New tires, new buses, more staff: TransLink lays out winter weather plan

TransLink says much of its buses volition beryllium equipped with new, much assertive tires erstwhile winter upwind rolls into Metro Vancouver.

The transit and proscription bureau laid retired its wintertime mentation plans connected Thursday, which see autobus upgrades and strategies to support the SkyTrain moving during snow.

Coast Mountain Bus Company president and wide manager Michael McDaniel said TransLink is expanding the usage of “Grip-D” tires, which person a deeper tread, to 600 buses this winter, astir 100 much than past year.

About 40 per cent of the fleet volition beryllium equipped with the tires, with a precedence connected “routes with higher-challenge terrain,” helium said.

McDaniel said TransLink has besides deployed 16 caller articulated centre-drive axel buses, which tin amended grip slippery conditions. Typically, the institution has needed to propulsion its articulated busses from hard routes during snowy conditions, replacing them with lower-capacity modular buses.

“The buses truly are lone arsenic bully arsenic the roads they thrust on, and they inactive tin get stuck successful unplowed roads and precise icy conditions,” helium noted, adding TransLink volition beryllium successful adjacent connection with municipalities astir plowing precedence routes.

On SkyTrain, TransLink is staffing up and sticking with its accepted attack to wintertime management.

That includes moving bare trains overnight, peculiar trains that spray de-icing fluid during the day, and deploying unit members onto each bid to ticker for snowfall hazards.

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“This twelvemonth we person made definite that much of our unit are prepared to tally our de-icing bid and are focused connected distributing our employees to stations that are astir prone to snowfall and ice,” said Will

TransLink said it is besides expanding connection staffing levels to guarantee the travel of real-time information, some wrong the transit strategy and with the public.

While McDaniel is promising an “all hands connected deck” approach, transit officials are inactive informing the nationalist to guarantee they person other clip erstwhile travelling during inclement weather, and are urging radical to intimately show its website and societal media feeds, oregon to motion up for transit alerts.