A few weeks after I wrote an article about Calgary and Edmonton’s need to improve their transportation. I was thinking about this more over the last few days, after a discussion online regarding Calgary and what I feel is a major lapse in the city’s fairly good history of building rail expansions quite consistently.
Calgary hasn’t opened any new rail since 2014, and the last major expansion of the C-Train system — the West LRT — opened back in 2012. While yes, Calgary’s system was historically good given its size (when comparing to notably poorly transit served cities in the US), Calgary has grown a lot in the last decade, and its transit system has not kept up.
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Now, yes, the Green Line has been crawling forward, still being on early works nearly a decade after this project started seriously being discussed (when the Trudeau Liberal government was first elected in 2015) is not good enough, and the unfortunate thing is that I fear Calgary has sat out a decade of enormous potential transit capital funding, which other Canadian cities like Toronto, Montreal, Edmonton, Ottawa and to an extent Vancouver cashed in on!
Furthermore, the Green line is an evolutionary improvement in Calgary’s transit system: it’s another light rail line from the suburbs to the core (with a downtown tunnel, seemingly only because with the amount of service Calgary pushes through its existing at grade downtown light rail corridor its not practical to run another line at grade through the downtown on a perpendicular alignment), but I think Calgary needs a revolution. Yes, the system of today works alright, but that’s not enough: Calgary should be marching towards a far more transit-oriented city as Vancouver, and Toronto are, it’s very important in the long term!
Toronto’s Mistake
A big lesson should have been learned from Toronto’s enormous mistake, mostly putting major transit capital expansion on hold from the early 2000s until into the 2010s. While Toronto is now playing catchup, the costs have been huge; the city now has way less rapid transit than it obviously should have given its urban growth (mostly in the form of densification). At the same time, every one of Toronto’s new transit projects is costing multiple times what something similar would have cost before the city let that institutional knowledge atrophy.
Calgary’s Current Approach
Calgary’s has not stopped building, which is why the pause on building rail is so problematic. The city has continued to sprawl outwards, and the downtown core has grown up and denser.
Even transportation infrastructure has seen major spending, with the huge new international terminal at YYC and the major investments in highways, most notably the completion of Stony trail. With road infrastructure growing substantial and rail infrastructure just not, how does Calgary plan to majorly shift transit ridership up relative to driving mode share?
And this isn’t just a problem of the past. Calgary and Edmonton will grow disproportionately faster than other Canadian cities as the country’s population continues to surge, and without more transit infrastructure, that growth will struggle to be sustainable and transit-oriented. The city has an opportunity to avoid the spiralling housing costs of other Canadian cities by using transit to turn more areas into potential future transit-oriented communities, but the opportunity is going to waste. This is concerning, because over the next few decades, it seems entirely conceivable that Calgary (and Edmonton) will grow to sizes near that of Metro Vancouver today (around 1,000,000 more residents to both be roughly ~2.5 million), but there is no credible plan to improve transit so that it’s at Metro Vancouver levels by the time that happens, much less better, which you would hope the Albertan cities could achieve decades in the future!
Vancouver’s Transportation
The comparison of Calgary and in particular its transit with Vancouver is not done often enough. Calgary is already around 60% as large as Metro Vancouver, and yet when I hear Albertans talk about the transit in Metro Vancouver, it’s as if it’s another world. Vancouver is fair bit bigger than Calgary, but it’s not Tokyo. Calgary is not a tiny city, and its skyline and scale feel much more similar to Metro Vancouver’s than it gets credit for.
Now, looking at the comparison, it’s easy to be deceived into thinking Calgary is doing better than it is, as the C-Train has only about 10 fewer stations than the SkyTrain (45 to 53) and 20 km less track (~60 to ~80), but these comparisons do not tell the story.
For one, SkyTrain is much better aligned: more of the regions major destinations are near a SkyTrain station, and better transit-oriented development policies mean a vastly different proportion of Metro Vancouver’s population and growth is near a train station when compared to Calgary — so each kilometre of SkyTrain goes much further. At the same time, SkyTrain runs far more service: train frequencies are usually doubly as good or better, and this is reflected in ridership that is also around twice as good (and remember ,Metro Vancouver is not twice as large). At the end of the day, Calgary probably needs to have a substantially longer rapid transit network than Vancouver, to balance against its lower service levels — something that people have to realize when they think about the right amount of expansion to pursue. At the same time, while the C-Train network does go to the edges of the urban area, this does not make it “complete”; branches would allow for additional suburban coverage (as you notably see in Vancouver), but Calgary also should be pursuing more inner urban trackage, since these denser areas are on average going to drive more ridership.
At the same time, the topology of Calgary’s network is much more radial than SkyTrain, which already has a suburban loop in Burnaby, and will see lines meet near, but not in downtown, with the Broadway Subway. There’s also the issue of connections to major trip generators like hospitals and universities. While basically every major hospital in Metro Vancouver has good transit and usually SkyTrain access, Calgary’s enormous Foothills Medical Centre (larger by itself than any Metro Vancouver hospital) does not have C-Train access. At the same time, while both UBC and SFU are on track to be connected directly to the rapid transit network with the Broadway Subway’s second phase and the Burnaby Mountain Gondola, Mount Royal University is not connected to the C-Train and the connection to the University of Calgary is not great, as the C-Train takes the path of least resistance along Crowchild trail as opposed to going through, and probably under the campus.
The issue is, not only is SkyTrain substantially ahead of the C-Train — a gap Calgary should be trying to close — but there are a lot of other places where Calgary has much to learn. For one, the basic frequent bus service provided by the Frequent Transit Network, or FTN in Metro Vancouver, is something Calgary, where buses are often winding and infrequent has a lot to learn from. Running frequent service on regular routes will probably be a major lift because even the MAX “BRT” routes Calgary has do not receive frequent service by Metro Vancouver, much less Toronto standards. Unfortunately with MAX, Calgary fell into the age old trap of spending lots on fancy infrastructure, but then running really poor service on it — similar to VIVA in York Region. By comparison, Metro Vancouver’s “Rapidbus” lines have less fancy shelters and infrastructure than MAX (at least less visibly), but actually run at really high frequencies and attract tons of riders! For buses, Calgary presents an image of progress, but the actual service is seriously lacking.
And then there are all kinds of small quality-of-life details: Metro Vancouver has more restaurants and shops in transit stations, better transit-bike integration, Wifi being rolled out network-wide, a large number of electric buses, night bus service, a smart card system with open payment that lets anyone showing up in Vancouver pay easily without downloading an app just by tapping the cards they already have, and more.
In fact, in Metro Vancouver, transit service is even considered during road projects. While Calgary has spent huge sums on highway expansion, there has been generally negligible transit benefit; in the meantime, both the Port Mann Bridge project and the coming Deas Island tunnel replacement project have created new dedicated busways that let high-speed regional bus services operate with rapid transit efficiency over regional highways.
All in all, there is a lot to learn, and a lot of improvements that cities in Alberta should be making. But they won’t feel the need if they keep comparing themselves to mediocre American light rail systems. Instead, they should compare themselves to one of the best transit systems on the continent, because after all it’s right next door!
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