Broadway subway project delay: Businesses closing, struggling with debt

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Simit Bakery manager Koray Yuce says that business at the company’s Broadway location has been a struggle for the last two years because of prolonged construction on the Broadway subway project. Two months ago, they made the decision to close for good.

After hearing news last week that completion of the project is now delayed until late 2027, he says the owners made the right choice.

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He transferred to the company’s West 4th Avenue location some time ago along with several others, but five staff at the Broadway location will be laid off when it has to close permanently next weekend.

“It’s heartbreaking. The Broadway location was actually very busy before, but nobody walks in anymore. We were trying to do some social media to improve things, but it was in vain.”

Completion dates for two major infrastructure projects, the Broadway subway and the Pattullo Bridge replacement, are a year behind schedule, according to the province.

The Broadway project — an extension of SkyTrain’s Millennium Line to Vancouver’s westside along the congested Broadway corridor — will not be completed until late 2027. The new Pattullo Bridge, which will replace the aging span between New Westminster and Surrey, won’t be completed until late 2025.

“It’s classic over-promise and under-deliver NDP public infrastructure,” said B.C. United shadow minister for transportation and infrastructure Trevor Halford, who is the MLA for Surrey-White Rock.

It’s not the first time these projects have been delayed and “there obviously will be an impact on cost that they’re not telling us about,” said Halford.

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The extended delays aren’t expected to affect the projects’ pricetags of $2.83 billion for the Broadway subway and $1.38 billion for the new Pattullo bridge — at least, not yet, according to the province.

The $2.83 billion overall project budget for the subway includes a $1.73-billion major contract with a contractor who is designing and delivering the project and a remaining $1 billion, which is the province’s costs and an amount allocated for unexpected situations contingencies, said Lisa Gow, associate vice-president for the subway project.

“We’ve looked at the overall budget and are comfortable at this point in time with what we know, and that even with those increases because of extra time we can manage within our current budget,” Gow told Postmedia.

Wendy Itagawa, the provincial government’s executive-director for the Pattullo Bridge replacement project, said that many special components, such as structural steel, as well as cables, bearings and expansion joints, have now been secured and are on site, “so we’re feeling very confident about the schedule now that that risk is out of the way.”

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“We’re reviewing everything and, so if there is a change, we would be letting the public know,” Itagawa said.

She said that for now the focus is on managing the budget pressures.

The Pattullo Bridge replacement project has also completed the building of the new bridge’s main tower, the tallest bridge tower in B.C. When completed, the $1.4-billion project will offer wider lanes separated by a centre median, as well as dedicated walking and cycling lanes.

Construction for the Broadway subway began in September 2020, with an initial completion date in 2025. But a five-week concrete supplier strike in June 2022 that held up construction of a launch pad for the project’s tunnel-boring machines pushed the completion date back to 2026.

Since then, there have been delays in relocating major utilities, installing traffic decks that are a new technology, tunnelling and soil excavation at each station.

“Just for a relative sense of things, each station box is, sidewalk-to-sidewalk, six lanes wide and it’s a block to two blocks long, depending on the location, and between 18 to 20 metres deep,” said Gow.

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According to a March status report for the Broadway subway, the project was already lagging behind schedule as a result of delays in tunnel-boring and station construction, but still expected to be within budget, with total spending to date at about $1.49 billion.

It has now completed tunnel-boring operations, which the province described as “the most technically complex and challenging part” of construction.

“Once we finished the tunnel boring, we had a much higher level of comfort in terms of what the remaining components of the project were going to be,” said Gow.

When completed, the 5.7-kilometre extension will have six new stations and will whisk passengers from the Millennium Line’s current terminus at VCC-Clark Station to a new station on Arbutus Street and Broadway in 11 minutes.

Until then, business owners like Sentheepan Senthivel of Greens independent grocer at 1978 West Broadway, who have been asking the city or the province to recognize their ongoing challenges, face another stretch and going into personal debt to keep their businesses going. Where banks had initially been more willing to extend loans, they are now “less likely to help out because of the risk.”

Jlee-young@postmedia.com

With a file from Cheryl Chan

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