Toronto Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport | ?m | ?s | Ports Toronto | Arup

From the article:

Wilson compared it to building a house or doing home renovations, adding its contractor PCL hasn’t committed to a specific date yet.
“The work takes as long as it takes,” she said. “It’s a complicated project. The scope is massive.”

First off, this is a tunnel with escalators and moving walkways. This in not that complicated of a project, thousands of these things are installed at airports around the world. Second, who in their right mind works on a large project with a contractor without a defined end-date? All the heavy tunneling and drilling must be completed at this point in the project. So really, what is the delay?

When hiring a contractor for any project the buyer can have only 2 of these 3 deliverables: low cost, high quality or a speedy completion. (ie. if you want something done quickly and with high quality, it is going to cost a lot.) It would appear that low cost is the driver in this case, there is obviously very little push to get this project completed.
 
jaybe said:
From the article:

Wilson compared it to building a house or doing home renovations, adding its contractor PCL hasn’t committed to a specific date yet.
“The work takes as long as it takes,” she said. “It’s a complicated project. The scope is massive.”

First off, this is a tunnel with escalators and moving walkways. This in not that complicated of a project, thousands of these things are installed at airports around the world. Second, who in their right mind works on a large project with a contractor without a defined end-date? All the heavy tunneling and drilling must be completed at this point in the project. So really, what is the delay?

When hiring a contractor for any project the buyer can have only 2 of these 3 deliverables: low cost, high quality or a speedy completion. (ie. if you want something done quickly and with high quality, it is going to cost a lot.) It would appear that low cost is the driver in this case, there is obviously very little push to get this project completed.
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Well it is a non-urgent project. Yes it will improve the convenience at the airport but it is an add on access that is hardly a necessity...so, yes, you are probably right there would be little push to increase the cost to get it finished by some arbitrary deadline.
 
ksun said:
are you saying this is not extremely slow? Take a look at larger tunnels elsewhere and how long it took. Fantastic incompetence and inefficiency.
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Without knowing the construction schedule, or monitoring daily manpower, you have no idea if it is taking a long time or if it is actually inefficient. From the sounds of it, the airport is under no hurry to get the project done, so the schedule is likely not very aggressive. It is quite possible that it has been scheduled to take a long time, in order to save money.

I would suggest that you hold your tongue before you start accusing people of incompetence, because as you have demonstrated in thread after thread, you clearly aren't very well versed in construction at all.
 
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An underground tunnel under a waterway with electrical and mechanical terminating with alterations to two existing structures... Time to call the York U tunnel guy as project troubleshooter.
 
Wasn't there a discussion about the difficulties of tunnelling in this region not too long ago....either in this thread or another? I believe it had something to do with this region being formerly covered in miles thick glaciers and as a result when holes or tunnels are dug the ground around them has a tendency to expand. The posts indicated that if sufficient time were not given to allow the expansion to complete that it could cause problems down the line. That could very well be why this is taking so long to build.
 
ttk77 said:
Wasn't there a discussion about the difficulties of tunnelling in this region not too long ago....either in this thread or another? I believe it had something to do with this region being formerly covered in miles thick glaciers and as a result when holes or tunnels are dug the ground around them has a tendency to expand. The posts indicated that if sufficient time were not given to allow the expansion to complete that it could cause problems down the line. That could very well be why this is taking so long to build.
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That's from this spacing article. That would be interesting if it were the case.

Also, forgive me if this was posted a couple years ago, there are some pretty cool photos.
 
Reminds me of the pedestrian tunnel in Terminal 1 at O'Hare to the satellite. Hopefully it looks as cool as that when it's done!
 
The state of the Air Travel Industry in the GTA is this (or this is how I see it):

Island/Waterfront residents say there is capacity at Pearson, move Porter's operations there and shut down the Island airport (and oh never mind the convenience factor)
On our way to Pearson Weston residents say there is no demand for premium business class Airport link to the downtown (again screw convenience)
Furthermore central Toronto residents say there are TOO many flights to Pearson, so much so that the Pickering airport should be built and flights diverted there
Pickering residents say that there isn't enough demand in Toronto to justify a second airport (after all waterfront residents are closing the island airport)

It is a wonder we have any sort of Air travel industry... Who says there's capacity at Pearson, who says take flights away from Pearson, who says we don't need infrastructure to support the airport.
 
Woodbridge_Heights said:
Who says there's capacity at Pearson, who says take flights away from Pearson,
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GTAA for the first and GTAA for the second but there is about a 40 year gap between these 2 items, and even then Pearson will have a ton of off-peak capacity. Pearson has a huge commuter rush.

The big difference between Heathrow and Pearson is Heathrow spreads it's flight load fairly evenly over 18 hours where Pearson does about 60% of it in 5 hours (morning/evening rush).
 
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Air Canada don't support jets at Billy Bishop (a shock - I know)

MONTREAL -- Air Canada (TSX:AC) says it does not support changes aimed at allowing jets to land at Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport.

The airline says its preferred approach is expanding turboprop operations at the airport, but says no consideration has been given to that idea.

The island airport is a popular choice for travellers because of easy access to downtown Toronto.

Porter Airlines is seeking changes that would allow it to operate jets at the airport on Toronto's waterfront.

Among other things, allowing jets to use the airport would require extending the runway at both ends by filling in parts of Lake Ontario.

Opponents have raised concerns about what jets might mean to the marine life and residential noise levels.

"We do not support jets at Billy Bishop -- we prefer to see a growing downtown airport focused on short-haul passengers using modern turboprop aircraft, which would be more consistent with the spirit and intent of the original tripartite agreement at Billy Bishop," Air Canada said.

"Port Toronto's focus on jets is not defensible as Billy Bishop can certainly prosper and grow as a turboprop airport, serving communities within the two-hour range that can be accomplished with Toronto-assembled Bombardier Q400 aircraft."
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