70 kilometres of new track, 45 new stations.
With three more decades’ worth of expansions essentially mapped out, it stands to stretch out more than 70 additional kilometres, becoming a six-legged monster with more than 45 new stations.
And yes, that includes an airport LRT stop.
Most plans are still many years, engineering studies and billions of dollars away.
"As much as we love the C-Train — and we do — there are two drawbacks with C-Train: it’s very expensive and it’s very inflexible, so we have to be really darn sure when we lay those tracks that’s exactly the right thing to do," Mayor Naheed Nenshi says.
The article does a good job of showing hard it is to retrofit a city with rapid transit and it might be a good idea for the City of Saskatoon to start planning for it, even if we don’t start building it for some time. Neighbourhoods that are designed from the ground up for LRT make it a lot cheaper then acquiring land down in the future.
In case you are wondering what it costs Calgary to build the LRT,
Fifty million dollars per kilometre is the crude measurement for LRT. Go above ground or below, and that becomes a lowball figure.
Amen – better to plan for light rail and do development around it.
We bought out house 5 years ago a block from the then-forthcoming light rail. It’s been in operation for 2 or 3 years now, and it’s great – we can go downtown, to the airport, and to a few other places, but the real value will be when it’s extended to the university and all the way to the north end of town (which has a mall).
The tracks were laid through a fairly run-down part of town that was substantially redeveloped at the same time. This wasn’t without controversy, and there was a substantial “save our valley” movement. I think we’re better off now, though, with a few thousand new housing units and businesses moving back in.
Glad Canada is moving aggressively on expanding rail service – I can’t say there is much other movement here besides this one project.