Extending the M4 metro line
Project plan, business case and risk analysis for a new stretch
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An escalator rising to street level at Enghave Plads metro station, with departure screens for services via København H and via Frederiksberg
- Client
- Case: Metroselskabet, Rødovre and Hvidovre municipalities
- Context
- Project Management, Tools and Practical Leadership, DTU
- Year
- 2022
- Role
- Project planning and analysis
- Team size
- 6
- Tools
- Milestone planning · Time estimation · Business case · Stakeholder analysis · Risk analysis
- Contribution
- Team of 6, project planning, stakeholder and risk analysis
A full project plan for extending the M4 metro line from Ny Ellebjerg via Hvidovre Hospital to Rødovre Centrum, covering the organisation of the project participants, a milestone plan, time and budget estimation, a business case, a stakeholder analysis and a risk analysis.
The brief
Metroselskabet together with Rødovre and Hvidovre municipalities wanted the M4 stretch extended, and this required a specification of the route, the placement of the stations, an assessment of the costs and an estimate of how the passengers would actually use it. The three municipalities have 146,877 residents between them, and Hvidovre Hospital adds a further 5,173 employees and roughly 1,557 patients a day, all of whom are potential passengers.
Estimating the demand
We assumed that around 6% of the population in the three municipalities and 6% of the patients and staff at Hvidovre Hospital would use the extended line, and that passengers travel on average twice a day, which gives 9,217 passengers, 18,434 daily journeys and roughly 6.7 million travellers a year. This is due to the current split in Copenhagen, where 3% use the metro and 13% use public transport overall, while public transport was expected to reach 25% by 2025, so we assumed the metro share would roughly double alongside it.
What I took from it
The group was five students from Process and Innovation plus one from Mobility, Transport and Logistics, and it is important to note that the single person with a different background mattered more than the five with the same one, since none of us from PI were strong on how you estimate prices for a metro construction or select station locations, and having someone with experience in exactly that was a considerable help. Here I would have preferred an even wider mix, since someone from production could have taken the economy and the time plan, and we could have distributed the work according to actual strengths. Furthermore the group went through a short storming phase at the start, which came from us being used to inventing new innovative solutions while this project instead required planning something that closely resembles projects that already exist, such as the Cityring. We came out of it relatively quickly once we understood what was expected, however we had started working in a particular way without ever writing a group contract or discussing our approach, which is a habit that comes from most of us being in groups together in other courses.