The Canada Line is the ALRT that runs from downtown Vancouver to Richmond, splitting off to either the airport or central/”downtown” Richmond. It opened for service in 2009 and one of its intended functions was to help move people from the airport to Olympic venues during the 2010 Winter Olympics.

Obviously the construction of a subway is always going to be disruptive to the neighborhoods it goes through, but the Canada Line’s first bad design was the decision to use cut and cover tunnels for most of its route. Cambie Street is the main route the line follows and it literally follows it–being cut and cover, they dug up Cambie Street, keeping two of its six lanes open during construction–and laid down the subway route along the road, following the same route, including a prominent “bulge” around Queen Elizabeth park. Businesses sued over the construction, some went under or moved and in the end it was declared such a mess that the entire Millennium Line extension from VCC-Clark to Arbutus is going to be a bore tunnel.

But the construction was only the first tangible aspect of the bad design. Once open, the line revealed its other flaws to the public. Namely, it was built on the cheap and with no thought put into expansion.

• The system only runs two-car trains, severely constraining capacity (it’s already maxed out at rush hour)
• Stations are very small and often have multiple bottlenecks, leading to serious crowding issues
• Fare gates are often too close to the platform, again because of the tiny size of the stations
• The small stations means that even if they expanded trains to four cars–which they could do anytime–there would be no room for the trains at any of the current stations. They would literally have to dig out new space everywhere except for the above-ground stations in Richmond. Compare this to the Expo Line opened in 1986, where all platforms can accommodate six-car trains, even though they only ran four-car trains for many years.
• Adding insult to injury, the Canada Line even started removing seats from some cars to allow more people to squeeze in, a terrible solution to overcrowding that will only drive (ho ho) people to seek alternatives. They fortunately stopped this after gutting a couple of cars, but the fact that they did it at all shows how inept the leadership is.
• The terminus Brighouse station in Richmond is specifically not designed to accommodate any expansion of the system. When the train leaves the previous station, Lansdowne, it switches over to a single track. The Brighouse station is built specifically around that single track, meaning any expansion would require a massive and expensive retrofit. Compare this to the Millennium Line, which anticipated a future expansion to the Tri-Cities called the Evergreen Line, leading them to build the base infrastructure for a third platform at the Lougheed station, where they expected the Evergreen Line to hook up to the rest of the system. When funding finally got approved for Evergreen–more than a decade later–crews were able to build on and around the existing third platform, saving time and money.
• The trains are seriously noisy when going around corners, the wheels shrieking like crazy. This does not happen to the same degree on the underground sections of other lines.
• Even the choice to go with a Korean manufacturer was short-sighted, as it meant the system could not integrate with the two existing SkyTrain lines, perhaps saving money in the short term, but hobbling any overall integration in the long term.

Much of this can be laid at the feet of the former BC Liberal government, who wanted the line built cheap and fast. They got both of those, but what they didn’t get was the unspoken third part–good.

Fixing the Canada Line would be difficult and costly, but it will likely have to be done eventually, simply because it’s already reached its capacity. There’s no happy ending here.