Commuters along Broadway will notice some significant changes in the coming weeks, as major construction gets underway on Vancouver’s Broadway subway.
Work to this point has focused on site preparation, building demolition and the removal of utilities from construction zones.
The biggest immediate change will be the installation of “traffic decking” in the area of transit stations, starting with the Mount Pleasant station at Main Street and Broadway in the coming weeks.
The decking will essentially create an artificial road surface supported by steel piles to allow traffic to pass through station blocks while crews perform deep excavations and top-down construction for the stations.
Traffic decking installation is scheduled to run from Spring 2021 until early 2022.
Construction of an elevated guideway to connect the six-station, 5.7-km subway extension to the existing VCC-Clark station is slated to run from 2021 until 2023.
Actual tunnel construction is slated to begin mid 2022, with the assembly and launch of tunnel boring machines, which are expected to complete their work by the summer of 2023. The machines will be removed and disassembled at the Arbutus Street subway terminus.
Crews will complete station interiors in 2023 and 2024, with the traffic decking removed and streets restored in 2024.
The new $2.83 billion line is slated to be in service by 2025.