Commuters travelling through one of Metro Vancouver’s busiest transit hubs will be asked to plan some extra time into their trip to accommodate major escalator work starting next week.
Staring on Friday, Sept. 27, TransLink will begin the second phase of its Commercial Broadway Escalator Replacement Project.
The work will involve closing the escalators and stairs from the station’s north side to the Expo Line platform.
“What this means is the escalators going to the Expo Line platform at the North Station will be closed for about a year, and customers will have to travel to East Broadway and cross the street to access the South Platform,” TransLink spokesperson Thor Diakow told Global News.
“It’s just not safe to keep those stairs open while this work is happening, there will be scaffolding, a lot of demolition.”
Commuters are being asked to plan about five minutes extra into their travel time if they need to exchange to the Expo Line at Commercial Broadway Station.
The North Station elevator to the Expo Line platform will remain open.
Also on Friday, the station’s escalators to the Millennium Line will reopen.
Those escalators have been closed for about eight months to allow for a complete replacement.
Diakow said TransLink is in the process of replacing all escalators along the Millennium Line, which have reached their end of life after more than two decades in service.
The new escalators will be heavier duty, have variable speed settings to reduce power use, and easier access points for maintenance.
“We’ve had exponential ridership growth across the SkyTrain network and we are getting more and more people on the system every day,” Diakow said.
“Commercial Broadway station is the third busiest station on our system, it had over 6 million boardings in 2023 alone, 19,000 average weekday boardings.”
The work to replace the station’s escalators serving both the Expo and Millennium lines will cost about $10.5 million, from TransLink’s existing capital projects budget.