Construction is now underway on TransLink’s first-ever brand-new bus depot dedicated to the future large fleet of battery-electric buses for Metro Vancouver’s public transit network.
As previously reported by Daily Hive Urbanized early this month, site preparation construction work for Marpole Transit Centre, including foundation piling, is now underway on a vacant 20-acre industrial site on the Fraser River waterfront in South Vancouver, situated immediately east of SkyTrain Canada Line’s North Arm Bridge.
When complete and open in 2028, this bus depot will have the capacity to store, charge, and maintain about 340 battery-electric buses, plus other facilities dedicated to operations and the large workforce of bus drivers.
But it will cost substantially more than originally budgeted.
Upon inquiry, TransLink confirmed to Daily Hive Urbanized the new Marpole Transit Centre will carry an estimated cost of $848 million.
This is nearly three times the preliminary estimate of $308 million in 2021, which subsequently increased to $344 million in 2022, and $498 million in 2023.
In addition to the recent steep market inflation in the prices for construction materials, labour, and equipment, the escalation in the construction costs was also due to the need to make “massive changes to the seismic and structural design of the project.” These changes are required under the provincial government’s 2023 update to the BC Seismic Code.
Such changes included adding over 3,500 steel foundational piles under the two main buildings and drilling over 17,000 concrete columns into the ground. This work can now be actively seen at the development site.
Construction progress on TransLink’s Marpole Transit Centre bus depot in South Vancouver, as of December 5, 2024. (Kenneth Chan/Daily Hive)
Construction progress on TransLink’s Marpole Transit Centre bus depot in South Vancouver, as of December 5, 2024. (Kenneth Chan/Daily Hive)
In addition to the challenging soil conditions on the riverbank land area, TransLink notes the required flood protection wall along the foreshore is also more complex than originally expected with the preliminary geotechnical information.
According to the development permit application approved by the City of Vancouver, the entire site will be elevated on a platform about 4.6 metres above sea level to serve a “superdyke” function — higher than the existing ground elevation between 2.5 metres and 3.3 metres. The complex will elevated about two metres higher than Kent Avenue along the northern perimeter, and a flood protection wall will be built along the south perimeter fronting the river.
Other unexpected site conditions now require TransLink to remove contaminated soil, debris, and buried foundations to improve the ground conditions before building the facility’s foundation.
Additionally, there will be numerous buckling-restrained braces to meet the provincial government’s new seismic standards.
Generally, TransLink’s existing bus depot facilities have relatively simple configurations, with maintenance/operations buildings adjacent to large surface vehicle parking areas for the overnight storage of buses.
Artistic rendering of the Marpole Transit Centre. (TransLink)
Artistic rendering of the Marpole Transit Centre. (TransLink)
Site plan of the Marpole Transit Centre. (TransLink)
Site and traffic movement plan for Marpole Transit Centre. (TransLink)
However, the significant parking areas for up to 300 buses at Marpole Transit Centre are stacked in the operations building, which is essentially a multi-level parkade structure that spans nearly half of the property’s land area.
With a growing shortage of available industrial land for new development in Metro Vancouver, there are growing calls from the development industry to encourage more vertical industrial projects. This bus depot represents the region’s largest example to date of a vertical multi-level industrial development.
The last bus depot TransLink constructed from scratch is the Hamilton Transit Centre in Richmond, which reached completion in 2016 at a cost of $136 million. Its industrial location is also on the edge of the Fraser River, and its size is comparable to Marpole Transit Centre, with a land area of 18 acres and a capacity for approximately 300 buses, including 150 compressed natural gas-powered buses.
Marpole Transit Centre represents one of the two initial major bus depot facilities that will handle TransLink’s pivot to battery-electric buses. A $31 million upgrade is also being performed on the existing Port Coquitlam Transit Centre to expand its capacity and introduce the capability for handling about 100 battery-electric buses.
Artistic rendering of the Marpole Transit Centre’s operations building. (TransLink)
Artistic rendering of the Marpole Transit Centre’s operations building. (TransLink)
Artistic rendering of the Marpole Transit Centre. (TransLink)
Artistic rendering of the Marpole Transit Centre. (TransLink)
The construction of Marpole Transit Centre allows TransLink to take a significant step toward adopting a battery-electric fleet by replacing aging fossil fuel-powered buses later this decade, while also expanding the overall size of the bus fleet to support new and improved service levels for growing ridership.
The complex is jointly designed by WSP Global, Architecture 49, and TWD Technologies.
A portion of this industrial waterfront site for Marpole Transit Centre, which has the addresses of 8902-9001 Heather Street and 502 West Kent Avenue, was previously contemplated by the Vancouver Park Board for a 10-acre waterfront public park, including the possibility of a natural outdoor swimming pool.
This facility complements TransLink’s nearby Vancouver Transit Centre bus depot, which primarily serves trolley electric buses. Located on the edge of the Fraser River, the Vancouver Transit Centre lies just west of the Marpole Transit Centre, next to the northern end of the Arthur Laing Bridge.
Upon completion, Marpole Transit Centre will be a highly visible structure for those entering or leaving Vancouver on the Canada Line.
Site of the Marpole Transit Centre. (TransLink)
In total, over the coming years, TransLink expects it will need to spend about $6.5 billion for brand-new and expanded bus depots built to a higher cost standard of handling battery-electric buses.
Additionally, other TransLink fleet depot projects have seen a steep cost escalation.
The cost of the new OMC4 operations and maintenance facility in Coquitlam, serving SkyTrain’s Expo and Millennium lines, has risen from the early design estimate of $658 million in 2021 to $1.299 billion as of December 2024, with construction now well underway.
The ongoing construction project of building a new state-of-the-art control centre building for SkyTrain’s Expo and Millennium lines has tripled since 2021, now reaching $327 million.