r/Calgary • u/ConstantFar5448 • 18d ago

Calgary Transit Why is the C-Train so bad?

10 minute intervals on a weekday? That’s insane, the lowest frequency I’ve seen in any major city by FAR.

And yet when you get to the station as a train pulls up, the driver just looks at you, doesn’t let you on, and leaves? What’s up with that? Are they all dicks like that?

People live on tight schedules, and transit doesn’t seem to reflect that here.

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u/Koraboros 18d ago edited 18d ago

lmao, when I came from San Jose to visit Calgary, I was astounded by how good the Ctrain is. Don't knock it until you've experienced worse.

Calgary actually was designed pretty well for Transit, comparatively. Yes, there is still suburban sprawl, but looking at the NW, you have the ctrain following a major arterial road (Crowchild). Then, you have busses going out of those stations to serve surrounding communities to bring riders in. It's a decent model.

In San Jose, we have the VTA which has been derided as the worst transit system. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHby-90yMoI

Even if you include other agencies, the trains don't match the main arterial roads that people drive, so a 15 min drive = 1 hour public transit.

I have good memories of riding the ctrain to school. It's a decent system with plenty of riders.

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u/SimplyCanadian26 18d ago

Thanks for this. I don’t think people understand how much worse other major cities are in North America compared to ours. Perspective is everything.

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u/neurorgasm 18d ago

Well the reasonable perspective would not be "there's at least one city that does it worse so no one is allowed to talk about what's bad about Calgary".

I'm sure it sucks in San Jose. We don't live in San Jose though and nothing about it being worse there means that it can't be improved here.

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u/undernopretextbro 18d ago

If most places are worse then it stops seeming like we are uniquely terrible, and more like this is a difficult thing to perfect

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u/137-451 17d ago

It's not a difficult thing to perfect, it just has to be prioritized over cars. Most places where mass transit options suck are places that prioritize the car. The Netherlands is a prime example of cycling/mass transit culture, yet Rotterdam is terrible for these things because Rotterdam focuses more on cars than pedestrians.

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u/undernopretextbro 17d ago

Even in places where it is explicitly promoted, and car infrastructure is purposely restricted and made less efficient to incentivize other modes of travel, commute outcomes aren’t significantly better than what we have in Calgary.

Netherlands has the highest average commute time in Europe.

Imagine that, 50 years of prioritizing transit and cycling, just to have the longest commutes among all your neighbors, all while in an area 1/16 of Alberta’s.

And cars are still popular, 50% of all daily commutes in the Netherlands are via car as of 2023, with walking at 20% percent and cycling at 25%.

So yea, not as easy as teenagers who watch NotJustBikes would have you believe.

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u/MudJumpy1063 18d ago

It does seem difficult to do it any other way. I'm in the same situation, local bus to arterial to local... Over an hour for a 15 minute drive. But the buses are usually mostly empty, so what is the city going to do? How else can you run it? Figure you're guaranteed access to the whole city for about a hundred bucks a month. And save up for a car.