Metro's five year plan

As we know with last week's announcement, Metro is about to begin construction on five new light rail lines. The Metro blog talks a bit more about how they will go about doing it.

We've said we would deliver all that by the end of 2012 - along with an Intermodal Terminal.

So how do we plan to do that?

Through a strategy called design/build. "Design/build, also called a hybrid delivery system, allows us to engineer and design a project while we're beginning construction," said Russ Frank, director of government affairs.

METRO worked very hard to change state law to allow us to use this hybrid delivery system - and in 2005, the state Legislature passed House Bill 2300.

"We can start the utility work and preliminary work," Frank explained. "We already have the preliminary engineering, we just don't have the final design. This allows us to use a contracting method that allows the design and construction phases to overlap."

It'll be interesting to see how this plays out in practice. Really, the biggest hurdle for Metro is going to be doing the construction in pieces, so that only so much of any given route is torn up at one time. That was the big issue with the Main Street line construction, and it's probably the strongest legitimate talking point that the anti-rail folks have going for them. Metro says they've learned from that experience, and they've been making promises to that effect, but they still have to do it. We'll see.

Posted by Charles Kuffner on October 23, 2007 to Planes, Trains, and Automobiles