VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – Starting May 26th, three escalators will be replaced at the Granville Street Station which will take two years to complete.

This is part of TransLink’s maintenance and repair program to fix aging infrastructure. The cost to repair the structure originally built in 1986 will be an estimated $14.5 million.

Sany Zein, who is the VP of Infrastructure Management and Engineering of TransLink, explains these are the three largest escalators in Metro Vancouver which is why the project is lengthy.

“These are very large units each one requires six to eight months to be replaced and we can only do them one at a time. Because the work crews need the space to be able to actually do the work so when one unit is disassembled they will work from the space next to it. And they need the third escalator for their own transportation up and down for the equipment,” he says.

“So effectively we’re closing this entire side of this station and we’ll be doing one escalator in every six to eight months sequentially, so that adds up to about two years. During construction we’ll be doing all we can to obviously speed up the work but workers safety and reliability of this station is important.”

Congestion will be a concern since all customers will be directed to the Dunsmuir side, but Zein says TransLink has done computer monitoring in that area. He says it will function and be safe because they have done proactive measures to make sure the Dunsmuir escalators are reliable.

“And we’ve have installed new compass gates on that side of the station. We’ll be helping our customers through this with a lot of additional signage to find out the new flow directions of the station, and we’ll have a lot of additional staffing to help customers navigate the station,” he explains.

“We very much appreciate our customers patience as we do this, this a really important maintenance project and as the Expo Line ages we’ll be doing more maintenance work to make sure our assets are safe, reliable, and provide the service our customers can expect.”

Customers can also consider using Burrard or Stadium-Chinatown station which is a five to eight minute walk away. Also customers are asked to give themselves extra time during their commute.