The shortened CTrain’s projected opening-day ridership has dropped from 55,000 to 32,000 users, mostly impacting transit users in the southeast
Mariah Wilson Chahal said one of the main reasons she and her husband bought a house in Riverbend this spring was their expectation the southeast community was going to have a Green Line LRT station.
Wilson Chahal said she and her husband used to live in a townhouse on Bowness Road, but found the northwest neighbourhood was getting crowded with constant bottleneck traffic along their street. Considering they also have two dogs, they wanted to upsize to a house with a yard.
Since they’re a one-car household, Wilson Chahal, who takes the bus to work, said they started looking at homes in transit-oriented neighbourhoods. The couple eventually decided on the southeast, believing the Green Line would eventually provide an efficient way for her to get to work downtown.
After beginning their search in Ramsay and Ogden, they ultimately moved to Riverbend in May.
“We definitely knew going into Riverbend that the Green Line wasn’t going to be there immediately, but we were excited by the prospect of, in the next 10 years, being able to ride it to work every day,” Wilson Chahal said.
“I actually work in the southeast quadrant of downtown, so having a quick route between our home and downtown was really appealing.”
But on Tuesday night, Wilson Chahal was dismayed to learn that city council had voted to trim the alignment for Phase 1 of the future CTrain to just seven stations, cutting out the South Hill stop and four others from the line until more funding can be secured.
For Wilson Chahal, trimming the alignment was a double-whammy, as she would have gotten off the train at the Centre Street S. station when commuting to work.
“It really isn’t usable for us anymore,” she said.
‘It is disappointing’
Wilson Chahal is one of thousands of southeast Calgarians who will no longer have local access to the Green Line, which was originally pitched as an LRT that would connect southeast Calgarians to the core.
“It is disappointing, that’s all I can say,” he said.
“To come out of downtown and only go three or four stops out of downtown for that sort of money? Oh, my goodness. It’s got to be tens of millions of dollars per kilometre.”
Clement, who is also the general manager of the McKenzie Towne council, said his wife takes transit to and from work, relying on the Route 117 McKenzie Towne Express. Due to heavy rush-hour traffic along Deerfoot Trail, her commute home often lasts more than an hour.
He said his wife was excited by the prospect of being able to take the Green Line from the Shepard station instead of the bus, and figured it would nearly cut her commute time in half.
Clement said the line was also an exciting prospect for those who felt it would alleviate some of the traffic along Calgary’s busiest thoroughfare.
Now, with ridership projections on Day 1 anticipated to be around 32,000 users, instead of the previously expected 55,000, Clement said the new LRT likely won’t make much of a dent in vehicular traffic.
“It is disappointing, but I think their problem is they had to do this thing underground and that chewed all the dollars,” he said. “If they had decided not to put it underground, we’d probably be getting it down to the Seton hospital.
“It’s unfortunate, but I guess we get what we get.”
Building Phase 1 will make future extensions easier: mayor
Council members have defended the decision to shorten the line as a best-case scenario to finally kick off a project that has faced continuous delays and cost overruns since it was first pitched more than a decade ago.
On social media on Thursday, Mayor Jyoti Gondek said construction will focus on the inner-city portion of the line first, rather than the southernmost section, to connect it with the existing Red and Blue lines on 7th Avenue.
Once Phase 1 is built, Gondek said the city will be better situated to extend the Green Line either north or south, once more funding is available.
“We all know that to be able to get from the north of the city down to the south, we need a train network,” she said. “It took a long time, but we’re finally moving in the right direction.”