TramCité is a new tramway network with 29 stations that will span 19km through Quebec City. As the city grows and traffic intensifies, there is a need for a modern tramway system to ease pressure on the roads and improve overall mobility.
Arup is serving as the owner’s engineer for CDPQ Infra, supporting the planning, design, and delivery of the project. As a member of the TramCAP consortium formed with Setec, Arup is providing technical and strategic support throughout the lifecycle of the project.
As Québec City's first high-capacity public transit network, TramCité will seamlessly integrate with other modes of transport, enhancing fluidity of travel and providing significant time savings for public transit users. The line will be modeled as a European style tramway, which involves the revitalization of the entire public right-of-way. From façade to façade, this project will enhance the quality of public spaces and integrate harmoniously into the urban environment and built heritage.
A progressive design approach
This project will be developed under a progressive design-build approach, which will streamline procurement. This approach will support the implementation of a collaborative process aimed at optimizing the project schedule and costs.
Arup will provide technical and strategic support during the procurement, co-development, and execution and commissioning phases.
Providing a range of multidisciplinary services
In addition to managing the overall project, Arup’s role includes multidisciplinary engineering for the civil infrastructure, tunnel, stations, and other structures. We will also be advising on the sustainability approach for the network and leading the creation of a digital twin for the project. This also marks our first large-scale project conducted entirely in French and will allow us to fully showcase the expertise of our multidisciplinary and multilingual teams.
Integrating digital tools to improve collaboration
Arup uses digital tools to keep information organized and easily accessible. The key to our digital approach with this project is Fuse, an in-house data management tool which offers a centralized location to host project data. The TramCité Fuse portal brings together publicly available data and consultant data viewable as an interactive 2D map. To create more dynamic visuals, project stakeholders can overlay other information on top of the pre-existing data. Fuse simplifies decision making, scheduling, minimizing potential mistakes and maximizes project efficiency.
A key feature of Fuse is Arup’s proprietary large language model, ProjectGPT. This multilingual AI-powered chatbot enables users to ask project-specific questions in their native language and receive accurate, source-linked responses drawn from our curated dataset.
Beyond effective data management, Arup is helping CDPQ better understand and adopt the ISO 19650 international standards for owners and contractors, which have been gaining traction in Canada. The framework recommends information management throughout the project lifecycle. These standards will assist in establishing a high level of coordination between different project stakeholders, particularly as contractors are onboarded onto this project.
