The Missing Transit in This Fast-Growing Canadian Province 

There IS that company Transpod that screams gadgetbahn initially that wants to do the tubed train, but since they don't want to do vacuums it *DOES* seem much more actually viable. Jet powdered maglev trains in a safety tube doesn't sound sci-fi. I also just watched a video about a company called Zeroavia, that should have a high powered, high heat, hydrogen fuel cell that only emits hot water vapor designed for planes. If they were to adapt that kind of technology to power maglev trains, and give them safety rails (which is all the tube is essentially) that could LEGITAMATELY be a really genius mode of transportation.

I feel like it would be quite beneficial to build a nice rail line from Edmonton to Vancouver, stopping in red deer, calgary, banff, revelstoke, kamloops, surrey and vancouver. It would be a beautiful route and possibly calm down the need for so many planes. I think the fact that Calgary-Vancouver is the most common flight route in Canada should be a bit concerning, especially considering how it could defenitely be turned into a train route instead.

There is a proposal from Prairie Rail Link in 2021 to do that, but it's just that, a proposal. I don't disagree that this is something VIA should have already had. I've also heard that Edmonton International Airport has lobbied against that link because that would take away flights.

@@andrewisvrycool that would be amaaazing! I wish they can use the carbon tax to pay for building that train line!

@@KartRacer720So unfortunate to hear that… it’s also quite short-sighted to block it or lobby against it as train users are a different demographic, I think. Would think that there are people that will still opt to ride a plane as they need to get to places faster, but at least the train would open it up for people who may not be able to ride a plane due to health reasons, or who want to stop over at other cities, have the luxury of time, or may not afford flying. Hopefully, the Prairie Line gets built!

Thanks Alex! I know you'd have a good sense of how to connect an airport :)

YYC screwed up, because our bureaucratic class lives in its own bubble of ignorance and arrogance. They could have gotten the additions done quickly and simply by creating spurs off of the existing two lines. A spur from the blue line turning north at Deerfoot Trail and traveling along Deerfoot up to the airport. But here is the problem: the bureaucratic class is ideologically captured by those who believe that cities are to be reformed into prisons where we won’t be allowed to have vehicular devices. The city HATES people who drive vehicles. There is a litany of ways that the city ACTIVELY tries to frustrate drivers. Why else would they put the green line right down the middle of Center Street, a 4 lane stroad that many use to get in and out of downtown from the north central neighbourhoods? The city already does alternating 3 to 1 lane shifts in the morning and late afternoon rush hours on center street, so why would anyone with half an ounce of common sense think that it’s a good idea to cut this road down to 1/2 capacity? If folks think spurs are too confusing, one only needs to look at NYC to see how it’s done. Folks would have to observe the train number to know which spur it will end up on. It’s really not that hard, and it would cost way less. But those are the realities of life in YYC.

Sprawlcast used to frequently cover whenever such discussions at City Hall were interrupted by lobbyists from General Motors and Ford. Especially disgusting as the Canadian government owns a significant portion of GM stock.

One major issue is how many people in Alberta are staunch enemies of any transit whatsoever. Lot of people here have drank the Kool aid and think it's either a waste of time or part of some evil plot to make everywhere like Beijing or something.

The LRT system's been consistently expanded over those forty years, though. Could more have been done? Sure. But they've been expanding it basically every single year.

The C-Train has expanded consistently, but Calgary has grown faster than the C-Train expansion. In the last 25 years, the population has doubled (809,000 in 1995 to 1.6 million today).

LRT expansion is great but some things to think about: 1. LRT ridership per capita has decreased since Covid. Most historical ridership has been commuters downtown, where much less folks work downtown now. Existing bus services accomplish a lot of cross city movement without the need to spend billions of $ on new LRT infrastructure. 2. Calgary has some of the best road infrastructure in the world for a major city. Global studies support this. 3. Flaws in the proposed green line include no link to the south health link campus, no intersection with the existing lines, no link to the airport, managed by public servants who do not have experience managing a project remotely of this size, and already well surpassing the original budget mesning it's prone to catastrophic cost overruns, putting strain on taxpayers for years to come.

Not light rail! Suburban / regional rail - I think the distinction is pretty important because the trains are faster and higher capacity than light rail! Even though Denvers build out has had a lot of problems I think the scope of it would be good for the Albertan cities to aspire to.

It’s also one of the business airports in the world. Much much larger than YYC.

The United States is a lot more efficient building massive infrastructure projects at a state and federal level.

And subsidy.

@@ShomoGoldburgler Less union power.

You beat us (Toronto) in every other respect, so let us have just this one.

airport rail is being built in 2030

​@ps5hasnogames55 no not really. Until the airport agrees with the proposal it's not happening

It's being built right now. It's been paying my bills for the last few months.

@@michaelslinger6903 I laughed way too hard at that!

We need to build a lot more rail in the next few decades than we did in the last few, and thats happening in Ontario - but it needs to happen in the rest of the country!

@@RMTransit ... and also stop tearing up what we already have ...

It is disappointing, but also completely understandable. We have cities that are spread out and were largely designed while the car was the new thing providing the ultimate in freedom of mobility. Also, no one was much concerned about pollution at that time, so roads and cars became the focus. Beyond that, with cars, who needed trains?!?!? Of course, here we are in 2024 with a completely different reality, and I agree.. trains make a great deal of sense.

There's a hydrogen powered passenger train being tested out in Quebec. Those regions with plentiful hydro-electricity can produce hydrogen cheaply enough. By the way, CPR has bought the Kansas City Southern railroad, and now has rail links all the way from Canada to Mexico, on the Gulf and Pacific coasts. As the Panama Canal continues to fail, that rail line will become rather important. In the US, there's more and more demand for high speed rail, especially here on the Seattle-Vancouver BC corridor.

100%, tons of the industry lines are still there straight to factorys and they don’t use them at all lol. We have an extremely well set up rail network that has been ditched completely, on my GO train commute I pass massive amounts of un-used rail and parked trains.

Wow! That's integrated service!

Yes, I talked about it in my Delhi Explainer! The thing that annoys me are that the two IGI terminals are not connected by metro or at least an automated people mover, so going between them on rail is actually quite complicated!

@@RMTransit Yes! That is actually true.

The baggage thing is a game changer

@@hayleybarbara1589oh yes! It is, back then, I knew a few enthusiastic people deliberately booked flights out of the Delhi airport just to experience that.

The lrt is dangerous lol

There’s zero correlation between Edmonton and glorious. It’s a dump

@@garycheevers2671 Wtf did the oilers do to you while u were on the fighting saints

@@pwnedeful that doesn’t make any sense. You must be another Edmonton brain surgeon.

@@garycheevers2671 You have the same name as the Bruins goalie, so I made the joke

Canada line to YVR is gorgeous. I never take a car to/from airport when visiting my daughter. And she lives in North Van ! Even with seabus it is a breeze.

@@dmitripogosian5084 it's a godsend of a line, during rush hour I can beat a car there, especially when I work holidays or long weekends I can save 10 minutes each way.

thought you were going to say you would love to see high speed rail from edmonton to finland

I just uber to the airport it's a $50 flat fee, it's way cheaper than paying for parking.

I commuted every weekend between Calgary and Edmonton for a year in 2010. A rail service of any speed would have been welcomed.

@@Obscurai I feel sorry for you. The QE2 is abysmal to drive in good weather and is the seventh circle of hell in bad weather.

I spent a bit of time studying the rail connection between Helsinki and Tampere since I wanted to see how well a country with very high car ownership does on a similar (albeit shorter) connection between major cities (one of which is similar to yeg and yyc in population and the other being much smaller) and was extremely impressed

All in good fun, as I said the Metro Tunnel will be great!

Hopefully it will be. Pretty sure this is meant as the start of a regional rail service.

My wife always takes a bus from Schipol to Amsterdam when she visits. Much cheaper than rail

I think because politicians can cut ribbons on construction projects.

Well now you've got me thinking as to which is the faster route to a better system. Improve our current system in the hopes of increasing service/ridership and justifying expansion Expand our current system in hopes of increased ridership demanding improved service

I think the latter point of your comment is important, capital funding is plentiful and small C-Train extensions are going to have a minor impact on operations funding availability

Yes, the subsidy well is only so deep.

And there isn't really that much in Paddington, other than St Mary's Hospital which is a local trip generator not an international one; and a tourist trap in the form of Aberdeen Steak House. Other than that it is a mostly residential/secondary retail area that would be Zone 2 if it wasn't for the big railway station.

​@@katrinabryceBut there Is a statue of Paddington Bear.

It needs regional service and a loop line. The LRT is too slow, which you already know.

It might be a no-brainer, but the question is "whose brain?" In the GTA, you have Metrolinx to cross municipal boundaries and get around red tape. In Edmonton's case, its hard for ETS to justify spending Edmonton's property tax revenue on serving people working in Leduc, and an airport that pays property tax to a different municipality. In turn, the airport pays Edmonton to run the bus - that's why it's not getting improved, because that's the only way they've figured to fund the thing. A rail link, or frankly even improved bus service, will require a regional transit authority or the province to step in.

One thing to to also consider is that the bus can go the speed limit on the highway (110 km/h) whereas our the Edmonton LRT vehicles have a speed limit of 80 km/h.

@@jgw928 Very good and interesting points. I’m definitely not a transit expert outside of just being someone who uses these services and has a casual interest in how it all works. I would also call myself an advocate and supporter of public transit funding and expansion everywhere. But the details and politics of a lot of these things are really outside my realm of knowledge. I’m sure the two cities could come to an agreement for rail expansion to the airport. For example here in Toronto, our subway now travels outside the city limits to Vaughan (and soon North York as well). I know that those two cities have been pushing for a subway extension into their municipalities for awhile now because of the the massive benefits to their citizens (as a way to get downtown and elsewhere for work or entertainment purposes), and also for the investment potential that it provides in the way of increased development and densification around transit hubs. I don’t know the details of their agreement with Toronto, but I would imagine that these payoffs would justify them paying into the system somehow. With the increase in burden to our already strained transit network, I would have to assume that these cities had to make a sizeable capital investment as well as ongoing revenue support to the TTC. I’m sure that a regional or provincial transit authority could help speed things up in regard to Edmonton’s needs (not sure how likely that might be with the current government). I Also think it would be shortsighted of surrounding cities to not want to pitch in for the benefit of having a rail line passing through their boundaries. People want to live near these transit lines for the option of an easy way to get to the airport or downtown without having to drive. It’s an easy way to spur development and increase the tax base for a city.

@@mrkylematz Great point. I remember it taking awhile to get downtown on the train, not even including the time spent on the bus. Some kind of express service would obviously be better, but I don’t have much hope of that happening.

Uhhh you mean North?

I've seen the proposed station for the Calgary Banff route included a possible future expansion for a HSR to Edmonton

Wouldn't this mean the provincial government's cooperation be needed for this? I don't see this happening with the current provincial government. I think they would oppose it on the grounds that anything that decreases the oil & gas market might hurt the environment and would ruin the aesthetics of the province.

The only way Calgary will get regional rail is if CP gives up the rai line that goes through the centre of the city. Essentially get CP to divert their mainline around the city of Calgary, rather going right through it. Easier said than done.

@@drewpatterson8261 I've heard a rumor that CPKC is moving their operation out of Alyth yard to newer facilities outside of the city, because of residents complaining about noise. They can't really expand with the constraints of the intercity rail yard

If you mean area along Gateway boulevard ? Isn't the large chunk of it CP tracks ? Which are fairly used ?

@@dmitripogosian5084 yeah, CP has tracks there, but the line could detour east just north of Nisku, then run along the Henday between Edmonton and Sherwood Park. There's tonnes of room out there. The CN yard along Yellowhead could be moved over there too. So the regional service coming from the South of the city could run north, through downtown and branch off either east or west at Yellowhead.

It will probably be faster, Canadian takes like 36 hours :) (Use to do it under 24 hours 15 years ago, and in around 16 in the 50-s, if I am not mistaken about the latter )

You have LRT going not too far from the airport, you could do some branching/realigning easily, airport is quite close.

Back when Winnipeg was planning its Southwest Transitway, there was a proposal for light rail. Our mayor at the time, Sam Katz, was behind it. People from Bombardier Transportation were brought in, and they suggested a system for downtown and the transitway based on their Flexity cars. City council and the provincial government said no, and we ended up with a BRT based on standard, 60 foot transit buses. However, the transitway was built so that it could be converted to light rail in the future.

As for Edmonton, build a main line station where the ROW is and either just extend the Blue line to make the connection or just make an Airport line that runs between the Main Line station and the new Blue line Terminus. Maybe add an express bus to Devon and the University of Alberta Botanical Garden (and one to the university itself) while you at it

And perhaps regional and high-speed rail would be better suited for the downtown-airport links if rail is part of the equation.

@@ostkkfmhtsh012345678 If you're going to connect the airport to much more than a bit of SW Edmonton, absolutely. Something a bit more S-Bahn like would absolutely work.

Hm, for me the airport bus from Century Park is more convenient than from downtown (and I live in St. Albert, yes, sometimes I do take bus-LRT-bus to the airport, can make it in 2 hours :) - never gets stuck in traffic

this has been in the calgary plan for yrs , its nothing new

Jasper has little chance. There is not that much traffic going there, and you will not put 400 km of parallel tracks to CN for few passengers. And on CN tracks passenger service has lowest priority. It is all about freight

Get out your chequebook and anything is possible.

Yes, pleeeeaaassee promote this on the channel

how does that help, it will just push people that want to enjoy a quiet neighbourhood out of the city. What's wrong with building high rises downtown and leave single family zones alone. Stupid Mayor.

@@cityboyis2 Infrastructure is expensive. If you don't want neighbours, buy the land; you don't get to choose your neighbours. It just gives you and them more rights to do what they want with the land. It's not removing zoning entirely lol. High rises, sure, if you consider 4 floors 'high rise' lol

@@planefan082 what you are advocating does not help the city long term.

@@cityboyis2 It's helped drastically in other cities. I'm sick and tired of tons of people having to share houses. Individual apartments are far better. Also allows for the construction of small flats in the parking pads behind houses. Like my neighbours did, but took them a long time for approval.

Twenty years ago. Things change

@@LoneHowler What are you talking about, the latest study was done for 2021... There has been multiple ones done since 2000 and ALL have said the same thing..

​@@matthewq4byou should see what the Alberta government announced today

You had flight service from City Center airport to Calgary which operated almost like a bus ( you get in, take a seat, and flight attendant collects fares and off you go :) )

Actually, I found bus connection to LAX from Union station pretty efficient as well

Indeed, 747 is never crowded, it seems. Shelters - there are ones like 15 meters from a stop - in a LRT station on one end, and airport arrival hall on the other, no ?

@@dmitripogosian5084 At the Century Park LRT station there are bus parking slots right beside the shelter. Because the 747 is the only bus that passengers are likely to have cumbersome bags, it would make sense to use an adjacent slot for the airport bus. The city doesn't do this. They've decided to place the 747 bus stop as far away from the shelter door as possible. It's far enough away that I wouldn't consider waiting in the shelter and dashing with my bags when the bus arrives. The issue at the airport end is similar. There is an airport door somewhat near where the bus stops however the interior space near the airport door is not set up to wait and watch for an arriving bus. When the bus arrives, you need to dash across a busy road with your bags. The city pays so little attention to this service that it's reasonable to conclude that it's at the very bottom of their priority list and they are uninterested in doing what is needed to make the 747 appealing to a wide swath of air travelers.

This is largely due to population size and density. In the last 25 years, population has doubled so that should no longer be an issue going forward. Density is being address on April 22 City Council will consider blanket rezoning for Calgary: the proposal to re-designate residential areas in Calgary that currently allow only single or semi-detached homes to also allow row houses and townhouses.

Yeah. Me too. I guess part of car-obsessed policies and probably lobbying. Just like cities ripping out Tram systems in favor of busses back in the day. Airports make a lot of money from car rental and taxi operations, in the past at least.

Get your cheque-book out and everything is possible.

I think a commuter rail to Langford is more feasible because even just having it run a few times a day would cut down on so much single-passenger car traffic in and out of downtown every weekday, as opposed to the higher-frequency we'd need for rapid transit to the airport to be useful. Still deplorable service though :( That said, a bus driver I spoke to last year had mentioned that a group of them were organizing to bring back the UVic-ferry direct bus, so there is hope :)

You could have it extend as far as Springbank and Calloway park

I've only flown in and out of Gatwick (because direct flights from Calgary) and it was surprisingly painless. I also found Edinburgh to be rather simple to get to (opted for the buses in that case).

Don't know if this still a thing but years ago (if you were flying BA from Gatwick) you could check your bags at Victoria.

@@robertcox1835 I don't think so. Also you can no longer check in at Paddington for Heathrow. In any case, I arrive at Gatwick from one of the other directions, not from Victoria.

Why should it baffle you? It's a question of money. My usual answer if I can't figure something out, that "makes no sense", I usually figure the answer is that somebody who had the money didn't want to pay for it, and somebody who didn't have the money wanted someone else to pay for it. Easy peasy. 1) Why is it Canada's job to help Québec build another autoroute to the U.S. border? You already have A15 to I-87 on the other side of Lake Champlain. Build another one yourselves if you want to pay for it. If it's only "nice to have but we don't want to pay for it ourselves", tough luck. 2) Amtrak's Montréaler used to go to Montréal for many many years, way back long before Amtrak (along with the Adirondack which still does.) It's a less direct route, going through Boston down the Connecticut River to Boston then on to New York and Washington. Before Amtrak it was a joint venture between CN, Central Vermont (subsidiary of CN), Boston & Maine, and I don't know who else farther south. Anyway, just north of St. Albans there is a long timber trestle that crosses the narrows between Lake Champlain and Baie Missiquoi. You can see it from Vt -78 on Google Maps between East Alburg and West Swanton. Amtrak declared that trestle unsafe at least 25 years ago and no one wanted to pay to restore it or whatever it needed. Presumably the Montréaler was losing too much money to justify repairing it just for passenger service. It's still there but I don't know if freight trains use it. Anyway, that's why Amtrak ends at St. Albans and the train is now called the Vermonter. I would think the likelihood that it will ever be extended to Montréal again is very remote. Montréal is a city in decline as far as the need for passenger rail connections with the States is concerned.

My only issue with the C-Train is that it essentially becomes a street-car system with the surface level stations in the downtown area. This means that it slows down considerably especially when all lines form a hub downtown. All the stops for traffic lights, not to mention all of the pedestrian accidents are terrible.

@@Obscurai The traffic lights downtown on 7th Avenue have been synchronized to the trains - therefore, if nothing goes wrong, the train departs say, 1st Street West and goes unimpeded to 4th Street West, and so forth. We have a history of being exceedingly frugal with our money. If we built the trains underground, we would not have the four lines of C-Trains we do today. Let's compare us to Edmonton. Similar sized cities, same start dates, same train technology. Edmonton started with their LRT starting downtown at the edge, but decided to go underneath Jasper Avenue, and went northeast. Calgary started theirs a similar distance from the south and went downtown, but stayed at the surface for the most part. Systems get up and running, carry lots* of people and years go by and the province doles out similar amounts of money to each system. Calgary builds northeast on the surface to Whitehorn and slightly lengthens the downtown line another couple blocks. Edmonton gets two stations further into the downtown core. More money comes from the province, and Calgary builds northwest to the University on the surface. Edmonton gets a couple more stations underground. Calgary extends their south line further by 4 stations, Edmonton gets across the river to their University. It seems to me that Edmonton shot themselves in the foot by going underground in the downtown core while Calgary benefited from the decision to build on the surface.

@@joncalon7508 I understand why it was built the way it was. That said, having used the C-Train for 25 years however, it is clear that there is a bottleneck in downtown. The synchronization is necessary since the 7th Ave lights are throttling the throughput and is a limiting factor for increasing either the number of trains/lines or the frequency of service.

@@Obscurai Completely agree. However, it's gonna take about 800 million dollars to split the Red Line off of 7th Avenue and bury it under 8th Avenue. The plan is there, heck, even a station box has been constructed at City Hall, but there's only so much money and most of it seems to be going to a new arena for the billionaires to make more money and the Green Line.

Too many meth heads on the ctrain and stations.

Yup, I think the last time Edmonton was favoured by the province was 1911 when they let us amalgamate with Strathcona and we got the university. Nada since

province didn't favour Calgary regarding the airport, the province made a deal with WestJet and Westjet chose Calgary to use for it's international flights, that's why there was additional funding to YYC.

Actually, with fast rail between Edmonton and Calgary, role of YEG will probably diminish even further. They may also go Lufthansa-Deutche Bahn way and sell rail tickets as air tickets with say Air Canada flight numbers :)

Well, no, because the longer you are on the train, the greater the labour cost the railway has to spend attending to you. In your car, you provide your own labour, which is not dependent on the unions, btw. So the farther you are willing to drive, the more you save on paid labour. That's why train travel is so expensive. It's slow, so takes more hours of labour to get you to your destination. The airlines figured this out. Flight is expensive *per hour* but not *per trip* because the trips e.g. Calgary - Toronto are so infinitely much shorter than by train. Even flying business on a long-haul overnight flight is much cheaper than going first-class in an ocean liner was. It's win-win. The airlines profit from lower labour cost per mile and the passengers benefit because who wouldn't rather get to Calgary in 4 hr or so, compared to 4 days. Oh, sorry, I forgot. You can't even get to Calgary by train anymore. Now sure, if fuel is really dominant, like in freight transportation, the train wins (sometimes) because trains are more fuel efficient than trucks to move the same load the same distance. But truck transportation is more flexible. The same truck can pick up the load anywhere and deliver to a customer anywhere there is road. With trains that only works delivering bulk cargo from a mine to a ship or a factory/power plant, or sort-of for automobile assembly plants where the parts come in by rail to the factory gate and cars go out on the same tracks. Intermodal helps with sea cans and truck trailer-on-flat-car. But for passengers, fuel cost by itself isn't dominant in choice of transportation. The lower fuel cost of the train is outweighed by the higher labour cost. And if you have a bunch of strangers stuffed into any kind of public conveyance, you need people keeping watch over them to spot people starting to get unruly, as well as feed them, clean the bathrooms, attend to complaints, etc. You don't have that cost in a car. (In a bus you're on your own. Just you and the driver and 40 psychopaths. Pray.)