The City of Calgary continues to hammer out details for its ambitious Green Line LRT route plan, but with construction slated to begin in 2019, residents in the city's deep south are weary of the wait. Many are wondering if the City should focus on improving other transit offerings in the area instead.

Talk of a CTrain arriving someday was a selling feature 22 years ago, when a future station site was built into the master-planned community of McKenzie Towne. More than two decades later, the promise of an LRT continues to feature heavily in the marketing of new communities farther south, including Auburn Bay, Mahogany and Seton, the farthest southern stop planned for the Green Line's 46-kilometre route.

Calgary to look at popular alternative to street parking

Nobody likes paying for street parking, but imagine if the money collected went directly into improvements for the community where you parked.

That's the idea behind Parking Benefit Districts (PBD), a concept gaining traction in a number of U.S. cities and may be on its way to Calgary.

"Parking Benefit Districts provide a solution to that political problem (of charging for street parking) as it creates a mechanism where the revenue generated stays in that local area," explains Greg Morrow, who sits on the CalgaryPlanning Commission and holds the Parker Professorship in Metropolitan Growth and Change with the faculty of environmental design and Haskayne School of Business at the University of Calgary. "You can direct parking revenue into local improvements like sidewalks, or installing new themed street lights."

Alternative forms of transportation dominates headlines in 2015

Joe Starkman was contemplating buying a car for his daughter while she attended university in Halifax. To his surprise, she wasn't interested.

"That twigged us," said Starkman, president of Knightsbridge Homes, the builder behind N3 in East Village, Calgary's first carless condo. "We started to do some research, and our research showed there's a market in that Generation Y demographic for which car ownership is not a priority.

"We're not trying to change the world, we're just responding to a world that's changing."

The numbers are in, and Calgary Transit set another record in 2013, by carrying a total of 107.5 million customers. From 2012 this was 5.5 million or five per cent more than the number of transit riders in 2012.

There has been a 12 per cent increase in ridership over the past three years, which is double the rate of Calgary's population growth during this period.