In 2001, the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) embarked on an ambitious plan to ease traffic congestion in the GTA by extending public transit to underserviced areas in the north-western region of the city. By 2006, the TTC began the Toronto-York Spadina Subway Extension (TYSSE), a $2.6 billion infrastructure project scheduled for completion in 2015, which will ultimately entail construction of the first rapid transit line to cross from Toronto into the York Region.
A project of this magnitude requires considerable subsurface investigation, assessment and design activity as a first step. In the case of the TYSSE, geo-engineering investigation involved input from many multi-disciplinary teams spread over an extensive project site using highly sophisticated techniques, as well as ongoing design work by several engineering firms, including Hatch Mott MacDonald, Delcan and the MMM Group who were responsible for project management. To ensure effective collaboration between these dispersed and disparate groups, the TTC and other stakeholders (including regulatory agencies and utility owners), the Project Managers determined at an early stage that a new document management system was needed to enhance productivity, and also to provide ready and secure access to research and other data by project consultants such as station or tunnel designers from outside the TTC, and in some instances from outside the country. While existing TTC systems had supported this type of construction in the past, access had been strictly limited to internal staff. A core requirement of the new content system was integration with the TTC’s geographic information system (GIS) from ESRI, which the TTC uses to capture, store and share geographic data within the organization and which enables users to manage and visualize layers of location-based data through maps to support decision making. An additional driver for building a new system was to avoid the need to build and support interfaces with legacy systems: according to Dr. Hossein Bidhendi, P.Eng., Geotechnical Coordinator for the TYSSE, experience has shown that interfacing with existing systems can be more difficult and much more time consuming than creating a new purpose designed system at the outset.
