BEB Charging Infrastructure - 6 Centres

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Category: Projects
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2023 to 2025

Transit

Utilities and site work at Regional Transit Centres supporting bus fleet electrification through either design-bid-build with general contractor or with construction manager. BCTransit intends to finish these six projects by 2028.

Picture of similar gantry in Auckland (charging equipment will look like a small yard of electrical cabinets):

Glenfield Transit Centre charging gantry

(EVs and Beyond, 2025)

Key Lesson: Keep your emerging workload visible -- set an early warning indicator

We relied on people in overwhelming circumstances to notice their situation and, crucially, believe that the company had people who had capacity to help.

This set of projects bore an important lesson for seeking team support: closely related projects have an extremely high probability of simultaneous scheduling. In this case, project work across the system grew exponentially. The client contracted the available time boxes faster than we grew the number of people working on the designs. BC Transit stopped accepting a deliverable for one transit centre a little bit after another transit centre.

Workload for individuals needs to be visible across the program where we could notice its growth rate (Sutherland, Scrum; Visual Management, Lean in Design). See also Lean in Design. We used many different places for coordinating work with only a portion optimised "globally" across a team, with most locally optimized for individuals (Sonnenberg, Come Up For Air) or separated at strategic level for people management.

Exacerbating factors:

  • the client will likely also want projects that start out separately to adopt common visual and design standards, regardless of origin or evolution
  • people had project work beyond this design program which also had deadlines in the same date blocks

Complexity from overlapping projects

As we were starting to really dive in on the BEB Charging Infrastructure projects, everything was manageable until it suddenly wasn't and was like being in a hurricane. I started to feel that the work requirements were crushing my values.

Looking back, the project work across the system that I was responsible for likely grew exponentially as BC Transit increasingly needed us to aim for keeping or accelerating our original design schedules. One of the books I read on climate adaptation this year had a great section on understanding exponential growth with a visual metaphor based on doubling time. Let's say something was doubling every month; the difference between we are 50% of capacity and complete overshoot is only one month.

Restructuring how the company handled the projects into a program with additional people was key to removing scheduling clashes that arose from how the company collected the projects. Stantec initially won each project individually. "MH now Stantec" had planned a sequence with increasing optimization as the project delivery team learned what BC Transit needed when completing each project in the set of four "MH BEB" sites.

The program emerged part way through the project work from how the project scheduling started to collide and compete across projects that involved the same people. The six sites involved charging infrastructure for battery electric buses to different degrees. Kelowna and Langford had a split between general building upgrades and charging infrastructure, while the others were exclusively charging infrastructure.

When I joined the four "MH BEB" Charging Infrastructure projects in 2024 as design manager, the projects were behind and bus manufacturing was progressing with batches of bus deliveries starting in 2025 and 2026. The schedules were starting to look like construction would finish after we had buses to charge. BC Transit had taken the Kelowna Project with us into construction with Buttcon construction management and Langford was ramping up design.

Stantec had overlapping teams engaged on Kelowna and Langford around the time it completed acquiring Morrison Hershfield.

Scheduling was critical with cost management a close second.

Factors that increased overall complexity

Client-side

  1. BC Transit has a complex set of internal stakeholders at every site, along with the operating companies delivering the transit service
  2. Fleet electrification is the single most important initiative at BC Transit in 2025
  3. Victoria is complex, housing both BC Transit's head office and a busy transit centre with complex parking requirements; as well as having deep municipal sewers crossing through the site where gantry foundations would naturally sit
  4. Regional District of Nanaimo transit system pre-dates BC Transit and the relationship differs from the usual agency-operator pattern at other sites

Design-related

  1. BC Transit needed long-lead components procured early (before final site design); especially the medium voltage and charging equipment required for the already-known fleet charging requirements which takes over a year to make
  2. Structural design involved a high degree of conceptual ping-pong and development; site requests and requirements for structural support for the charge dispensers involved considering multiple potential gantry variations on the space-constrained sites during early design development, with questions from client stakeholders about gantry features well into detailed design (such as maintenance catwalks, weather protection, future-proofing)
  3. Nanaimo's extreme space constraints require offsite bus storage during construction and design expanded for temporary parking in the adjacent property through BCT and RDN coordination with the neighbour
  4. BC Transit plans to operate Langford and Victoria fleet operations to support each other for storing buses in off-peak hours when construction happens at either site; Langford is priority between the two, yet Victoria's design started earlier
  5. Kelowna recently accelerated Clement Avenue upgrades that interacted with the soil nail shotcrete retaining wall for the expanded west yard, after design was complete (Stantec was designing both; BC Transit and City of Kelowna approved data sharing between teams)

Consultant-side

  1. Projects shared team members and gradually started sharing delivery dates starting with the four BEB Charging Infrastructure sites and eventually the full six, until we expanded the overall program to decouple design execution
  2. Project filing structures, systems, and toolsets differed across the program
  3. BC Transit wanted better align the service approaches and output for project delivery across the Stantec-initiated and MH-initiated projects; preferring Stantec's clear and detailed approach for addressing the needs that emerged during development at each site