Extending Vancouver's Automated Transit System into the New Millennium

The Greater Vancouver area has grown rapidly over the past two decades and is now a large, vibrant, multicultural region and an important international gateway to the Pacific Rim. With an expanding economy and population, the city and surrounding municipalities are facing unmanageable congestion, rising air pollution and urban sprawl, all of which take a toll on the regions livability. From a systems contractors perspective, this paper outlines the challenges of integrating new, state-of the-art electrical and mechanical systems with existing systems built in 1986 and subsequently extended in 1990 and 1994. The requirements of this brown-field systems engineering process and its quality assurance controls are described. SkyTrain is well known as a transit system that demonstrate one of the lowest costs per passenger kilometre in the industry. The conclusion reviews SkyTrains history of exceptionally low operation and maintenance costs and explains how this history was translated into specific performance targets for the new system. Strategies for maintaining a high level of performance while driving down future costs are outlined.