AlvinofDiaspar
Moderator
The length of the platform is 50m - about half that of the ECLRT.
AoD
AoD
Just got back from Vancouver over the weekend. Didn't like the extra $ to take the Canada Line from the airport but had to bite the bullet on that one. Other than that, the Canada Line is very impressive. I did find that the cars (in terms of length) are rather short... only 3 or 4 cars per train.
Just got back from Vancouver over the weekend. Didn't like the extra $ to take the Canada Line from the airport but had to bite the bullet on that one. Other than that, the Canada Line is very impressive. I did find that the cars (in terms of length) are rather short... only 3 or 4 cars per train.
None of this was easy to negotiate. The woman who ran the setup of the project for TransLink, lawyer Jane Bird, says it's a tough job for the public sector to figure out what exactly to demand of the private partner. And it requires thinking about projects differently.
"Governments spend most of their life specifying," says Bird, who is now overseeing the renovation of Canada’s diplomatic mission in London. "All of the engineering profession is trained and culturally attuned to that, saying the chair should be green and it should be this high and it should have four legs." Instead, in a P3, government officials need to think about what they want to achieve, and leave it to the private company to figure out how to get there.
'What are we really trying to accomplish?'
For the Canada Line, Bird recalls that the government partners set out to specify details such as how many luggage racks there should be on each train. But InTransitBC’s designers pushed back. They argued that passengers don't like luggage racks because they want to be close to their bags. So the trains were designed with cantilevered seats for under-seat bag storage, as well as large open spaces where riders can stand next to their luggage.
"It takes more time than it would appear at first blush to figure out what the goal is," Bird says. "What are we really trying to accomplish?"
Still rising slowly, but progress is noticeable. The office building is starting to get up as well, but you can't really see it from this angle.
IMG_20140305_114525 by AMetalnikov, on Flickr