The opening of the much-anticipated Evergreen Line, which will connect Burnaby, Coquitlam and Port Moody to Vancouver, has been delayed until early 2017.
The line was previously scheduled to open in the fall of 2016, and the news of the delay was buried in a provincial government press release issued November 27.
“The tunnel interior work and systems installation will continue into summer 2016,” The release said. “Train testing is expected to begin in the tunnel in the fall of 2016 with the line operational in early 2017.”
As recently as September 2015, an Evergreen Line community update bulletin had stated testing would begin in July 2016.
Robin Lindsey, professor of operations and logistics at UBC’s Sauder School of Business, said delays are common in major transportation infrastructure projects like this.
“The reason is their complexity, the amount of time required to do the work and the many opportunities for something to go wrong,” Lindsey said. “In the case of the Evergreen Line the main problems were with the boring machine getting stuck and the sinkholes.”
Lindsey said project completion dates are usually forecast with the expectation of nothing going wrong, and when delays do occur, announced completion dates are again pushed back without allowing for any future delays.
“A more honest approach would be to announce a list of possible completion dates such as: 2015 if nothing goes wrong, early 2016 if minor problems occur, late 2016 if major tunneling problems are encountered, and so on,” he said.
“Announcements are not made this way in practice because it would confuse the public and because it might suggest incompetence on the part of the contractor and/or the government agency responsible for writing the contract and overseeing the work.”
Minister of Transportation and Infrastructure Todd Stone said the entire project is more than 75% complete, and tunnel boring is now finished. The government said the boring of the tunnel was the most challenging part of the project.
A section of the bored tunnel in Port Moody | Photo: Government of BC
The line will have seven stations, and station buildings range between 80% and 99% complete.
The government said it anticipates the Evergreen Line system will carry 70,000 passengers and take 40,000 cars off the road every day by 2021. Lindsey said these numbers may be overly optimistic.
“Transit projects often end up attracting people who would otherwise have walked, bicycled, or not traveled at all,” he said. “Moreover, when some people stop driving traffic congestion eases up and other people may decide to start driving.”
A map of Metro Vancouver's transit network, showing the Evergreen Line in green | Government of BC
