GreenLine Update: Revised Phase 1 Project + Capital Request
To address rising cost inflation that is impacting all major infrastructure projects across North America, Calgary City Council has approved a revised Phase 1 project and capital request for the Green Line.
The Green Line LRT is moving forward and on track to begin main construction from Lynnwood/ Millican in the southeast to Eau Claire by the end of 2024. Phase 1 south to Shepard, as well as future extensions north or south, will proceed when additional funding is in place.
The city-shaping benefits from building the core of Phase 1 remain strong. This decision will allow for new Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) and bus service in the southeast to provide connections into the LRT, contributing to the projected opening day ridership of approximately 32,000 Calgarians. Additionally, the revised Phase 1 Green Line will connect Calgarians to 162,000 jobs within walking distance of stations, remove 15,000 tonnes of GHG emissions annually, and unlock a maximum potential of 70,000 housing units through strategic transit-oriented development along the alignment.
The strategy to build LRT projects in Calgary in phases makes even more sense now with cost pressures on all infrastructure projects along with the financial constraints and competing priorities of our funding partners. It never gets cheaper to build major infrastructure projects.
You can read the full media release through the link below
Further Reading
A Note from GC:
Framed in my office at City Hall hang four huge boards chock-a-block scrawled with the distinctive comic book-style notes and sketches of Ramsay artist Sam Hester. Each board is a record of one of the days in which the original GreenLine team and their consultants design charrette engaged Ramsay and Inglewood community members on how that mega project might best bring change to our heritage communities.
I had that record framed for many reasons - Sam’s work provides such insightful distillation of complex moments in time - but most of all out of a sense of deep gratification that I was achieving the mission that had sent me to City Hall in the first place: historic reinvestment in the East Calgary neighbourhoods that built our city, so that we can continue in that role and successfully meet the future coming at us.
That charrette was almost a decade ago.
At the end of July, a very different City Council from the one that first conceptualized the GreenLine, in a very different moment in time, made the momentous - but to my mind deeply obvious - decision to finally begin building the GreenLine. This was in the face of the stiff headwinds that have challenged the project from its inception: tangibly, the huge costs and technical challenges associated with a city-shaping mega-project; but also, the intangibles of fear of change gamed by a politics of anger and division.
While there are many things I wish had gone differently over the last ten years, and while I deeply wish the original timelines that would have seen the 2026 opening day for the first phase of the project met, I am extremely pleased that we’re moving forward.
Our collective mission now is to ensure that:
All Stations are delivered with the quality public realm, the connectivity, and the neighbourhood-enhancing real estate opportunities that we originally conceptualized at that Charrette; and,
We elect federal, municipal, and provincial governments that are committed to funding the full completion of the GreenLine.
We hope you’ll join us in this important piece of advocacy.
