War on Buses? Er…No, Just Very Bad Planning
Is there a war on buses in Vancouver?
Sorry, no.
Instead thereAi??has been an ongoingAi??war on good transit planning and those supporting bad transit planning won decades ago. The real problem is and always has beenAi??SkyTrain and the massive costs associated with the mini-metro.
The taxpayer has paid about three to five times more for the proprietary SkyTrain light-metro than originally planned light rail without any added benefit. Today, we have spent over $8 billion (those pesky debt servicing charges and retrofitting costs do add up) on a SkyTrain network that has taken over 25 years to build just three lines of which one, the Canada Line, isn’t SkyTrain at all.Ai??TheAi??present mini-metroAi??networkAi??almost mirrors the original 1978, $800 million Vancouver to Richmond, Surrey and Lougheed Mall LRT scheme! The extra large sums of money spent on SkyTrain could have been spent on extending the LRT to include at least two North South and two East West LRT corridors in Vancouver; LRT to Steveston and Ironwood Mall; and LRT to the Tri-Cities, bringing quality public transit to a much larger audience. The larger the transit customer base, the more people that will use public transit.
It is SkyTrain light metro that has bankrupted TransLink and piling tax uponAi??user feesAi??to fund transit will simply fail to stop the rot!
TransLink’s funding has not been kneecapped, as claimed by Mr. Ladner,Ai??rather the porcine TransLink is dying of financial obesity andAi??no matter how much money we pour into the transit agency, it will never be enough money to pay for bloated transit proposals put forward by equally bloated planning bureaucracies!
Notice Mr. Ladner, no one buys SkyTrain anymore?
One also tires of SFU City Program Director Gordon Priceai??i??s continuedAi??hype and hooplaAi??on transit, as he is no more a transit expert than Zwei! Mr. Price has had decades to understand how a public transit system works, but he hasn’t bothered to and has joined the ‘tax and spend’ crowd that continually demand more money for TransLink, hoping the more money one throws at TransLink, the better it will become. Sadly, hell will freeze over first!
If Mr. Ladner wants to improve transit without breaking the bank, he must think out of the box andAi??demand TransLink to plan for what the customer wants and can afford and not what the bureaucrat’s want. TransLink must abandon SkyTrain light-metro planning in favour of modern light rail, if these conditions are not met, TransLink will impale itself on huge debt.
There never was a war on buses, instead the transit battle in Vancouver was lost when the first kilometre of SkyTrain was built!
Toronto transit on the right road; Vancouverai??i??s hits dead end
The war against the bus has been won
By Peter Ladner Tue Jul 31, 2012
Why are leaders in Toronto smarter than leaders in Metro Vancouver?
Both cities have a remarkably similar problem: the local transportation authority ai???has an approved plan to build the system we need, but we have nowhere near the funds to pay for it. We have to be open to ways to raise money that are dedicated to getting this done … We need to move people and goods quickly and easily for our region to be a great place to live, work, play and invest, and yet weai??i??re decades behind in making that happen ai??i?? Everyone agrees we have a crisis on our hands. We want to give residents a way to say, ai???we need a better system, and we need to find sustainable ways to pay for itai??i??.ai???
In Vancouver, thatai??i??s the message coming from a group of UBC students whose frustration over getting passed up by 99-B-line buses is spilling over into a wider campaign headed into the public domain in September. While every word of that quote rings true in Metro Vancouver, it comes from the mouth of business and political leader John Tory, chairman of the Greater Toronto CivicAction Alliance (GTCAA), a formidable blue-chip organization that is launching a major community campaign for transportation funding in Metro Toronto this fall.
The GTCAA announced its 27 Regional Transportation Champions ai??i??representing more than two million employees, students, customers and members across Metro Toronto and Hamilton ai??i?? almost to the day that Vancouver was tagged as the most congested city in Canada, and the second-most congested in North America after Los Angeles. That dubious title (based on dubious methodology, it must be said) was won without even counting the real congestion zones east of Burnaby and south of the Fraser.
Two days earlier, a two-year-old group of frustrated volunteers known as the Sustainable Transportation Coalition (STC) was meeting downtown in a boardroom donated by the Fraser Basin Council, over our brown bag lunches, with no budget, no staff and faint hope.
SFU City Program Director Gordon Priceai??i??s blunt assessment from his July 3 BIV column (ai???Transit integral to building transportation bridges ai??i?? issue 1184; July 3-9) hung in the air: ai???TransLink has no more money. Gas-tax revenue is down, thereai??i??s no new source of funding from the province, no more property tax from the municipalities and not even approval for an anticipated fare increase. Expansion plans for already-promised transit are all off the table.ai???
Bizarrely, signs on Highway 1 still proudly announce what is not going to happen: ai???New RapidBus BC Service, Park and Rideai??? on the new Port Mann Bridge. There will soon be 30 vehicle lanes across the Fraser and not one lane of transit.
Richard Walton, Mayorsai??i?? Council chairman and North Vancouver District mayor, told us at the STC meeting nothing will break the impasse until a regional road pricing strategy can be approved that has political support in Surrey. So we took what comfort we could in enlisting our coalition members to support the student-led ai???Get On Boardai??? campaign for the fall, with a rally, social media and MLA campaigning.
Meanwhile in Toronto, the GTCAAai??i??s first wave of Regional Transportation Champions rolled out: a former federal cabinet minister, senior bankers and insurance executives, trade union leaders, president of the airport authority, religious leaders, president of the World Wildlife Fund, presidents of Oxford Properties and Cadillac Fairview, president of the University of Toronto, the CEO of YWCA Canada, president of the board of trade and many others.
It is astounding that so few people at that level here have grasped the impact of TransLinkai??i??s kneecapped funding for our region. The war against the bus has been won. The surrender to car-dependency and congestion and economic distress is complete. We are all casualties.
While Toronto mobilizes, Vancouver business leaders shrug and slip away to the beach.
Detroit’s “Mugger Mover” celebrates 25 years of ‘sort of’ operation
We don’t hear much about SkyTrain elsewhere and I wonder why? Well I know the answer, SkyTrain reign of operation elsewhere has not been as successful as the SkyTrain lobby would have us believe. Please take note of the serious issues regarding the Detroit’s ICTS’s guideway, as previous discussion on the RftV commnets has been about future costly problems with the Vancouver’s aging SkyTrain guideway.
The locally knownAi??‘Mugger-Mover’ was the first incarnation of the SkyTrain family of mini metros, with the concept being several cells of roughly 4 km looped single track loops, built in urban centres. The concept was soon proven unworkable and the Detroit ICTS/Skytrain system is the result, a lone 4.5 km single track loop, that doesn’t really offer much advantages to transit customers. Managers at Ontario’s UTDC, quickly redefined Skytrain as an urban mini-metro, but as history has shown, the proprietary railway has met with little success.
The Detroit “Mugger Mover” is on life support and its time is ever coming closer to being a historical footnote, just like Toronto’s Scarbough ICTS.
When will the Skytrain lobby admit that SkyTrain is obsolete, made obsolete by LRT, which Skytrain was suppoed to make obsolete.
The Detroit People Mover celebrates its silver anniversary today with discounts at local businesses.
(Elizabeth Conley / The Detroit News)
The Detroit People Mover turns 25 today, marking a proud quarter-century of occasionally carrying me to lunch.
It also once took me to the Renaissance Center for a charity event on what happened to be the night of a Red Wings playoff game. Given that everyone else aboard was in red or white and I was wearing a tuxedo, I stood out a bit, so I told them I was singing the national anthems and led everyone in a rendition of “O Canada.”
In celebration of the anniversary, the People Mover people have rustled up discounts from some of the 380 businesses and venues close enough to the track that you can hear the wheels squeal. You’ll find the list at
http://www.thepeoplemover.comYou’ll also find a DJ at Campus Martius from noon-2 p.m. and a People Mover photo exhibit in the Compuware atrium.
The record-spinner is known as DJ Invisible, which coincidentally is what the People Mover became after one of my favorite people-moving moments.
Conceived as lab rat
We’re talking about a rail system that’s loopy in every way, from its 2.9-mile route to the general lack of usage to the overruns that pushed a $137 million project to a final reported tally of $210 million.
The People Mover was conceived as a sort of lab rat for federal urban transit projects ai??i?? “Let’s try it in Detroit, so if it doesn’t work nobody will notice!” ai??i?? and was supposed to carry tens of thousands of daily passengers who had arrived on our shiny new light-rail system.
Unfortunately, the light-rail system was never built, so we wound up with a hole and no doughnut.
It’s a nice hole, mind you, clean and safe and quite handy when you need it. But it’s been luckless from the start, and was an unwitting victim of the Hudson’s implosion on Oct. 24, 1998.
I’d let myself into the abandoned department store a year before with a demolition expert. Looks like an enjoyable project, he’d said, but it’s complicated and unpredictable. If you don’t use wrecking balls, you’ll need to build a steel cage to protect the People Mover track.
Naturally, the city opted not to shell out for the cage, even though the route ran only 12 feet behind the store. A chunk of the 439-foot-tall building took a wrong turn and punched out a 350-foot length of track, and the People Mover was out of commission for a year.
Problems big and small
Even during construction, the poor People Mover had issues. In 1985, the Los Angeles Times pointed out that it had “lost its central purpose and tends to fall apart.”
Sixteen of the 183 support beams had already cracked, and two-thirds of the 173 guideway beams needed maintenance or outright replacement ai??i?? 18 months before the first passenger dropped a token into a slot.
One of the beams didn’t even make it into position before it required first aid. There was a minor hiccup with a crane, and a 100-ton mass of concrete and steel bars went crashing to the street.
A police officer happened to be standing nearby. “The last thing I heard,” he said, “was, ‘Oops.'”
That’s become the word I most associate with the People Mover. The train stalls for no apparent reason? Oops. The turnstile eats a token and stays shut? Oops.
The good rides have far outnumbered the rocky ones, though, so happy silver anniversary to the very best transit system between here and Greektown ai??i?? and may the oopses be outnumbered by the opas.
Could TramTrain be the solution for the E&N?
The following article about the rebuilding of the E&N passenger station in Nanaimo and the hint of a commuter train service causes ‘Zwei’ to speculate that; could TramTrain be the best solution for a passenger or commuter rail serviceAi??using the E&N railway in both Victoria and the Nanaimo regions.
Using the Rail for the Valley/Leewood Study as a basis…….
……… a TramTrain service connecting approximately 110 km from Victoria to Nanaimo is affordable, with a cost around $7 million/km. and with a few km. of on-street operation would cost less than $900 million. An approximately 70 km TramTrain route from Port Alberni to Nanaimo with no on-street operation, via Parksville could cost as little as $350 million! Put another way, an extensive 180 km. diesel TramTrain line connecting Victoria to Duncan, Chemainus, Nanaimo, Parksville and Port Alberni could cost a little as $1,250 billion or about $150 million less than the $1.4 billion, 11km. Evergreen Line in Coquitlam!
By using TramTrain and the concept of one-stop travel, we could even connect the TramTrain service from the E&N spur to the Nanaimo docks and travel just under 5 km., on-street, to Departure Bay with the TramTrain serving just not the very busy Horseshoe Bay ferry service, but the ferry service to Gabriola Island as well.
Properly built, an island TramTrain service, with scheduledAi??TramTrains connecting Victoria, Nanaimo, Parksville and Port Alberni, would not only vastly improve regional transportation, it would spur much needed economic development, especially tourism, in the region. With good public transit, in the guise of TramTrain, a tourist would not need a car to see the beauty of Vancouver Island.
The question is, do island politicians and transportation advocates have the foresight to see the benefits of a modern TramTrain service?
A venerable ‘Budd Car’ on the E&N
http://tinyurl.com/cb4yrqx
“Trains are still important transportation
The Daily News
Published: Saturday, July 28, 2012The historical E&N Railway Station on Selby Street marked its official reopening this week in Nanaimo, nearly 126 years after it was first opened.
An arsonist torched the original heritage building five years ago, leaving it empty of both business and trains.
It was quite the celebration, as politicians, local dignitaries and members of the railway community crowded Fibber Magees Station, an Irish-style pub occupying the rebuilt building.
Rebuilding the station cost roughly $2.4 million, with insurance covering $870,000.
Local groups, such as the Young Professionals of Nanaimo, came together with a yeoman effort to raise the remaining funds. That effort must not go unrecognized.
Though the station may have re-opened without a passenger-rail service in operation at the present time, it remains an important project to the community.
The beautiful station is part of the continued revitalization of the Old City Quarter area.
The work done by groups in that area has been nothing short of outstanding.
In addition, the city of Nanaimo also announced the development of a new E&N trail that will run alongside the tracks, ending at the southern city limits.
The trail will be created with the help of Southern Rail and the Regional District of Nanaimo.
To top things off, the Island Corridor Foundation announced the return of a three-car passenger service to Nanaimo, hopefully by May of 2013.
“It would be a great thing and the tourist aspect alone would be huge,” said Mayor John Ruttan.
“The big plan is to have it run to Port Alberni.”
A commuter train service will run from Nanaimo to Victoria, leaving at 6 a.m., offering passengers a respite from driving the Malahat Highway.
As we’ve said previously, this is about much more than upgrading an old rail line.
This is about adding to the transportation infrastructure of the mid-Island, putting in place yet another piece that will be of economic benefit to the region and providing an important legacy for future generations.
While many details for the entire rail project remain to be pieced together, what we do know is that when passenger trains resume, Nanaimo will be – suitable to its nickname – the hub of the line.
The overarching idea has been to start daily trips from Nanaimo to Victoria, back to Courtenay, return to Victoria and ending the day in Nanaimo.
Rail travel is neither dead nor outmoded.
There is, in fact, a compelling argument that it is soon to return to being an important and viable means of transportation.
With gas now at $1.35 a litre and fossil fuels identified both as significant pollutants and a factor in global warming, the trend away from reliance on gas-dependant vehicles is already underway.
We may be closer than we think to seeing our reliance on fossil fuels becoming as expensive, if not more so, as rail.
Restoring the E&N line means that future Island residents will have a reliable means of travelling or commuting up and down the Island.
There is also increased tourism potential.
As Mayor Ruttan points out, that alone is significant.
It to easy to say that trains are outdated in our instant-everything world.
Easy to say – but wrong.
Rail remains viable and important for both passengers and freight. The opening of the station is an excellent step in what remains a vital project
A diesel TramTrain in Kassel Germany.
CancA?n tram-train feasibility study commissioned
It is so sad that just about every country in North America and Europe are looking a TramTrain (Interurban) to help solve regional transit problems, except Canada andAi??especially BC and Metro Vancouver. That the now obsolete SkyTrain mini-metro is still being planned for the lower mainland only shows how backward and irrelevant our regional transit planning has become.
That TransLink and the any regional mayors refuse to accept the simple fact that modern LRT has made SkyTrain obsolete over two decades ago, just illustrates how delusional regional politicians have become about regional transit planning.
In Metro Vancouver we plan for myths.
From the Railway Gazette
CancA?n tram-train feasibility study commissioned
MEXICO: Spanish metre-gauge operator FEVE is to undertake feasibility studies for a new tram-train network serving Caribbean resorts between CancA?n and Tulum.
FEVE is to study a route linking CancA?n with Cozumel, Solidaridad, Benito JuA?rez, Isla Mujeres and Tulum, serving an area containing some of the most important tourist destinations in Mexico.
It says that an efficient, low-cost rail system would improve transport options for tourists and local residents alike, reducing dependency on road transport while minimising environmental impact.
The framework agreement signed by Rodrigo Borge Angulo, Governor of Quintana Roo state, and FEVE President Marcelino Oreja also makes provision for the Spanish company to provide operating and training assistance as well as rolling stock.
Through the past – darkly
A note from Zwei….
This post is for the real transit enthusiast, who understands the nuances of transit history. Ed T., who is mentioned in the post is Ed Tennyson, who just turned 90, is one of the USA’s foremost transit experts.
The following has been making the rounds in the “transit blogs” and is well worth a read.
“Remember that during the depression the government was funding roadbuilding all over this country. so even the worst riding buses were smooth on these brand new “concrete ribbons” as they were advertised and the people building them wanted to drive on them so as soon as they could scrape together the downpayment on that fliver they were off of transit. many found out they couldn’t afford that car but by then the trolley they had abandoned before was gone.
In transit there is a threshold volumne and connectivity that when a system falls below this the whole system essentially collapses except for the captive riders. this was in recent years proven with accessible transit, ridership was very low until about 75% of the system became accessible then ridership practically exploded. this is the same thing with almost all transit in general, Portlands, San Franrciscos, San Diego, Dallas and other new systems of rail have reached that threshold of connectivity and coverage that suddenly ridership explodes, the N
Judah in San Francisco was a heavy but not overloaded line for many years but suddenly in recent years with the additions to the system at the Bay end the ridership is more than even the longest trains and fleet size and tunnel carpacity can handle and they need bus supplements.This worked the same way in reverse when systems were falling apart and the only economic choice the private operator had was to write the worst rail line off for short term survival it reached the level where the system essentially imploded.
Remember that GM and other members of NCL also provided scholarships and often controlled the sylabus in colleges that taught the transit planners and executives of the 50’s 60s and 70s I know because I was one of them and felt like a fish swimming upstream against the tide, Ed T was one of the last old school and I was just the odd guy out that they tolerated. I can pull out my old textbooks, there is maybe a chapter on monorails, PRT and subways. but a year or so ago I looked and could not find a single mention of anything resembling light rail. and this was after the building of the first light rail line (officially in Franfurt a Main, Germany) I had lived in Frankfurt so I had watched and ridden the U lines as they were designated and had photos of them and when brought up in classes they were brushed off as the “dying gasp of those unwilling to face the future”
When I first got involved in accessible transit I was a firm believer in paratransit, but had an open mind, and then I ran a paratransit system and tried as hard as I could and could not make it work, that I started believing in mainstream accessibility.
The basic formulas that Ed T and the old timers knew from the seat of their pants and thru experiences of an open minded educated and experienced transit professional could recognize in the 30,40,50,60s was as accurate then as it is today.
We must learn from the past but use it to build for the future. fortunately the students comming out of even my old alma mater and other transportation engineering and planning programs are learning this but we had to make a lot of mistakes and overcome many years of wrongful teaching by those who were lead by the people only concerned about their own wallets and pie in the sky vision (which was common until about 1963 or so) and then 20 years to come to our senses and actually move forward. Sen M in San Diego was one of these visionaries from the past and linked up with a trained engineer from the past (Ed T) and was willing to fight for what they knew would work until the generation that learned from them matured enough to take over.
enough. crawling off my soapbox”
The Tyee and Transit – Please do More Research!
TransLink is embarrassed because they oversee a rather expensive mini-metro system, a system that has now cost the regional and BC taxpayer nearly $9 billion, yet congestion in Vancouver is so bad, it is rated worst in Canada and second only to Los Angles. This certainly not good advertising for TransLink, especially when it wants more ‘brass’ from regional taxpayers to pay for questionable transit schemes.
So, what to do.
Why not call on some transit types working for the Tyee and have them submit a ‘puff‘ piece on TransLink and howAi??transit ridershipAi??”crushes” Portland and Seattle.
The following is from the tyee.com, an alternative online newspaper of sorts and as expected it is all rah, rah Vancouver, but just wait a second here.
There is no mention of TransLink recycling and double or triple counting bus and SkyTrain riders as they are forced to transfer from one mode to the next, nor is there any mention of the now 100,000 $1.00 a day U-Pass season ticket holders, that get unlimited travel on the transit system for $1.00 a day! (Sources have told Zwei that about 70% of the U-passes are being used, with users making 2 to 6 trips a day and the U-Pass program is hemorrhaging money from the transit system at a rateAi??far more so than fare evasion!)
How about the cost per passenger comparison between Vancouver, Seattle and Portland, to determine which city has invested wisely for public transit options?
Never done by Vancouver’s media is why SkyTrain was rejected by Seattle and Portland, in favour of modern LRT?
The SkyTrain lobby are hard at it, desperately Ai??trying to squander the taxpayer’s money on more SkyTrain Lines and the piece from the Tyee, is nothing more than TransLink speak by a reporter who should do more research.
Transit Geeks Rejoice!
Not only does Vancouver crush Portland and Seattle, but proving it involves nifty analysis and charts.
By Clark Williams-Derry, Today,Ai??Ai??Ai??Sightline.org
When it comes to commuting by transit in the larger cities on North America’s northwest coast, neither Portland nor Seattle can hold a candle to greater Vancouver.
The simplest comparison among the three cities looks at the average number of bus and rail transit boardings per person, per year, in the entire metro area. And on that measure, Vancouver vastly outstrips its two southern neighbors (see chart at top of story).
Unfortunately, the story is somewhat more complicated than this chart suggests. Vancouver’s transit system encourages transfers — and since there’s a single, unified transit agency for metro Vancouver, there’s good data on how many riders actually transfer in the course of a single trip. Seattle, in contrast, has so many overlapping transit systems that it’s very difficult to assess how many transfers there really are.
Still, even if you assume that each transit boarding in Portland and Seattle represents a single trip, but use Vancouver’s data on “trips” rather than “vehicle boardings,” Metro Vancouver still beats the two U.S cities handily:
Using the same “trip” definitions in the chart above, a mode-by-mode breakdown shows that Portland has far more rail riders than Seattle, while greater Seattle edges out greater Portland in bus ridership. But Vancouver still comes out on top in both categories.
Trips per capita, 2010*
By Bus: Vancouver 56, Portland 32, Seattle 43
By Light Rail: Vancouver 33, Portland 21, Seattle 3
By Commuter Rail: Vancouver 1, Portland 0, Seattle
*Note: Vancouver data represent transit “trips,” while data for both Portland and Seattle represent transit “boardings.”
Of course, there’s still more to the story. These charts exclude a number of transit modes, including dial-a-ride transit (which is typically door-to-door service offered to those who are physically unable to use standard transit service), as well as vanpools and ferries. I’ve decided to keep those out of the analysis for now, but I’ll note that after including ferry trips in the total trip count count, Seattle’s per capita transit ridership ties Portland’s; and when you add in vanpools as well as ferries, Seattle narrowly edges Portland.
So perhaps Portland and Seattle are about tied… but tied in a race to see who comes in a distant second to Vancouver.
Notes and Caveats:
For this analysis, we considered all of the transit agencies in the greater Portland and Seattle metropolitan areas, as listed in the National Transit Database. For Seattle, those agencies included King County Metro, Sound Transit, Community Transit (in Snohomish County), Everett Transit, the City of Seattle, and a handful of ferry providers — but not Kitsap Transit. For Portland, it included Trimet, C-Tran in Clark County, the South Metro Area Regional Transit agency in Wilsonville, and the Metro vanpool program.
All data for Metro Vancouver comes from Translink. In Seattle, Light Rail includes the monorail and South Lake Union Trolley. Population for the Seattle metro area includes the full population of King, Snohomish, and Pierce counties. Greater Portland’s population includes Clark County, Washington, and Clackamas, Multnomah, and Washington counties in Oregon. Population for greater Vancouver includes all of Metro Vancouver. Note that Seattle and Portland population totals, as described above, may differ from the populations of the service areas as defined in the National Transit Database
What’s not to love about riding the rails?
What’s not to love about riding the rails?
BY JON FERRY, THE PROVINCE JULY 6, 2012
Photograph by: Graphics , The Province
I have few grand passions in my life, but train travel is one of them. A train journey can be frustrating (I once spent an entire day stranded on a train in Africa). But it’s invariably interesting and often an absolute delight.
Indeed, I don’t understand why improving rail travel in this eco-aware, tourist-dependent part of the world has to be such a slow, laborious grind.
I mean, running regular trains between Vancouver and Seattle, and between Vancouver and Squamish ai??i?? and even down alongside Highway 1 from Chilliwack ai??i?? should be a no-brainer.
Just ask any West Coast Express regular how stress-free train travel can be.
I especially don’t understand why, despite all the high-level talk about “high speed” rail, it still can take nearly 12 hours to go from Vancouver to Eugene, Ore., by train.
I mean we’re not talking about how to find the Higgs boson subatomic particle here.
“The problem we’ve had is that most train discussion is focused around goods movement, which is very important. It hasn’t focused enough on the passenger rail aspects,” said Vancouver Coun. Geoff Meggs, himself a staunch rail booster.
Surrey Mayor Dianne Watts agreed passenger rail in our region is under-utilized.
“There are opportunities,” she told me Thursday. “I mean, if you look at the old inter-urban line, there’s pieces of it that make sense that could be used.”
There has been some progress, though. After years of talks between Canadian and U.S. governments, you can at least go by train from Vancouver to Seattle and back in a day. And the plan is for there to be four round trips by 2023.
What’s needed now is for Lower Mainland rail enthusiasts to get behind the current campaign ai??i?? now supported by Surrey and White Rock councillors and the Surrey Board of Trade ai??i?? to reopen the 100-year-old train station in Blaine, Wash.
This would mean Fraser Valley residents who wanted to take the Amtrak Cascades train to Seattle wouldn’t have to drive all the way to downtown Vancouver to board it. They’d simply cross the border near where they live and park their vehicles at the Blaine station.
“It would serve a catchment area of more than 750,000 people,” noted Bruce Agnew, director of Seattle’s Cascadia Centre, a passenger-rail advocacy group.
Indeed, Agnew told me Thursday that taking flights from Bellingham is now so popular with Lower Mainland residents that Washington state transportation authorities might be persuaded to put in a station there, too.
The only problem is the more stops the train made, the slower the overall Vancouver-to-Seattle journey might become.
And Agnew and others would like to see the time for the trip come down from more than 3A? hours to make it competitive with other travel modes.
With train travel, of course, speed is not everything. As author David Baldacci wrote: “It’s my experience that most folk who ride trains could care less where they’re going. For them, it’s the journey itself and the people they meet along the way.”
Myself, I do like to get where I’m going, and fast. But I also like time for reading, chatting, scenery-viewing and people-watching.
Rail travel is the full meal deal.
jferry@theprovince.com
Ai?? Copyright (c) The Province
via What’s not to love about riding the rails?.
TransLink cuts half the senior executive positions from 2009. Why not just get rid of TransLink?
What most people don’t realize is that much of TransLink does, could be done easily by outside sources;Ai??the TransLinkAi??bureaucracyAi??tends toAi??duplicate what has already been done.
West Coast Mountain Bus and its bureaucracy runs the buses and SeaBus and The BC Rapid Transit Company Ltd. runs the two SkyTrain lines and a private operator runs the Canada Line, which again I must remind people that the Canada line is not SkyTrain. Metro Vancouver is supposed to be doing regional planning and the only job it seems that TransLink has been doing of late is misinforming people about modern LRT in favour of the SkyTrain light-metro system.
If one really wants to save money, do away with TransLink altogether, there is absolutely no need for this ponderous and self absorbed bureaucracy.
TransLink cuts half the senior executive positions from 2009
Efforts aimed at cost savings
By Kelly Sinoski, Vancouver SunJuly 17, 2012
TransLink has halved its senior executive positions since 2009 as part of an organizational restructuring aimed at finding cost savings to pay for transit upgrades across the region.
Ten positions were cut last year, according to a 2011 year-end financial report released Tuesday.
CEO Ian Jarvis would not provide details on the managers who lost their jobs last year, saying only that they had worked at TransLink for between three and 19 months.
However, earlier this year, Michael Shiffer, who moved from Chicago three years ago to become TransLinkai??i??s vice-president of policy and planning, lost his job after his position was also eliminated.
The cuts, along with other changes, are credited with helping TransLink find $30 million in cost savings over the past three years, Jarvis said.
But he also noted the number of staff earning more than $75,000 annually rose in 2011, likely as a result of TransLink absorbing 102 people from Coast Mountain Bus Company ai??i?? a move aimed at streamlining human resources and information technology.
Total staff salaries for 2011 were $48.9 million, according to Tuesdayai??i??s financial report, while employee expenses were $1.07 million.
Jarvis vowed to continue searching for more cost efficiencies through 2012. ai???Funding is our No. 1 priority within the organization now and weai??i??re looking at all areas of the business,ai??? he said. ai???Weai??i??ll continue with our own efforts, by trying to drive more transit fare revenue by allocating transit hours to more productive use.ai???
TransLink, which is the subject of a provincial audit, is under pressure to find another $30 million per year in savings so it can go ahead with transit upgrades across the region. The upgrades have been delayed after regional mayors refused to allow property tax increases to pay for them.
Letters To The Editor
On-street running on Portland’s MAX LRT.Ai??
Malcolm Johnston, erstwhile supporter for modern light rail since the mid 1980’s, again has another letter published in the Surrey Leader newspaper. The letter, which is just a rehash of the operating characteristics of modern LRT, something that most European transit planners take for granted. No wild claims, no nonsense, the letter just states facts…………….
LRT is the best transit for Surrey
Published: July 10, 2012
The column ai???Urgent need for rapid transit in Surreyai??? (The Leader, July 5) includes a mistake commonly made by those comparing SkyTrain with LRT as illustrated by the following quote: ai???However, SkyTrain is separated from road traffic and as such can offer quicker trips and not get tied up by intersection crashes.ai???
The claim that SkyTrain makes quicker trips than LRT is based on the fact that SkyTrain has much fewer stations per route kilometre than LRT. Fewer stations equals quicker times, but fewer stations also deter ridership.
The main differences between streetcars and modern LRT is the concept of the reserved rights-of-way or a rights-of-way for the exclusive use of the tram or streetcar to operate on. The reserved rights-of-way can be as simple as a HOV lane with rails or as complex as a linear park with grass, instead of ballasted or paved, track complete with shrubbery and flowers. The Arbutus corridor in Vancouver is a very good example of a ai???reserved rights-of-wayai??? as well as the former BC Electric interurban route that bisects Surrey.
A reserved rights-of-way enables a tram or streetcar to operate as fast and carry as many passengers as its much more expensive cousin, light-metro (SkyTrain). In fact, modern LRT has made SkyTrain obsolete two decades ago but no one has apparently told TransLink, which continues to squander taxpayerai??i??s money on dated SkyTrain transit planning.
The notion that LRT causes crashes at intersections is nonsense; rather it is car drivers ignoring red light signals that causes crashes at signal controlled LRT/road intersections and studies have shown that a LRT/road intersections are about 10 times as safe as a road/road intersections.
In the 21st century, modern LRT has proven to be faster, able to carry more customers at a far cheaper cost, to more destinations than SkyTrain light-metro and Mayor Dianne Watts is correct in demanding modern LRT for the City of Surrey.
Malcolm Johnston
Rail for the Valley
…………………but facts never get in the way of the SkyTrain lobby, which following letter is full of the standard nonsense that one expects of the SkyTrain lobby. Sadly, comparisons with Portland’s MAX should include that the Portland transit authority doesn’t force bus passengers onto transit, ‘en mass’ like TransLink, nor is there a universal $1 a day U-Pass for post secondary students.
Portland’s transit planners also have to contend not only with the Willamette River which bisects the city and a small mountain range, but also many rivers of concrete and pavement of the many highways and interstates that run northAi??and south and east and west through the city, necessitating many more bridges than most other new “rail’ transit systems.
Portland’s MAX LRT now has five lines and spans 85 km, with 85 stations and now carries 126,000 passengers a day; real transit customers and not recycled bus passengers forced to transfer onto MAX! Yet, the SkyTrain lobby, always mindful of facts ruining a good fairy tale, never tell the whole story, including the fact that Portland’s voters have voted in favour for the finance of each line built, a nicety never offered to Metro Vancouver voters
Transit money better spent on SkyTrain
Published: July 12, 2012
Thereai??i??s no doubt that Surrey needs rapid transit. Surrey is expected to face huge growth in next 30 years. Rapid transit will help manage, accommodate and welcome these newcomers.
We also, however, need to face a single, unchanging fact: There is no one-size-fits-all solution for rapid transit. A system that works somewhere in the world will not necessarily replicate with stunning success elsewhere.
In a 2008 survey of Surrey residents, 88 per cent agreed that ai???transit should be as convenient and attractive as driving a car on city roads.ai???
But letai??i??s look at what the City of Surrey is currently favouring: on-street LRT that cannot and will not be any faster than Surreyai??i??s drivers, with reliability and performance compromises at well.
The city is ignoring the expectations and demands of 88 per cent of Surreyai??i??s population.
The City of Portland has built an 84-kilometre LRT system (MAX).Ai?? However, in spite of servicing a greater population base over a larger area of service, there are fewer weekday boardings on the MAX than on SkyTrainai??i??s Canada Line alone.
Conclusion?
In three years of operation, a single SkyTrain line spanning 20 kilometres has attracted more riders per year than an entire LRT system operating over four times the service area, and for more than 26 years.
Portland had little to gain from LRT.Ai?? The transit commute-to-work mode-share has remained at a standstill for more than 15 years, despite $4 billion in additional LRT-related investment. The service hasn’t made the overall system any stronger though; recently, a cut in overall service came with fare increases and the removal of free downtown transit.
Conversely, TransLinkai??i??s service hours actually increased during this same period. SkyTrain as an attractive, profitable service is part of what makes our system strong. The introduction of the Canada Line has tapped new potential riders and realized operational cost-savings, allowing TransLink to boost revenue and facilitate improvements to service beyond Canada Line. As a result, TransLink maintains a much stronger regional transit network than Portlandai??i??s TriMet.
Leader columnist Frank Bucholtz is right about one thing (ai???Urgent need for rapid transit, The Leader, July 5): It would be difficult to come up with funding for rapid transit.
When we do get it, I would rather see that funding go towards SkyTrain expansion.
Itai??i??s simple: SkyTrain is a competitive rapid transit service that helps truly unlock the potential of Surrey as the regionai??i??s next business centre.Ai?? We must not waste our limited resources on an LRT system that has a poor business case in benefiting our community.
Daryl Dela Cruz
SkyTrain for Surrey Initiative
Now a question for Mr. Cruz, a question that Mr. Cruz continually fails to answer. “Why, after being on the market for over 32 years, transit planners avoid SkyTrain like a plague, with only seven SkyTrain systems built and not one has been allowed to compete against modern light rail?”
To date, there are two SkyTrain Lines built as demonstration lines, Detroit and Toronto (both soon to be abandoned); two built as airport people movers, JFK and Beijing; the Yongin EverLine, built to support a theme park, which is built, but sits dormant because no one wants to operate it, due to high operating costs; and the Vancouver and Kuala Lumpur ALRT/ART urban transit systems. It should be noted that Kuala Lumpur also operates an elevated LRT system and a monorail.
And Mr. Cruz want to continue building with SkyTrain in Surrey? As Barnum observed; “There is a sucker born every minute.”
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Bombardier’s Gambit, a Streetcar is not light rail: and only in Vancouver.
Interesting, that Bombardier Inc. is stumping in Surrey and Vancouver to drum up interest in their Toronto streetcar, which in reality is a reworked Flexity tram, so it can operate on Toronto’s heritage streetcar lines. After listening to a Bombardier Rep. claim that SkyTrain was cheap to operate because it has no drivers (he didn’t mention the over 250 full time attendants that work on SkyTrain) it is becoming clear of Bombardier’s game; Don’t call trams light rail, but streetcars, because streetcars are a poorman’s SkyTrain.
Bombardier is in a pickle, for over 15 years claims have been made in great quantity that SkyTrain is better than light rail, but now, with Surrey wanting LRT and even Vancouver planning a streetcar, in very short order all those claims about LRT will be seen asAi??a lot of “porkies“, bringing disgrace upon those who repeated them Joesph Goebbels style. Golly gee whiz Bombardier, how are you going to explain that Siemens or Alstom’s trams are LRT but Bombardier’s product is a streetcar.
Bombardier Inc. isAi??desperate to sell light rail vehicles in North America, but all a Siemens or Alstom rep. has to say is that their light rail product is as good as or even better than a Bombardier SkyTrain and the Bombardier rep. will have absolutely no comeback because his product is a mere streetcar, which Bombardier claims is inferior to SkyTrain.
Oh what tangled webs we weave, when we first practice to deceive.
The Flexity modular tram, is it a tram, LRV or a streetcar?
An updated Rail for the ValleyAi??post from 2008.
With the ongoing transit debate, there is some confusion between streetcars and LRT, so whatai??i??s the difference?
Streetcars are just that, a rail guided transit mode that has the legal right to operate on the public highway. Streetcars in Europe are known collectively as trams, a term dating back over two hundred years, where ai???tramsai??i?? mostly coal carrying rail cars, traveled on a ai???tramwayai??i?? on the public highway. Back then, the public highway was merely a muddy track.
The term streetcar is strictly North American and with a few exceptions (Diesel LRT), describes a steel wheel on steel rail, electrically powered passenger vehicle, that operates strictly on public streets.
During the heyday of streetcars, many operators ran on routes that had few stops between urban centres and operated on an exclusive rights-of-ways, giving a much faster service. This was known as the ai???interurbanai??i?? or a streetcar that ran between urban centres. The interurban could operate on streetcar tracks in city centres and then network on to its own rights-of-ways, giving much faster journey times to its various destinations.
In the 1930ai???s several transit operators in Europe and the USA took the interurban concept and applied it to cities by givingAi?? streetcar lines exclusive or ai???reservedai??i?? rights-of-ways in city centres, giving much higher commercial speeds and faster journey times for customers. The depression, World War 2, and the auto revolution, started a chain of wholesale streetcar abandonments in many cities in North America and Europe and the lessons of the ai???reservedai??i?? rights-of-ways were lost.
By the late 1960ai???s, streetcars had all but disappeared in North America and in Europe abandonments increased, with the old tramwayai??i??s being replaced by metro systems. A few cities in Europe upgraded their tramway systems to smaller pre-metros with large sections of grade-separated rights-of-ways, operating articulated cars. This was very expensive and the results were not all that encouraging. Overall transit ridership in cities with new metro or subway systems declined as the customer perceived that metro and buses (which replaced trams to take the customer the metro station) were not user friendly and it was just easier to take the car instead. As auto congestion increased in urban centres, more subways and metro were planned, with the thought at the time thatAi?? the transit customer wanted fast subways. The customer, as it turned out wanted his or her the tram back.
A crisis of transit philosophy evolved, the transit customer wanted faster trams, but did not want subways (nor did the taxpayer) and one universal and unpleasant fact emerged, the customer did not want to take a bus! In the early 1970ai???s, the idea of the reserved rights-of-way reemerged and the results were encouraging. By giving a tram line even sort sections of reserved rights-of-ways (RRoW), greatly increased commercial speed, which both increased ridership and increased productivity. The success of the reserved rights-of-way was instant and combined with the articulated rail car, the concept of priority signaling, and operating on a reserved rights-of-way gave the tram or streetcar almost the same commercial speeds of a metro at a fraction of the cost. A new name was coined to market the old tram/streetcar/interurban ai??i?? Light Rail Transit or LRT.
Today a tram or streetcar system which operated at least 30% of its route on reserved rights-of-ways is considered LRT. In the USA and Canada, transit planners have tried to reinvent light rail as a light-metro(Vancouver & Seattle) and the streetcar as small trams, operating on marginal routes. It should be noted that Hong Kongai??i??s 1067 mm, gauge tramway, operating small double-deck tram cars, carry over 80 million passengers a year and in France, Strasbourgai??i??s tramwayai??i??s largest cars, called Jumboai??i??s, have a capacity of 350 persons. Any streetcar or LRT system can carry over 20,000 persons per hour per direction, the only difference being, LRT is able to obtain much higher commercial speeds on a RRoW.
A streetcar is considered a rail operated transit vehicle, operating on-street, in mixed traffic, with little or no signal priority at intersections, while Light Rail or LRT is a streetcar that operates on a reserved rights-of-way, which can be as simple as a High Occupancy Vehicle Lane (HOV lane) or on a park like boulevard like the Arbutus Corridor, with priority signaling at intersections, giving it commercial speeds equal to that of a metro.
LRT operating on segregated rights-of-ways such as in a subway or on viaduct is considered a light-metro.
It is not the vehicle that dictates whether a transit line is a streetcar or tram, rather it is the quality of rights-of-way the tram or streetcar operates on.
Siemen’s Avenio Flex tram; is it a streetcar or LRV?
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