Michael Schabas
businessperson

Michael Schabas is a Canadian-born, UK-based railway consultant who has been involved in launching several railway projects and businesses. He has advised clients on projects in more than 20 other countries.
Early life and education
Schabas was born and raised in Toronto. He studied Architecture at the University of Toronto and City and Regional Planning at the Harvard Kennedy School.
Career
When Schabas was Chairman of the City of Toronto Cycling Committee at the University of Toronto, he secured funding for the City’s first on-street cycle lanes. He attracted controversy by asserting cyclists had the same rights to use streets as cars.
Schabas was employed by UTDC as Design Coordinator for the first SkyTrain (Vancouver) line (now called the Expo Line), which was the world’s second driverless metro opened in 1985. He then worked in Toronto and Honolulu before moving to London as vice president of transportation for Olympia & York (O&Y), which were developing the Canary Wharf project in London Docklands. He led O&Y's involvement in planning and promotion of the Jubilee Line Extension and also instigated the re-signaling and re-engineering of the Docklands Light Railway.
In 1994, Schabas was retained by the London Borough of Newham to review the proposed Channel Tunnel Rail Link.
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This entry incorporates text from “Michael Schabas” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.