Libuš Metro Station Goes Out to Tender at 3.755 Billion, With Price the Only Criterion

Dopravní podnik hl. m. Prahy has issued the public contract for the construction of Libuš station on metro line D. The estimated value is 3.755 billion crowns excluding VAT, the build is to take 54 months from handover of the site, and DPP says the station should open together with the first section of line D in 2032. Building it extends the shortest operable stretch of the line, Pankrác to Nové Dvory, by a sixth station.

Seven days ago the position was that Libuš had a permit and no builder. This is the other half.

What is being bought

Libuš will be a cut-and-cover station with an island platform and two vestibules, running north–south along Novodvorská roughly from Cuřínova street as far as the Obzor shopping centre and the Libuš tram stops. The station itself is 204.351 metres long. The platform is 12.06 metres wide and 102 metres long, with no central columns, and the top of rail sits about 13 metres below ground.

The southern vestibule goes in at the Libuš tram stops and connects to them by an underpass beneath Novodvorská. The northern one sits on the eastern side of the street, roughly between Machuldova and Cuřínova, and carries the lift that makes the platform accessible from street level. The above-ground parts of both are to form the ground floors of future development around the station — not standalone entrance pavilions but frontage in somebody else's building.

The winner does not dig

The notable thing about the scope is what it leaves out. The contractor will not drive the running tunnels. Those come from the section already under way between Ryšánka and Nové Dvory, which DPP started this June and which includes TBM drives from Písnice through Libuš towards Nové Dvory. The Libuš contractor's job is to build the box, connect it to tunnels that are already there, and fit most of the equipment — cable runs, ventilation, escalators, the lift, lighting, the information system — plus a ventilation structure and the back-of-house rooms for plant, switchgear and sumps.

Three things are carved out and come from elsewhere: the platform screen walls and the traffic and control system, which will be installed by the supplier of the automatic metro system for line D and the automation of line C. The contractor also has to deliver the surface works around the station, to be coordinated with construction of the new Libuš–Nové Dvory tram line and with the planned development on the site.

Bidders must meet the basic, professional and economic eligibility and technical qualification tests set out in the public procurement act. The award criterion is economic advantageousness, weighted 100 per cent to the lowest total bid price. Nothing else is scored.

Why the city is pleased with itself about this one

I believe that thanks to good coordination of the individual construction stages we will manage to complete Libuš station ahead of time, so that it can be put into operation together with the first section of metro D in 2032. Libuš is a densely populated part of Prague that badly needs a high-capacity rail connection.

— Jaromír Beránek, first deputy mayor of Prague for transport

Petr Hlaváček, deputy mayor for spatial development and the land-use plan, made the planning argument:

Instead of building a metro in a meadow, the city prepared a spatial study here in good time, which set the rules for development including a new park and square, coordinated the metro project with a private developer, and negotiated land for the construction of municipal affordable housing.

— Petr Hlaváček, deputy mayor of Prague for spatial development

That is a claim about sequence, and it is the right one to make. The vestibules being built into other people's parters is only possible because the study came before the station.

What follows

For the Nové Dvory–Libuš section, the transport and energy construction authority issued its project permit in September; DPP expects it to become final during October. Zdopravy reports that a tender for Písnice station should be issued soon, and that the design of that station changed this year partly to fit it into a planned new quarter — it is now to have two vestibules of its own, with extensive development around it.

Prague is currently building the stretch from Pankrác via Ryšánka, Nádraží Krč and Nemocnice Krč to Nové Dvory. Libuš is the station that decides whether the line opens there in 2032 or one stop further south.