04-13-2018, 06:12 PM
(04-13-2018, 04:28 PM)KevinL Wrote: Ugh. I am very disappointed in how slowly things have been allowed to proceed and the dearth of testing seen so far, and it seems now that's well founded. Hopefully this lights a fire under the right people and we find a way to shrink these timelines.
Curious: "The original project schedule included 8 months of testing and commissioning activities following the delivery of the last vehicle." Was this always public knowledge?
The vehicles were originally planned to be delivered in lots of time. Given that, it would be reasonable to make a plan that isn’t dependent on the exact date of vehicle arrival, meaning that the time between all the vehicles arriving and the system opening could be quite long. In a different situation, one can imagine even longer — imagine we got a good deal on used vehicles. Maybe they would have arrived in 2014 because that is when they were available. It doesn’t mean all that time is needed for testing.
It is not believable that 8 months, or even 6 months, are truly needed after delivery of the last vehicle to prepare the system for opening. What they should be doing now is moving ahead full speed with everything that can be done with the vehicles now here. Treat the remaining vehicles as additions to a functional system. Let’s get real: say the system is a huge success, so much so that we need to increase service to a level that requires more vehicles. Will it really take 8 months after arrival of the additional vehicles before they can be used in service? I think not. And if it is needed, then there is a severe problem with how these projects are being conducted, because it just shouldn’t take that long. It would be like the bridge engineers coming back and saying that the Laurel Creek rail bridge replacement was going to be a 2-year project.
This project has suffered for many years from a lack of urgency, but this is the most egregious example of it I think we’ve seen.