At the corner of Harvest Hills Blvd and 96 Avenue is a plot of land dedicated for a future Green Line station. It’s been there since they built out the Northern Hills Communities with big wooden signs, donning 90s-era colour schemes, which advertised, “FUTURE LRT PARK ‘N’ RIDE.”

However, over the last few decades those signs have deteriorated. You can go to Google Earth Street View and watch the sign on Harvest Hills Blvd slowly fall apart over the years. It has been an accurate metaphor for the state of the north leg of the Green Line.

The province, city administration and council have allowed the north leg to fall apart and are now only pursuing this new southeast alignment. They have essentially decoupled the North Central and Southeast legs of the Green Line and left North Central Calgary to wonder where it began to fall apart?

It’s hard to pinpoint where the north leg deterioration started. Many believe it was when the North Terminus shrunk from North Pointe to 16 Avenue in 2017.  That was when then-Alderman Jim Stevenson uttered his infamous comments, “There’s not going to be rioting in the north” in response to the decision to build more of the southeast leg first. This comment still bothers many of us up here to this day.

However, the deterioration of the north leg began amplifying quite quickly around this time in February of 2024. The focus on Green Line wavered when comments from Premier Smith (fresh off a new mandate from the recent election) were more interested in LRT to the Airport than Green Line in general.

This is when the city began asking the province for funding to go towards the Blue Line Extension. This was a departure from the messaging that finishing Green Line would come before any future extension projects. Even more recently, engagement has begun on The Red Line Extension Functional Planning Study. To put all this into context, the City’s RouteAhead Strategic Plan from 2023 gave Blue Line Extension a benefit score of 71/100 and the Red Line extension a 54/100.

Green Line is not data-driven decision-making

The North Leg of Green Line has a Benefit Score of 99/100. The new direction the city is taking with LRT development is ignoring its own benefit score data, but we shouldn’t be surprised by this.

The decision to go south before north never actually followed the City’s data either. In 2020, it was made clear in the Alignment Options Report that the southeast leg required the north leg ridership to justify LRT. The “Southeast Transit Way” (SETWAY) was originally a BRT project, but jumped to LRT when they connected their corridor to the North. Yet, the newest Provincial alignment may only ever reach 7th Avenue now, an alignment that the 2020 alignment report said, will result in “high” cost and complexity to expand northward.

All while the North has been overcapacity since the 2016 Green Line Business Case which said, “routes 3 and 301 accounted for 44 per cent of bus overloads citywide, meaning passengers were unable to board due to crowding.” It is staggering that for almost a decade red flags have been ignored along the Centre Street Transit Corridor.

The 2023 RouteAhead Plan listed the North Central 301 BRT improvements at a benefit score of 83/100. This was an interim solution for the north transit capacity issues. However, even after $50-$100 million has been spent on new bus stations, city administration has said at recent engagements that a transit ride may only improve by 2 minutes with these improvements. It was also revealed that these improvements cannot be converted to LRT as was promised to the North communities.

A project, meant to be a Green Line enabling works project, has turned into millions of dollars worth of throwaway infrastructure, not usable for a future LRT. These were band-aid solutions to tide us over until the powers that be decide whether or not Green Line will connect North.

The great Green Line decoupling

The councillors who approved the new alignment have essentially uncoupled the North from the South. They have agreed to a five per cent designed southeast only alignment. They took on all responsibility for cost overruns. Cost escalation alone will inevitably push a North Central transit solution out a few more decades; a $6-7B southeast line at five per cent design is bound to increase substantially.

In a LinkedIn Post Councillor Sharp said, “Cancelling it would’ve cost Calgarians at least $850M in contract penalties, wasted $1.4B already spent, lost billions in funding from other orders of government…” 

This sunk-cost fallacy defined council’s decision making. The mentality of “build anything at all costs before time runs out” is what blew up the north leg.

Those fretting about the sunk-costs need to put this in perspective. Alternatively, we could have cancelled Green Line LRT, absorb the $1.4B “sunk-costs”, pay the $850M in contract penalties, and build a proper $2B BRT corridor from Seton to Keystone Hills, for less than the stub of an LRT being pursued to the Southeast. Instead, the Southeast will get their LRT and all the North is getting is what amounts to an unintentional “monument” to Green Line failures.

There is only one remaining post from the deteriorating “FUTURE LRT PARK ‘N’ RIDE” signs.

It has been immortalized by frustrated North Central Calgary residents with a plaque that reads, “The Northern Hills Post Monument to Missing Infrastructure.”

A fitting tribute to a dead project.

• Contributed by Andrew Yule – North Central Calgary Community Advocate