A video yesterday from Oh The Urbanity! got me thinking about cities in the Canadian province of Alberta (famed for its oil). In many ways Albertan cities are outperforming those in the rest of Canada, and the US – from getting housing built, to population growth, but I think that the big thing cities in Alberta need to work on is their infrastructure – and in particular transportation infrastructure. I’ve been planning a bunch of videos on different transport topics in the province, but I wanted to write this short blog post to get some of my thoughts out now.
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Sprawl and Buses
While Calgary and Edmonton are growing and densifying (I think Calgary’s downtown in particular is widely and severely underrated), they are also growing out with sprawl. And far too often, this sprawl isn’t even very well served by transit.
A sunset view of Edmonton downtown from Griesbach Central Park, on January 28, 2024, in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. (Photo by Artur Widak/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
I will get to talking about rail, but Albertan cities have unusually comprehensive highway and semi-highway road networks for Canada, and meanwhile they mostly lack the high-quality suburban and express buses (not to mention suburban rail) of Toronto, Vancouver, or Montreal. Calgary doesn’t even a night bus network or a IC card payment system, and even more frustrating, the city spent a bunch of money on nice bus shelters and on creating a “BRT-lite” network and then went and ran the routes every 20+ minutes.
Cities in Alberta would benefit enormously from complete overhauls of how they do buses (Edmonton is better than Calgary), and even just matching the bus network of Vancouver (in terms of quality) would be huge — especially if it came with bus lanes and busways, which the Albertan cities have loads of room for. Essentially, there’s a lot of basic stuff that cities in Alberta need to get on with if they want transit that matches that in other Canadian cities, much less the best cities in the world (which I think we should strive for!)
Trains
And then there are the rail networks. Both Calgary and Edmonton in my view began developing their rail networks in very smart ways off of the German Stadtbahn model. However, the networks both have single trunk sections and too few branches — if you look at the Stuttgart Stadtbahn for example:
you’ll see a much denser network with several city centre trunks, numerous suburban branches, and interconnections between branches outside of the city centre — all served by a wide range of services.
A city like Calgary or Edmonton could have this, it would just need to be cost effective, keep building, and learn where to spend money (city centre tunnels and grade separations) and where to cut costs (single-tracking and suburban train-like corridors outside of core areas). As it turns out, both Calgary and Edmonton have actually managed to do a lot of incremental cost-effective expansion historically (and Edmonton might? still be doing so), but over the last decade Calgary has built essentially nothing, and Edmonton has built some rather mixed projects (the Metro line for example completely ignores the learnings from German cities with regard to speed and grade separation). Both cities are also all-in on P3s for their big new lines, which will probably lead to high costs and further slowing of transit expansion.
[some calgary/edmonton rail]
The newest lines in both Edmonton and Calgary — the cross-city Valley and Green lines respectively — also make the mistake of moving to a new standard for rail vehicles (low-floor trams), which are more expensive to maintain, lower capacity, and nigh impossible to mesh with the existing high-floor systems into a Stuttgart-style integrated network. And probably most importantly, I think that the networks are just too small (these new cross-city lines should have been completed in the early 2000s). While Ottawa will not have a network as big as Calgary or Edmonton when the second phase of the O-Train is complete (and the system obviously has its well known reliability problems) the truth is Ottawa will have a fairly comprehensive metro-style system that is almost as big as Edmonton and Calgary’s Stadtbahn/tram systems.
Planes and, Well, More Trains
And importantly, Ottawa’s network will actually connect to its airport — it amazes me that “business-friendly” Calgary has not built an extension of the Blue line to the airport (this is the correct solution — please NO APMs), which should be a cheap ~6 kilometer extension. It’s doubly crazy because these days Calgary airport is moving nearly 20 million passengers per year.
Edmonton should be ashamed too because it’s airport only has a single ETS bus, and it runs only half hourly! It also needs to be said that the lack of an Edmonton-Calgary train is crazy, especially because even just at the 200kph speeds that Brightline hits on the expressway-side leg to Orlando, a train journey between the cities would smoke the car. And this is before we get into talking about the other mainline rail projects the province should be looking at!
What Alberta could look like…
All of this leads me to what things could be. And to learn more about that, you’ll have to stay tuned for my “Crayoning with Reece” for Edmonton and Calgary.
In the meantime:
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