Vancouver’s Broadway Corridor is the busiest bus corridor in North America and services the University of British Columbia (UBC), the second-largest employment centre in the Province of BC. TransLink recently committed approximately $3B to extend the Millennium Line SkyTrain through Central Broadway to Arbutus Street. However, with a terminus only at Arbutus, this project would be incomplete. UBC is still six kilometres further west of Arbutus and continuing this project to UBC will complete the extension project, providing a contiguous service to the corridor’s single largest destination. 

Access played a crucial role in leading the planning team to make this rapid transit project a reality. We were awarded a multi-year assignment to help TransLink through a multi-stakeholder process to define the project's most important objectives and affected communities and to design creative options for train design, alignment, and community development to achieve them. To this effort, we brought expertise in rail and community integration, business case development, and strategic decision support.

This phase of work resulted in a preferred alignment and design concept that emerged as the most promising option among a range of project alternatives. The work compared and evaluated the performance of different project alternatives, including definition of the costs, benefits, business case, and funding options.