A light rail advocate believes commuters will face more SkyTrain service disruptions than what TransLink is claiming.
Thousands of SkyTrain passengers faced long delays and eventual overcrowding July 4 when a technical glitch shut the rapid transit line down for two hours.
SkyTrain spokesman Ken Hardie told media that a cable linking the trains with SkyTrain’s central computer broke down.
He said these kinds of outages “seem to happen a couple of times a year.”
Light rail activist Malcolm Johnston told Business in Vancouver that he believes the outages will become increasingly common.
“With SkyTrain’s aging infrastructure, ‘glitches’ will happen more and more, greatly increasing the unreliability of an automatic metro,” Johnston said.
“With light rapid transit, these sorts of glitches are rare because the signalling [technology] is more robust and easier to maintain, thus light rail’s reliability as it ages is not a great issue.”
Metro Vancouver mayors met Transportation Minister Blair Lekstrom last week and left feeling more optimistic that the 11-kilometre Evergreen Line would be built through Port Moody to Coquitlam.
The line has been on the drawing board for decades and has been said have been close to an agreement many times.
Some residents in Metro Vancouver’s northeast sector, however, believe that the line will finally become a reality partly because Premier Christy Clark championed the project when she was a cabinet minister in the early 2000s.
“We need to make sure [the Evergreen Line] happens,” Clark told Business in Vancouver during her run to be Liberal leader. “I’m really committed to make sure that the Evergreen Line gets built. The people of the northeast sector have waited long enough.”
Glen Korstrom
Twitter: GlenKorstrom