12 Minutes from west Calgary to downtown?
That’s what Transit says in their West LRT advertising as it finally opened on December 10th.
I will become a frequent user of this line as I live in this area of the city, so I’m very excited about the opening. Does the travel times actually match the claims though? I used my phone to time the train on Friday as I took transit to a Youth Central project.
I decided that an afternoon trip to downtown should be a fairly good choice to reflect the timing of the train, since delays due to rush hour volumes would be minimal (most of the traffic is heading out of downtown by this time of the day). I set the timer to 12 minutes and activated the stopwatch as the train left the station.
It took about 2 minutes to head to Sirocco station:
4 minutes to 45th Street station:
6 minutes to Westbrook! (Not bad, not bad, eh? Faster than the buses by a few at least for us West Calgary dwellers) The underground station has attracted a lot of attention from residents from other areas of the city.
7 and a half minutes to Shaganappi Point!
The best part of the route comes along–the views on the elevated bridge almost reminds me of the Skytrain in Vancouver. Just almost.
It’s about only 9 and a half minutes to Sunalta, officially Calgary’s first elevated C-Train station.
The timer is ticking down FAST…..
The advertising didn’t fail us, however, if their sense of “Downtown” is the westernmost station on 7th Avenue, the brand new Downtown-West Kerby station.
There are many factors to timing trains like this, so my results are not necessarily accurate. It provides a clue to how this line saves commute times, though. Travel times are very important as rapid transit is frequently touted as a rapid mode of transportation. Direct buses are now gone, but the C-Train brings new opportunities to the area.
The High School I go to, Ernest Manning, got a new school building due to the old building being in the way of the West LRT, so that’s a bonus.
I guess the Real Estate developers who are building houses in growing neighbourhoods close to these new LRT stations can now brag about this new advantage!
To end it off, here’s a nice timelapse video for the West LRT (credits to Bryan Wright):
Haha I’m going to have to test this out for myself one day
I dare you to! My friend was staring at me pretty hard when I told her I was actually going to time the train. 🙂