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Originally Posted by officedweller
I left that up to the reader on purpose - apparently Calgary has good transit ridership and their CBD is very centralized, making transit easy to plan.
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Originally Posted by CoryHolmes
Have you seen the rest of it, though? When I was there back in '01, it was nothing but urban sprawl as far as the eye could see, with (as you said) has a very small CBD.
Surrey is working hard to shed that 'low-class suburb' tag that it's borne for decades. Growing like Calgary really won't help that. If it really wants to be taken as seriously as Vancouver, then it's going to have to become a true urban/metro area.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by officedweller
I haven't been to Calgary in years - so I can't really comment on it.
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More people in Calgary commute using the LRT here than use the SkyTrain in the lower main land. (Calgary 271,000 vs. SkyTrain 220,000). Not sure how the numbers compare when you add in busses, since I can't find Coast Mountain ridership numbers.
Calgary's CBD is the working home for more than a 1/4 of working Calgarians, and provides a natural focus for service. This did not appear out of a vacume however, and is the result of many years of pro CBD policies. (as a result we have much fewer people living in the core compared to Vancouver, but it is reversing a bit these days). I wouldn't call the CBD small, but concentrated. (Calgary has more leaseable office space than Vancouver, about 25% more)
And yes, sprawl is bad in Calgary, but not any worse than in any other Canadian Metropolitan Area. New suburbs are built with density targets of 12.5 UPA, and all suburbs approved after the early 1980s are at least 6 UPA.
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Originally Posted by fever
There aren't that many passenger rail companies. Bombardier (Canada), Siemens (Germany), Alstom (France), Breda (Italy), Skoda (Czech), Stadler (Swiss), one for every other European country basically, and a bunch of Japanese companies.
I think Toronto and Calgary are trying to do something similar to this. The total probably doesn't add up to $25 billion.
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Calgary buys off the shelf from Siemens, built in California. The only way Calgary will buy from anyone else is if it is cheaper, or if they loose access to federal/provincial money if they don't.
Skoda is building a plant in Portland for streetcars. Toronto can't even decide to buy any new cars as of today.
A nail everyone here has hit on the head is how difficult it is to plan transit in Vancouver, due to a current lack of natural hubs. The advantage to this is you can create hubs and fund construction through MTR style land development at these hubs.