Student: Tom Juan Claude Fréreux- Sanchez Study:
Vancouver SkyTrain :An example of efficient transportation Keywords:
mobility, city-scale, automation The Vancouver SkyTrain is defined as a light and fast mobility service created in 1985 in the Metro of Vancouver. This automated metro network is deployed on three, mainly overhead, lines for the surrounding municipalities, hence its name, and provides a gorgeous panoramic view of the downtown Vancouver. The starting point of the project, back at the time, was to envision an efficient transportation means to answer the exponential growth of traffic jams in the city (a cultural change that many cities have faced). Since that time, the network kept on growing and includes today 53 stations, carrying an average of 390,600 passengers per day. With 79.6 km of rail road, the project became in 2016 the longest automatic metro network in the world, ahead of the Dubai’s metro. Moreover the former crosses the longest exclusively metro bridge in the world, the Skybridge over the Fraser River. For all those reasons one may claim that Vancouver SkyTrain achieved the sustainable transit ideal as it enables citizens to live far from the center and yet access efficient automatized transportation. Nonetheless, in the last years, some claim rose dealing
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with the unjustified cost of the construction. Indeed the SkyTrain had cost an average of 500 million$ per km while classical tram transportation cost about 1 million per station. Therefore some claim that this means is no longer efficient as it no longer fulfills the “most amount of transportation for the least amount of money” requirement. Lastly, some analysis as shown that that development around SkyTrain stations did not benefit all groups of society equally but mainly wealthier and more educated population.
