I don’t know your qualifications, but I doubt you were involved in the project. When I hear people upset about infrastructure giving armchair estimates of how long it should take or how expensive it should be, I just hear the uninformed project manager being outraged at the software engineers’ estimates. “And when their work was done I toured the station/software and it looked exactly the same!”
I’m sure there’s bureaucratic inefficiency. But there’s always so much nonsense that gets appended to the criticism.
It doesn't take a genius to realize that there is something wrong about tearing up 10-20 tiles in front of an escalator and shutting down for 6 months only to appear one day and finish the job but still leaving the escalator off for another 1-2 months only to reappear to remove the barriers and turn on the escalator. Now do that all over again in and around the entrance to the station for another 5 years.
If you use the station everyday, you notice these things.
A comparison, to give people an idea of why this story sticks out:
In my 25-floor condo, the company that did our elevator renovation was able to replace 3 elevators over the course of 1 year. They were done in sequence, not parallel, so we had full use of 2 elevators the entire duration.
I live in Toronto: Runnymede station specifically is in a very built up area, and there's not a lot of elbow room to work. Do a Street View of 265 Runnymede:
The original criticizing GP also assumes that it was a "simple renovation": is this a valid assumption? For example, how do you get a bunch of new elevators installed:
Reconstructions of stations of the Prague metro tend to take between 6 and 12 months, rarely longer.
5-7 years remind me of the Sofia metro (Bulgaria) during the Soviet Bloc era. It was officially under construction for like 20 years but in practice, the budget just wasn't there so the works went forward veeeeeery slowly, in some years literally nothing was done.
My intuition tells me 5-7 years doesn’t pass the sniff test. But if I’m wrong, maybe the government can endeavour to be more transparent. Doesn’t take a lot to show us a general timeline breaking down the major tasks.
My criticism is purely: we don’t know better so let’s avoid throwing numbers out there.
I’m sure there’s bureaucratic inefficiency. But there’s always so much nonsense that gets appended to the criticism.