Vancouver SkyTrain p

Student:

Tom Juan Claude Fréreux- Sanchez

Study:

Vancouver SkyTrain :An example of effi cient transportation

Keywords:

mobility, city-scale, automation

The Vancouver SkyTrain is defi ned 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 effi cient transportation means to answer the exponential growth of traffi c 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 effi cient automatized transportation.

Nonetheless, in the last years, some claim rose dealing

with the unjustifi ed 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 effi cient as it no longer fulfi lls 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 benefi t all groups of society equally but mainly wealthier and more educated population.

Student:

Kristina Jessie Goveas

Study:

The Environmental Energy Innovation (EEI) Building

Keywords:

building-scale, energy

The Environmental Energy Innovation (EEI) Building is the first purpose-built facility on the Ookayama campus, Japan. This building incorporates the latest environmental energy technology and also has a designed energy system that is nearly self-sufficient at producing the energy it consumes.

Overall, this building has managed to reduce its CO2 emissions by 60%. It reduces its CO2 emissions and generates power to cover the building’s own consumption. The building can conserve energy through high efficiency equipment. The power is also generated through solar panels placed on the rooftop as well as on the south and west side of the building which are angled for maximum sunlight.

In order to maximize the number of solar panels to be used on building, a detached frame of panels, the solar-panel envelope, was created. Unlike conventional buildings which utilize solar panels on their walls and roof, this building has solar panels covering a surface area larger than that of the actual walls. About 4570 solar panels cover the building’s south, west and top surfaces. In this way the building was able to fulfill its goal of becoming a nearly energy self-sufficient building. The rooftop of the building is the command center from which power generation, storage and distribution is managed. This helps to control the solar energy used by the solar panels. It also uses geothermal heat pumps and a ‘cool tube’ system to maximize the cooler air generated below the basement floor.

Wasted high temperature heat is reused by an absorption refrigerator which provides energy to an outside air conditioning system. Low temperature wasted heat is used to control humidity and heats the water used in the building’s restrooms. The utilization of waste heat improves the system’s efficiency. The EEI building is also designed to have a high seismic capacity to withstand strong earthquakes which often occur in Japan.

This is achieved by forming a ‘basket frame’ around the sides of the building which absorbs the energy from small- scale earthquakes. Additionally, it avoids damage to beams, columns and the building’s exterior in the event of a large-scale earthquake which ensures the long-term use of the building.