With credentials, any idiot can make all other idiots believe any idiotic claim

A San Fransisco cable car on a city street. Please note the slot on the pavement where the cable car’s “grip”

The following comment was made on a transit blog lamenting that anyone with an university degreeAi??can call themselves a transitAi??expert, yet those with real expertiseAi??with transit issues, especially those without a degreeAi??are ignored.

The density issue is a good example of this. Only in the Vancouver regional area is the issue of density forAi??new transit construction is taken as an absolute, with much time and study taken with the issue, yet outside our transit region, the question of density barely raises an eyebrow and instead, questions of the seamless (no transfer) journey; transit being user friendly; or transit being affordableAi??being deemed more important. Go to any transit meeting in the Vancouver metro regionAi??and the the term density is used ad naseum by those who really don’t know what they are talking about, promoting the SkyTrain light-metro instead of light rail.

Talk about modern LRT with regional planners and one comes away in wonderment that the mode is used at all, with the litany of complaint about the mode being slow, dated, unable to cater to transit demands, etc. In fact, modern light rail is treated as a pooman’s SkyTrain and is designed as much. This is tantamount to a shortcut to failure and one wonders if the so-called transit experts at TransLink want this to happen.

Just about everyone who has an Engineering degree, whether it be a chemical or electrical or more, feel that they are an instantAi??transit expert, yet so much of what they speak is nothing more than opinionatedAi??baffle-gab, nowhere near being accurate or correct. Professional misconduct comes to mind.

This reminds ‘Zwei’ of a story which happened some years ago in Vancouver.

A transit expert was giving a talk on streetcars and part of his video show were pictures of San Fransisco cable cars, which the chap mistakenly called streetcars. On and on he went misinforming those attending the meeting about how streetcars were small and open to the whether, etc. During the question period I told the chap that what he called streetcars in San Fransisco were in fact cable cars and were powered by an underground moving cable and that San FransiscoAi??streetcars were in fact a mixtureAi??PCC cars and articulate Boeing VERTOL cars, which he had no pictures of.Ai??Oh, no, no, no said the expert, “all of San Fransisco streetcars were once cable hauled and now have been rebuilt with electric motors.”

I again stated that he was wrong, the steam powered cable system was indeed replaced with electric motors but the cable cars themselves were unpowered and that the cable cars he was calling streetcars, were in fact cable cars.

A minder from the Vancouver City Engineering Dept. soon appeared at my side and told me not to disturb the meeting any further, that, “that the city paid good money for this man to speak, he is a qualified engineerAi??and we don’t want any nonsense from the trolley-jolly types, LIKE YOU!”

I haven’t gone to a streetcar meeting since as most what is talked about is dated drivel, by people who haven’t a clue about modern LRT, let alone streetcars.

ThisAi??observation manifested itself with the short lived Olympic (tram) Line long False Creek. The new track was laid to a mainline railway standard complete with welded rail, concrete ties and Pandrol clips, costing about $8 million of aAi??1.5 km. stretch of single track. What ever one wanted to call the Olympic Line, a simple streetcar it was not.