Those Who Do Not Read History Are Doomed…………….

………….to make the same expensive mistakes. In Toronto, metro madness is the order of the day, but the overlooked story is the Scarborough R/T, SkyTrain’s first cousin, being torn down because it will be soon “life expired”. The current debate is whether to build a hugely expensive one stop subway to replace the SRT or [...]

An Idiot’s Delight At UBC Or Is UBC Offering Courses In Money Laundering?

And here I thought universities were filled with intelligent people; people who crave education and research. At UBC, evidently not! The ignorance and displayed by the UBC types is nothing more than appalling. Lysenkoism and jingoism has now become transit planning doctrine. The current cost of the proposed UBC subway is in excess of $3 [...]

An Essay on TransLink, SkyTrain and Carbon Emissions

A new player in Vancouver politics,A�Vancouver Green Citizensa�� Group, is emerging and is taking critical aim atA� Metro Vancouver and TransLink. I have always said that Translink’s ridership numbers are inflated and the recent news releases; re releases and re re releases are indicative of TransLink’s desperate attempt to coax the public to accept Metro [...]

Common Sense & FastFerry’s

Common sense. Common sense: something that TransLink, the City of Vancouver, the Mayor’s Council on Transit, TransLink and its CEO, Premier Horgan and is entourage lack. Common sense: the industry standard for customer flows on a transit line needed to even think of building a subway is 15,000 persons per hour per direction. Common sense: [...]

The Myth

The current transit philosophy is that transit be used to density the route it travels, to increase ridership potential. In Metro Vancouver, this has been taken to the extreme, where properties along a transit route have been up-zoned to permit high rise condominiums. The downside, of course, is that affordable accommodations are torn down and [...]

Unintended Consequences

The unintended consequences of transit planning are embarrassingly many. What planners expected did not happen and the unexpected, proved challenging. In Germany in the 1960′s and 70′s, there was a big push to build subways. Subways were thought of great public works projects and many cities decided to abandon their surface tramways and build subways [...]

How a New Transit System Could Hobble Montreal, As It Hobbled Vancouver

Light-metro, the great philosopher’s stone for urban transportation in the 1970′s has turned out to be nothing more than a wet squib. BC’s provincial politicians have continually forced light-metro onto metro Vancouver, forcing bus riders by the tens of thousands to make transfers to pretend there is high ridership. Light-metro was so expensive that a [...]

Repeating The Subway Lie And The Broadway SkyTrain Subway

TransLink and the City of Vancouver have trundled out their end game for the Broadway subway and it is nothing more than a grifter’s delight of fake news and alternative facts. To remind everyone, subways are only built on transit routes when passenger flows exceed 15,000 pphpd (20,000 pphpd in Europe). Current traffic flows on [...]

People Before Cars – A Lesson Unlearned In Metro Vancouver

This is what should be happening in Metro Vancouver, but it’s not. SkyTrain is elevated or put underground, to keep streets free for cars. The cycle lobby is giving precedence over transit customers. Cars remain the most viable transit mode in the region. Our regional, provincial, and federal politicians only invest in transit to reward [...]

The Vancouver Sun Out Does Itself

Not high speed rail, but TramTrain is an affordable rail option in lightly populated regions. Vancouver’s mainstream newspapers have been famously ill informed on the subject of “rail”, whether be it, SkyTrain, light rail, or regular railways. I don’t even think there ever has been a honest story about light rail appearing in the Vancouver [...]