Sep 10, 2026 · 53 min · 10 segments
Alex Williams is joined by Greg Miller (a Ward 4 resident), Willem Klumpenhouwer (a transit expert), and Jeff Binks (from LRT on the Green) to discuss the updated Green Line alignment for Downtown…
Willem KlumpenhouwerGuestJeff BinksGuest
Greg MillerGuest
So my understanding is that, you know, there's been a long standing plan to build some sort of higher order transit, whether it was like a rapid transit way or something to the southeast, as well as to the north.
Some of the original plans, the southeast alignment, I feel has pretty much kind of stayed the same the whole time, the part that runs let's say from downtown or from the Elbow River, from Englewood southeast, has been relatively stable.
There was talk about other alignments, and that kind of all came together, I want to say, in about 2014, maybe it was, where the studies for the Southeast and the North were sort of linked together.
There was a council champion who sort of championed the Green Line, name of Shane Keating.
And so when all of those ingredients come together at the same time, A proposal gets put forward for sort of a nice, huge, interconnected vision of a green line that runs from what I would call the deep, deep south in Seton to the to the deep, deep north in North Point or 160th Avenue.
So that was sort of the vision that came together in sort of the mid 2010s, let's say.
That work advanced, there was a whole bunch of work done about downtown Calgary in 2016, where they looked at all these different ways to get downtown.
Um, they also looked at this in 2006, but they looked at other things in 2016 and ultimately they concluded that they wanted to go sort of through the center, what I've been calling the center of mass of the city, sort of the balancing point of the downtown, which is second street and to tunnel it underground, um, go onto the bow river, connect up to the north.
Um, and that was advanced for a while, um, until it was paused by the provincial government in first in 2019.
So my understanding is that, you know, there's been a long standing plan to build some sort of higher order transit, whether it was like a rapid transit way or something to the southeast, as well as to the north.
Some of the original plans, the southeast alignment, I feel has pretty much kind of stayed the same the whole time, the part that runs let's say from downtown or from the Elbow River, from Englewood southeast, has been relatively stable.
There was talk about other alignments, and that kind of all came together, I want to say, in about 2014, maybe it was, where the studies for the Southeast and the North were sort of linked together.
There was a council champion who sort of championed the Green Line, name of Shane Keating.
And so when all of those ingredients come together at the same time, A proposal gets put forward for sort of a nice, huge, interconnected vision of a green line that runs from what I would call the deep, deep south in Seton to the to the deep, deep north in North Point or 160th Avenue.
So that was sort of the vision that came together in sort of the mid 2010s, let's say.
That work advanced, there was a whole bunch of work done about downtown Calgary in 2016, where they looked at all these different ways to get downtown.
Um, they also looked at this in 2006, but they looked at other things in 2016 and ultimately they concluded that they wanted to go sort of through the center, what I've been calling the center of mass of the city, sort of the balancing point of the downtown, which is second street and to tunnel it underground, um, go onto the bow river, connect up to the north.
Um, and that was advanced for a while, um, until it was paused by the provincial government in first in 2019.
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