If you’ve been driving along Highway 7 East lately, you’ll notice an exciting development taking shape on our Highway 7 rapidway: the installation of the first of 22 vivastations.
And like everything else on the vivaNext project, the station that we’re going to be building in the median at Leslie and Highway 7 is the product of literally years of design, planning and preparation. Here’s a primer on the stations, and how they’ll be installed.
Like their predecessor at Warden Station on Enterprise Boulevard, our vivastations along Highway 7 are going to be beautiful, strong and very functional. The curved viva blue glass that makes up the canopy is surprisingly rugged – this glass is curved, tempered and laminated for strength, which prevents it from breaking into sharp pieces if it is cracked or broken. Reliability was our first priority in sourcing the manufacturer: our glass panels are actually being made by the company that makes nearly half of the world’s windshield glass.
Although the canopy is made up of nearly 100 individual panes of glass, each will be connected to its neighbour by small fasteners, known as “spiders” – so visually, the glass will look like it’s all one piece.
Supporting the glass underneath is a three-piece structure made of Canadian-fabricated steel, constructed just outside of Paris, Ontario. With durability in mind, the steel will be finished with a high-quality automotive-grade paint to minimize long-term maintenance costs.
Before the station components are delivered, a concrete platform is poured and set, and the connections built into the platform are prepared. Then the canopy’s three steel structural sections are brought in on a wide-load tractor trailer and installed. It takes about a week to align the sections perfectly and do some other prep, in advance of the glass being delivered and installed.
Each station includes two platforms/canopies – one for eastbound passengers and one for westbound passengers. Our schedule calls for the construction of one station canopy a month, with eastbound and then westbound canopies being built along the Highway 7 East rapidway throughout the rest of this year. There are a number of steps involved in getting the platforms ready before the glass and steel can be delivered; each platform requires about 12 weeks of work including excavations, installing electrical cables and concrete work.
One of the strategic decisions we made in the beginning for the vivaNext program is to build our rapidway segments consecutively, enabling our designers and construction experts to assess the experience of the previous segment and continually fine tune the design and construction methods. Lessons learned from our experience building the Warden Station have helped us find ways to modify the design, to make the canopies easier and more efficient to install. And because minimizing traffic impacts along the Highway 7 corridor is so critically important, our team has focused on finding strategies to install these huge canopies in a very small space with minimal lane closures.
Beyond providing rapid transit users with a comfortable and convenient experience, our vivastations are going to give a defining look and feel to Highway 7, as it becomes increasingly urbanized and developed over the next few years. We think that’s a milestone that’s really worth celebrating.
2 replies on “Building for the future: here comes the first Highway 7 rapidway station”
I have been looking into some of the pictures of the future rapidways, but have noticed that the buses will be traveling only on one side of the station. This poses a problem in my mind because of where the bus doors are facing. To be more specific, there is no problem when the bus goes in the direction where the door is facing the station, but if the bus moves in the opposite direction, then the door will be facing the traffic.
This may not be too much of a problem if traffic is minimal, but the station that is currently being built is in the middle of Hwy 7; one of the busiest road in town where you can almost always expect some kind of traffic jam during the day. It seems to me that passengers will have to squeeze in between cars to be able to get on or off the bus. I feel that this can be an annoyance to the passengers and the cars, but most of all, I am concern about the safety hazards that this may pose.
This comment has been based mostly on the picture in the following link which I assume will be similar to all rapidways that will be built. http://www.vivanext.com/rapidways Perhaps, there is something that I don’t see which precludes this problem but meanwhile, maybe some of your “experts” can enlighten me as to why this isn’t a problem.
DaleA: Hi Dominic,
Viva buses will travel only on one side of a vivastation platform, but each station will include two platforms – one in each direction. Passengers will only get on and off viva buses on the side the doors face. In the picture you referred to, only one platform [e.g., eastbound] is shown, with the other [e.g., westbound] platform on the opposite side of the traffic signals. The station platform currently being installed on Highway 7 is for eastbound passengers only, with the westbound platform scheduled to be installed later this year on the west side of the intersection. In this video you can see how it will work: http://www.vivanext.com/885
Is there going to be a program for monitoring the line speed vs. ridership? You see, I have doubts that a busway (we call it a Transitway in Ottawa) operating in a non grade seperated/partially physically seperated right of way is going to get bus travel times down compared to a similar rail system. Unless you have a large physical seperation between car traffic and bus traffic you will get frequent car invasions of your bus lanes. The same thing happens here in Ottawa when the bus lanes on Albert and Slater Streets take over from the physically seperated Transitway right of way. It is only the massive number of transit vehicles that keep the rush hour traffic out of the lanes. Even with police and the large bus numbers frequent lane invasions occur. The threat of a large rail vehicle cutting through your car is often all you need to keep invasions down with light rail lines.
DaleA: Hi Fraser,
To answer your first question, transit operations will continue to monitor the ridership and speed of each Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) route, as an important part of the scheduling process. In terms of speed, viva buses use traffic signal priority systems to help them stay on schedule. We have multiple rapidway projects underway and at different stages of completion in York Region, and each corridor has unique traffic patterns. As each project is completed, our traffic experts will carefully monitor traffic patterns in and around the rapidway lanes.
There are some important differences between the design of vivaNext rapidways and the Albert and Slater transitways in Ottawa. Our lanes are in the middle of the road instead of curb side, and regular traffic is restricted from using our rapidway lanes 24/7 instead of during designated times. Our rapidways have medians and 27-metre-long stations at several locations, the pavement is coloured red, and there are rumble strips at the outside edge. On Albert and Slater, vehicles need to cross the transitway lane to access the right-turn lane, whereas vehicles will not need to cross our rapidway lanes.
We’re building Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) lanes, but we’re interested in all types of rapid transit and viva’s rapidways have been designed to be converted to light rail when passenger demand increases to that level.