09.200 To understand the Green Line we first need to take a look at the history of the project and
00:00:13.760 how it started and exactly how it is that we got where we're at here today.
00:00:18.480 The Green Line was first introduced in 2015 by Nahid Nenshi when he was the Mayor of Calgary.
00:00:24.720 It was promised to be a 46 kilometer line that would run from 160th Ave North
00:00:29.600 all the way to Seton at the south end of the city and include 29 stations.
00:00:34.560 The project was also supposed to include a tunnel running under the Bow River and through the
00:00:39.520 downtown core. Back then this mega project was going to cost $4.65 billion. The only issue the
00:00:46.800 City Council back then failed to do any of the proper costing, engineering or planning before
00:00:52.560 coming up with that $4.65 billion price tag. At best it was drawn up on a napkin.
00:00:59.120 Now as you could probably imagine that's not how competent or responsible organizations build
00:01:04.640 large and complex mega projects like this one. It's impossible to determine how much any project
00:01:11.360 will actually cost if you don't plan, design and engineer it beforehand. So it didn't take long for
00:01:17.200 the Green Line project to start falling off the rails. Under the previous government in 2017, the Green Line
00:01:24.000 was slashed from the original 46 kilometers and 29 stations to only 23 kilometers and 15 stations.
00:01:30.640 The City also abandoned the entire north side of the Green Line. Now this alignment was done to make the
00:01:36.800 budget fit inside an over-promised and poorly planned project design. But the shrinking of the Green Line
00:01:43.120 didn't stop there. Even after cutting it by half of the original size, the Green Line project was
00:01:48.800 facing massive cost overruns. Calgary City Council was still finding it impossible to build the project
00:01:55.440 with a $4.65 billion budget. So they cut it down to 18 kilometers, abandoning any stations north of the
00:02:01.840 Bow and only going as far south as Sheppard. But they kept the big expensive tunnel under downtown which
00:02:08.240 was responsible for the majority of the costs. Unfortunately, even with these further cost-saving
00:02:14.160 measures, the Green Line could still not be built. And so the City shrunk the Green Line even further
00:02:20.720 and reduced the Green Line scope down to only 10 kilometers and seven stations running from Eau Claire to
00:02:27.120 the Linwood Millican station in the southeast. So from an original lack of planning, the Green Line
00:02:31.760 shrunk from 46 kilometers and 29 stations that Calgarians were promised almost 10 years ago down
00:02:37.840 to just 10 kilometers and seven stations. Now this just goes from bad to worse. The most recent 10
00:02:43.920 kilometer mini version of the Green Line doesn't serve a lot of Calgarians at all. And the project costs
00:02:48.720 have now, brace yourselves, gone up to $6.2 billion. Now to put that into perspective, that means that
00:02:56.160 taxpayers will be paying $630 million for each kilometer of track. Now that's just ridiculous. 0.86
00:03:02.480 For example, Montreal's REM line only costs around $86 million per kilometer or seven times less than
00:03:08.560 this current Green Line. Now this new alignment would make the Green Line one of the most expensive
00:03:13.600 and least effective LRT projects in North America. And all this taxpayer money, while Calgarians need to
00:03:20.880 build a new water line to ensure this summer's water crisis isn't repeated. And unfortunately,
00:03:26.160 lack of poor water infrastructure has been a decade-long issue, but that's for another day.
00:03:31.440 Now as your provincial government, we have an obligation to ensure taxpayers' dollars for
00:03:35.760 infrastructure are spent efficiently, responsibly, and in a way that benefits the most amount of
00:03:41.120 Albertans possible. We are not going to throw billions of taxpayer dollars away on a vanity project
00:03:47.920 that fails in every way to address the actual transit needs of Calgarians. This is why we are
00:03:53.840 taking immediate action to fix this nightmare. We will be working with experienced engineers to design
00:04:01.120 a new above-ground Green Line alignment that integrates with the Red and Blue Lines, connects
00:04:06.800 to the future Grand Central Station at Calgary's new Arena Entertainment District, and then stretches
00:04:12.240 south to the community of Shepherd and beyond. We also have big plans for the City of Calgary
00:04:17.680 and for the province when it comes to passenger rail, and we are going to deliver on them in a way
00:04:23.680 that respects the hard work and investment of our taxpayers. This government finished Calgary's
00:04:30.480 Ring Road on time and on budget, and we're adding lanes to the Deerfoot to help Calgarians spend less
00:04:36.640 time in traffic and more time at home doing the things that they love. We want to improve the quality
00:04:43.040 of life for Calgarians, and we're committed to work with this City Council to deliver a Green Line
00:04:49.520 that actually goes somewhere, and that Calgarians can be proud of. Thank you and we'll see you around.