Tram Trains for Romania!
The flexibility of the modern tram to operate on mainline railways is now being exploited in Romania.
This means affordable, quality public transport can be extended to service customers, who would otherwise be excluded from transportation planning.
Until our politcans and public clearly understand that building subways and elevated transit is not how to increase a transportation’s user-friendliness (translates to ridership), rather affordable options, such as TramTrain, serving remote destinations at a far cheaper cost, will attract far more new ridership to transit.
It is time to stop building transit to win elections and build transit to move people!
From the Light Rail Transit Association.
Oradea (population 184,000), a city in Romania which has a smallish tramway system has plans to extend this into a tram-train project.
This will involve using bi-mode and tri-mode vehicles capable of operation on the urban tramway using 600 V dc, the state railway system which uses 25Kv ac and there will be some sections unwired on which battery operation will be used.
Publicity states that there will be 11 vehicles but as this is split into 8 bi-mode and 5 tri-mode it will probably be 13!
An Independent Audit Of TransLink Needed – NOW!
What TransLink wants, TransLink gets as fiscal responsibility is not in TransLink’s lexicon. Public scrutiny of TransLink is non existent. The Mayor’s Council On Transit invests in Transit to secure future elections and reelections and the public is left with a largely 1950’s bus system, tarted up with a now obsolete 1970’s light-metro system.
Positive photo-ops and well practiced 10 second sound bytes for the evening news is more important than providing a user and a taxpayer friendly transit service.
What is telling, mode share for transit in the Metro Vancouver region has stagnated for a quarter of a century, as new ridership comes strictly from population increase.
TransLink is building a now almost $4 billion, 5.7 km subway under Broadway to cater to traffic flows of just over 2,000 pphpd from customers using the Broadway B-99 bus!
TransLink turned a $1.63 billion light rail project in Surrey to a $7 billion, 16 km SkyTrain project on a route that will carry fewer customers than the Broadway B-99 bus!
TransLink is spending $16 billion to extend the Expo and Millennium Lines a mere 21.7km!
There is something radically wrong with Metro Vancouver’s transit system, yet the NDP’s only solution is to raise taxes and fares and throw more money after bad at the system, ever hoping that the transit system will improve.
Taxpayers demand an independent audit of TransLink governance, planning and operation and independent means done by someone outside the BC and SNC Lavalin’s sphere of influence.
Is the Metro Vancouver taxpayer getting good value from money spent on transit?
The transit customer and the taxpayer deserve much better from Premier Eby’s NDP government!
Metro Vancouver’s TransLink plans fare and tax hikes for better service
By The Canadian Press
Posted April 10, 2025
TransLink is proposing a plan to improve its services, ease overcrowding, and finish projects, but it will involve a fare hike and a tax increase for Metro Vancouver residents.
The B.C. government announced Thursday that it would provide $312 million in operating funding to the Metro Vancouver transit operator over the next three years if the rest of its investment plan is approved.
The plan would allow for several improvements, including more service on up to 50 bus routes, extending the North Shore’s rapid bus, and adding West Coast Express train cars.
But it would also mean a five per cent fare increase in July 2026, followed by annual two per cent increases, and there would be another $1.50 added to the current fee to go the airport, along with a 0.5 cent property tax increase, equal to about $20 for a median household.
Denis Agar, executive director of Movement: Metro Vancouver Transit Riders, says Thursday’s funding announcement is a huge sigh of relief for commuters.
“We generated over 3,000 emails to mayors and 3,000 emails to MLAs,” Agar said.
“So we think they heard loud and clear that riders want to prevent cuts and they actually want more service. And it looks like that’s what we got.”
He says he hopes TransLink will use this momentum to come up with a permanent solution to their financial issues.
“This is a three-year plan, that’s when the funding expires, and it doesn’t address some really serious problems that are still left in the system,” he said.
“So we’re challenging the mayors in the province to come up with a new plan in just one year.”
Agar notes the plan doesn’t fund the long-awaited SkyTrain extension to UBC or the gondola up to SFU.
A public consultation process is being held on the plan with comments accepted until April 24. A vote by both the Mayors’ Council and the TransLink Board is expected on April 30.
TransLink provides 5.5 million service hours every year, operating commuter trains and the SeaBus, as well as trolley and regular buses, but has said it faced a shortfall of $600 million per year.
Transportation Minister Mike Farnworth says they know that TransLink is facing a significant deficit as costs and demand for services increase, and the provincial funding will allow for both stable service and for expansion.
The B.C. money is in addition to $1.5 billion over 10 years that the federal government announced for the network in March.
— With files from Srushti Gangdev
Court Case? What Court Case?
The following comment from Mr.Cow has raised eyebrows.
“By the way it’s not 205 Mk 5 Cars, its 41, 5 section vehicles, at approximately 17.63 Million per 5 section vehicle. With entirely new sub systems not the longer versions of the Mk 3 trains with similar equipment that the BCRTC thought it was getting. You see guys, Bombardier promised the Mk 5 wouldn’t be filled with new tech. They changed the designs and brought in new systems, all before their surface transportation group was sold off. This is forcing the BCRTC to now pay for expensive maintenance training and equipment they never budgeted for. Alstom threatened them you better pay up for the new training or else. The court case between BCRTC/Translink and Alstom was settled out of court. However, the fact remains far more money is being spent by BCRTC than planned. Money nobody has.”
Court Case? Settled out of court?
Like all negative news about SkyTrain and TransLink the media sweeps it under the table, with a “nothing to see here” attitude.
This confirms to me, that a fully independent audit of TransLink and the 21.7 km expansion to the Expo and Millennium Lines is badly needed.
The public is being kept comfortably numb by the mainstream media, who only see fit to give air time for positive news.
Škoda ForCity Smart 38T -Trams Get Longer
As the modern tram evolves, companies offer longer trams to cope with ever increasing ridership demands.
With a modular design, this easier to do than a complete new design for a tram.
It also should be noted that Mannheim’s tram system is metre gauge, thus the kinematic envelope for trams is very constricted and the only way to increase capacity is lengthening the tram. Offering 156 seats is impressive, especially compared to a much wider ROTEM EMU, used on the Canada Line, which offers a meagre 88 seats for a 41 metre long two car train-set.
The 38T tram also comes in smaller sizes, 30.5 metre and 40.65 metre lengths.
Škoda Group unveils the world’s longest tram
17 September 2024
The six-car 58.7 m long ForCity Smart 38T for Mannheim. Source: Škoda Group
Belov Sergey, Editor-in-Chief, ROLLINGSTOCK Agency
Savenkova Ekaterina, Editorial Contributor to International Projects of ROLLINGSTOCK Agency
Germany: The six-car 58.7 m long ForCity Smart 38T will transport passengers in the city of Mannheim, where it was officially unveiled.
The streetcar was built as part of a 2018 contract between the Rhine-Neckar region’s public transport operator RNV and the tram builder. The previous record for tram length was held by the nine-car 55.9 m CAF Urbos for Budapest.
The first photos of the 38T were published in June. For 368 passengers, each 38T offers 156 seats, including 12 flap-up ones. The operating speed of the tram is 80 km/h.
The six-car 58.7 m long ForCity Smart 38T at the presentation in Mannheim. Source: RNV
Škoda Group has contracted to deliver 12 38Ts and 68 shorter trams: the 36Ts with a length of 30.5 m and the 37Ts with a length of 40.7 m. All trams, based on the Arctic platform, have been adapted to 1,000 mm track gauge and will operate in Mannheim, Ludwigshafen, and Heidelberg.
A Pre Election Band Aid
When the provincial government spends in excess of $16 billion to extend the somewhat obsolete Movia Automatic Light Metro (a.k.a. SkyTrain) system a mere 21.7 km, the regional transit system as a whole suffers.
The federal government is partly at fault for this growing financial debacle by compelling the provincial government to continue building with the proprietary light-metro system, which patents were once owned by Bombardier Inc. and SNC Lavalin, simply to keep jobs in Quebec and Ontario.
Unlike the American government which vets all transit projects, receiving federal aide, must be peer reviewed. In BC we continue throw good money after bad on the now obsolete light metro system; a transit system which has an international reputation of a Ford Edsel.
$1.5 billion, over ten years amounts to $150 million annually, which would build about 350 metres for elevated light metro and a mere 160 metres of subway construction per year!
By comparison $150 million could by us about 10 to 15 kilometres of RftV’s Marpole to Chilliwack regional railway, per year!
The Liberals, under Carney, must demonstrate some largess of cash to buy votes for the soon to be called election (and maybe called before I post this) as one does not win votes telling politcans to spend within their own (read the taxpayer’s) means.
We are living in dangerous times with a bellicose President Trump wanting to invade Canada and an even more warlike Putin, threatening an ever encompassing war in Europe.
If I were metro politcans and TransLink, I would not be counting your financial eggs before they hatch and start planning for a leaner and meaner regional transit system, because what the federal government promises today, maybe stopped by a national emegancy, such as a massive tariff assault by the American government or worse, war in Europe.
It is “interesting times” we live in and out politcal leaders should be far more prudent with our scarce transit dollars, but of course, never before an election and in Metro Vancouver the word “prudent” is not in the lexicon of elected officials or their bureaucrat masters!
TransLink to receive over $1.5B over 10 years from Ottawa
Posted March 21, 2025
Another $1.5 billion in federal funding has been promised for local transit projects.
The money was announced Friday morning, with Ottawa calling it long-term, predictable funding for the growth and maintenance of public transit in Metro Vancouver.
It will come through the creation of what’s called the Metro-Region Agreement, starting next year.
“The federal government is investing in public transit projects across the country to ensure that more Canadians are connected to jobs, services, and their communities. These sustained infrastructure investments are key to growing the strongest economy in the G7,” the statement from the federal government said.
“Metro Vancouver’s public transit network is one of the busiest in Canada, connecting the municipalities within the region with bus, SkyTrain, West Coast Express and SeaBus services.”
This is on top of $663 million in funding TransLink recently received from Ottawa, and “builds on great investments in the region, including almost $1.5 billion in support of the Surrey-Langley Skytrain and the Millennium Line Broadway Extension projects.”
“The Metro-Region Agreement will also look to accelerate the positive role that public transit can play in creating sustainable, inclusive, and prosperous communities. The Agreement will help ensure that all orders of government are aligned in their efforts to get the most out of investments in public transit to create more complete, transit-oriented communities, improve the housing supply and affordability, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” the federal government said.
1130 NewsRadio has reached out to the Metro Vancouver Mayors’ Council for comment.
The Westerwald Railway Another German Regional Railway
The Westerwald Railway of the district of Altenkirchen GmbH (WEBA, Westerwaldbahn GmbH) is a regional railway infrastructure (EIU) and a railway company (EVU) owned by the district of Altenkirchen (Westerwald) in Rhineland-Palatinate. The company operates the and Betzdorf–Daaden railway lines, the latter as line RB97 in local passenger rail transport. Here it transports approx. 365,000 people and also operates two travel centers in the train stations Wissen (Sieg) and Betzdorf (Sieg), which took the place of the Au (Sieg) station in 2022.
Until 2017, Westerwaldbahn GmbH carried out rail freight transport on various lines, and until 2018 it was also active in bus services, which it has been able to expand strongly under the conditions since then, but therefore continues it as a separate company Westerwaldbus GmbH. The headquarters of both companies are their joint depot in Steinebach/Sieg.
$7 Billion to Move 56,000 (or less) Persons A Day.
If one wishes to know why emergency rooms are being closed on weekends in hospitals around the province, the NDP are spending $7 billion to move 56,000 people a day.
56,000 thousand riders a day? According to Wikipedia, the Broadway 99-B Line bus to UBC, averages 39,900 customers a day (2023)! One thinks that the 56,000 customers a day (or is it 26,000 customers day counted twice?) a tad bit optimistic, considering that the 99-B goes to UBC, a major transit destination and Langley is hardly a major destination.
Also, has TransLink factored in their estimates, that transit trips of more than one hour, actually deters ridership? This makes me think the hype and hoopla about BRT Lines in Surrey/Langley are more to “fiddle figures”, especially travel times because of this unpleasant fact.
The article does not mention the $1 billion Operations and Maintenance Centre #5, needed for the new 5-car rakes of Innovia 300 cars or the $1.47 resignalling of both the Expo and Millennium lines or the yet to be tendered $1 billion plus electrical rehab needed to operate trains on the 16 km extension.
Actually the project’s cost jumped over four times from a $1.65 billion light rail project to a $7 billion plus light-metro project and this will further increase if countervailing tariffs are added on American cement and specialty steel needed to build the guideways.
Both the Broadway subway and the Expo Line extension defy modern public transit planning and showcases the NDP’s being stuck to the dated “SkyTrain” philosophy and begs the question: “Why?”
At best, the line will replace three bus routes (501, 502, 503) with a combined peak hour capacity of less than 1,400 persons per hour per direction, which translates to huge maintenance costs, operating near empty trains another 32 km per round trip.
Rail for the Valley’s $2 billion, 130 km Marpole to Chilliwack regional railway, servicing 12 major destinations, would certainly out perform the Langley extension by offering many more travel solutions. The Langley SkyTrain extension will only offer slower overall travel times by forcing transfers onto potential customers.
This what has happened with the Canada line service, which, by forcing transit customers to make an unwanted Transfer from train to bus at Bridgeport Station has seen a collapse of ridership on transit and an explosion of electric cars in South Delta.
Of course TransLink hides this unpleasant fact, but if one observes, once sardine style, crammed express busses that used to go direct to downtown Vancouver, now see 20 or less customers using each bus.
As there is no independent audit of ridership on our public transit system, one must take any ridership claims by TransLink as suspect, as it is in TransLink’s interest to overstate ridership to keep doing the same thing over and over again, ever hoping for different results.
Despite shrill claims by our local politcans, that Vancouver’s SkyTrain is a world class transit system, it is the only world class system I know of, where no one wants it or builds with it and has been shunned planners around the world for almost fifty years!
Major construction ramps up on Surrey-Langley SkyTrain project
By Simon Little Global News
Posted February 28, 2025
Construction on the new Surrey-Langley SkyTrain extension is ramping up, with the project to become much more visible in the months to come.
Transportation Minister Mike Farnworth said Friday that construction for nearly 200 piers and columns that will support the transit line’s guideway has begun.
“Together the Surrey-Langley SkyTrain, combined with the Broadway subway project in Vancouver, will expand our current SkyTrain network by about 27 per cent,” Farnworth said.
“We’re also working closely with TransLink to ensure efficient, reliable bus service that connects with the SkyTrain stations, including access to rapid transit for people who don’t live or work close to the alignment.”
The province says that work will continue through the spring, as crews begin casting more than 4,400 concrete segments that will form the system’s guideway.
Specialized cranes called “gantry launchers” will then begin to lift and install those concrete segments this summer at sites at 152 Street, Bakerview-166 Street and Hillcrest-184 Street stations.
Construction on two future stations, Green Timbers and Langley City Centre stations, is also scheduled to begin this year.
Last summer, the province revealed the cost to complete the project had jumped by almost 50 per cent, from just over $4 billion to just under $6 billion.
The timeline to complete the project was also pushed back a year from 2028 to 2029.
The province blamed inflation, supply chain issues and rising labour costs for the higher costs.
Once completed, the eight-station line is expected to take people from Langley City Centre to King George Station in 22 minutes, with an anticipated daily ridership of 56,000.
Time To Rethink SkyTrain Premier Eby
With a looming trade war with the USA, it is time to rethink the BC Governments exclusive planning, centred around the proprietary SkyTrain light metro system.
Yes, I know the NDP government ministers call SkyTrain a world class system, but it is the only world class system I know of that no one wants to buy or build.
Currently we are spending over $16 billion to extend the Expo and Millennium Lines a mere 21.7 km on two routes that just do not have the ridership to justify this scale of investment.
According to TransLink the Expo Line extension to Langley will carry fewer customers than the Broadway B-Line Bus and the Broadway subway is replacing the Broadway B-Line bus, which has a peak hour capacity of only 2,000 pphpd, from Commercial drive to Arbutus.
In the real world Premier Eby, subways are not built until ridership on a transit route surpasses 15,000 persons per hour per direction! In the late 1940’s and early 50’s Toronto was operating coupled sets of PCC cars on select routes offering peak hour capacities in excess of 12,000 pphpd. The modern tram has the ability to double this at a fraction of the cost.
Yes, I know that the NDP and the current developer friendly Vancouver Council, with their ill-conceived denisfication program for Broadway, believe the Broadway subway will be the great transit panacea.
Sorry it will not be, rather it will become the great Vancouver $4 billion “White elephant“.
Just to remind you Premier Eby, subways tend to be user unfriendly and are poor in attracting new ridership. As planned, the $4 billion subway is following the ghost rails of the previously planned for light rail, terminating at Arbutus and will force an unwanted transfer to a 99 B-Line bus to continue West.
The current estimate to complete the subway to UBC is now in the range of $8 billion and that is before tariffs!
Oh, by the way, TransLink thinks the same because after their $1.47 billion re-signalling program of the Expo and Millennium Lines; the maximum capacity of the Millennium Line (Broadway subway) will be a mere 7,500 pphpd.
Remember those PCC streetcars in Toronto?
The Expo Line extension to Langley is more of the same, a hugely expensive light-metro system, on a route that just not have the ridership to justify the investment. It was the NDP government that turned a $1.63 light rail project into a now $7 billion light metro project and it begs a question.
Why is the NDP stuck to SkyTrain like a tar-baby?
Twice in the NDP’s history, they overturned planning from light rail to the proprietary railway that operates on both the Expo and Millennium Lines.
Remember, no one wants to buy or build with this proprietary railway. Only seven such systems have been built in almost 50 years (only six remain in operation) and the proprietary railway being rebranded at least six times (ICTS > ALRT > ALM > ART > Innovia > MALM), is hardly a positive endorsement for the system.
Now, with the tariff war looming with the United States, the cost of the specialty steel and cement, which the SkyTrain light metro system is a voracious consumer of, will further increase the costs of construction.
A billion dollars here, a billion dollars there and soon the taxpayer will be bankrupted funding what is really a NDP government prestige project, designed to win elections and not move people.
Considering that Rail for the Valley’s Marpole to Chilliwack regional railway plan, will cost around $2 billion, servicing twelve major transportation destinations and attracting more new ridership than the Expo Line extension to Langley, would it not be a wise and prudent decision to abandon all light-metro construction and planning and instead plan for what we can afford and what would provide a modern user-friendly transit service for the Fraser Valley?
Premier Eby, time to stop using jingoistic word salads and cut the apron strings to SkyTrain light metro and instead, do what is best for the taxpayer and the province.
Siegen to Bad Berleburg Regional Railway
An interesting regional railway route in Germany.
The Geneva Model
The problem in Canada, is that transit is built to win elections and not move people. Transit projects become “gold-plated”, ponderous and not user-friendly. In Canada the transit customer is all but ignored.
In Switzerland transit is built to meet the needs of the transit customer and the transit customer approval is needed at all stages of planning. Thus the the transit provided is user-friendly.
User friendliness is the key to good public transport and that is greatly lacking in Canada.
This is so true in metro Vancouver where we keep spending billions of dollars on an obsolete proprietary light metro system no one wants or ever wanted. The rest of the transit system is designed to fed the politically prestigious light metro system, thus it has become extremely user-unfriendly. Currently the government is spending $`16 billion to extend the light metro a mere 21.7 km, without any sort of public approval on routes that do not have the ridership to justify the investment, nor will the new routes attract much new ridership.
There is a reason why Metro Vancouver is used as an example on “Not how to build transit.”
Like clockwork
Fifty years ago, Switzerland was poised to become as car-dependent as anywhere in North America. Now it has the best transit system in the world. What’s the secret to this alpine nation’s transport success? Taras Grescoe Special to The Globe and Mail
Video illustrations by The Globe and Mail. Source video: Getty Images Published January 25, 2025
Taras Grescoe is the author of Straphanger: Saving Our Cities and Ourselves from the Automobile, as well as High Speed, a newsletter about the global passenger rail renaissance.
I’ve spent a lot of time in Switzerland over the last two decades, a fact that would have astonished my 30-year-old self. As a young man, I was more inclined to travel in the soulful, sunny parts of the world. Switzerland struck me as being picturesque, but boring: the sensible shoe of nations. Sure, hiking in the Alps was amazing – but, hell, Canada has the Rockies. As for cheese and chocolate, I could get those in France or Belgium, where the hotel rooms were cheaper and I didn’t have to invest in a Schweizerdeutsch phrase book.
Funny how your perspective can change. Over the years, as research trips took me to a dozen Swiss cantons, I’ve come to appreciate that, though Switzerland is a landlocked country lacking in natural resources, it is rich in something vanishingly rare in the rest of the world: common sense.
This is most apparent in the way the Swiss travel. I’m at once deeply envious, but also convinced that North America should look no farther than this alpine nation for a model of sensible, sustainable – and, dare I say, enjoyable –transit. It’s simply the best transportation system in the world.
This really began to sink in two years ago, when I spent a month-and-a-half in the canton of Vaud, in the French-speaking west of the country. After flying into Geneva, I rode an escalator to a railway platform located directly beneath the airport terminal. After waiting less than five minutes, I boarded a double-decker intercity train, which featured a play area for kids, complete with a slide, on the upper level. Within seven minutes, we had arrived at Geneva’s main station.
Twenty-seven minutes after that, I disembarked at Morges, a town on the north shore of Lac Léman, where I walked a few dozen paces to an adjoining platform, where a smaller, three-carriage electric train, run by the private rail company MBC, was already waiting. Exactly as the second-hand of the platform clock hit the top of the dial, the train pulled out of the station.
We wended our way through a landscape of grapevines and Simmental cows in their summer pastures, to the end of the line, a village with the charming name of Apples. There, on the far side of a gabled stationmaster’s house, a two-carriage train was waiting for us. It only pulled away when the last of the passengers had transferred from one train to the other.
We passed through four villages, spaced three to five kilometres apart, before I arrived at my stop. A short walk from the end of the open platform, a small green-and-white bus collected the disembarking passengers, which included a half-dozen students returning from high school. I was whisked, along with my backpack and suitcase, uphill to my final destination, the village of Montricher (population: 900).
The entire journey went like clockwork, with each mode of transport – from heavy-hauling intercity train to that 49-passenger rural bus – meshing with the next with gear-like precision.
Fearing I’d be isolated in a small hilltop village, I’d arranged to borrow a road bicycle. As pleasant as pedalling the foothills of the Jura Mountains turned out to be, I needn’t have bothered. Any time I decided to leave the village, I could walk to the middle of the village, and take a bus back to Montricher’s rail station. Trains left hourly from six in the morning until 1:46 a.m. From there, I could get to larger hubs like Geneva, Lausanne or Montreux, and travel by train all around Switzerland (and, by high-speed rail, to Italy, France and Germany).
A Swiss friend suggested I download the official trip-planning app offered by SBB, Switzerland’s state-run railways. After linking it to my credit card, I was able to plan a trip anywhere in the country with just a few swipes on my iPhone screen. This wasn’t limited to trains. SBB allows you to buy a through ticket on gondolas, river boats, funiculars and city buses, even those run by private companies, and provides you with a QR code to show to ticket inspectors. By swiping right on the “EasyRide” tab, the app would use GPS to track my position, and automatically charge the best available fare to my account when the trip ended.
Visitors complain about the prices of train tickets in Switzerland, which are among the most expensive in Europe. (One Swiss transit professional I talked to considers the high prices a “tax on tourists.”) But one can also paya yearly subscription, currently 170 francs ($273) which gives you half-price fares on all trains. Many Swiss citizens opt for the “abonnement général,” an annual pass that, for 3995 francs, gives them free transportation on all modes, everywhere in the country. (Gondolas and cable-cars, more likely to be used by skiers, are 50 per cent off.)
By federal law, every village in Switzerland with a population of more than 100 has to be served by some form of public transportation: a bus, a train, cog railway, or PostBus – the national system of mail-delivery buses which serves both cities and remote villages – on a daytime schedule of one hour or better.
This is a way of keeping rural areas connected to the rest of the country, but it also allows city dwellers, and visitors, to reach remote villages, and even national parks – places with a population density of zero inhabitants per hectare – without ever getting behind the wheel of a car.
This was a revelation. For just over $6,000 a year, the Swiss can travel anywhere, reliably, in comfort, and get where they’re going on time. (In neighbouring Austria, where the cost of living isn’t so high, the equivalent national rail pass costs just €1,100 – or $1,600.) In Canada and the United States, the average cost of car ownership – including payments, parking tickets, insurance, parking, and gas – is more than $12,000 a year. That’s a high price to pay for a system that delivers congestion, traffic deaths and injuries, air pollution – and, more often than not, gets us to work or school late. For half the price North Americans pay, the Swiss get reliable, anywhere-to-anywhere mobility.
But it turns out the Swiss weren’t always so well served by transit. Fifty years ago, Switzerland was poised to become as car-dependent as anywhere in North America. The pivot began in Zurich, with a revolt against urban highways, and the refusal to give up on tramways – a mode that we in North America know as the streetcar.
In the 1960s, Switzerland experienced its own version of America’s proverbial “love affair” with the automobile. Car ownership rose at a rate that would later be rivalled by the breakneck motorization of China in the first decade of this century. To accommodate the flood of Volkswagens, Opels and Fords, the country began an ambitious program of road-building.
“The federal government decided highways were the future,” explains Norman Garrick, a University of Connecticut engineering professor, who has chosen to spend his retirement in Zurich, where he is writing a book about Swiss transport policy. “The plan was to build three highways, which would converge in the shape of a ‘Y’ on the centre of Zurich. They actually built part of the highway on stilts over the Sihl River; you can still see it.”
Since 1894, Zurich had a popular, publicly run tramway system. Tram operator VBZ came up with a plan to put the streetcars in tunnels underneath the streets, which would allow cars and buses to move freely through the historic centre. Thanks to the Swiss confederation’s system of direct democracy, though, any major infrastructure project has to be put to a popular vote.
The proposal was soundly defeated in a canton-wide referendum, which brought highway construction to a sudden stop. (Autobahstummel, or “highway stubs,” where elevated expressways end abruptly, still stand as testaments to the referendum’s results on the outskirts of Zurich.)
Inspired by the principles set forth in economist E.E. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful, the citizens of Zurich came up with “a radical priority plan” to give a decades-old transit mode new life. The historic tramways would be given absolute precedence over cars. The plan was implemented in the 1980s, along with the construction of an S-Bahn (short for Schnellbahn, as in “fast-railway”), a mostly above-ground commuter-rail network whose 32 lines now extend into five cantons, and even into Germany.
“In Zurich,” marvels Dr. Garrick, “the tram is king of transportation. That’s true for how it’s physically accommodated in the city, and how it’s treated in law. When a tram approaches a stoplight, the light changes, and goes red for cars. Almost everywhere, trams run on their own rights-of-way.”
In the few North American cities that have retained historic routes, notably Philadelphia and Toronto, streetcars too often share streets with cars, trucks and buses. Snarled by traffic, they become the slowest vehicles on the road – lumbering stop-and-go advertisements for transit inefficiency.
“You can go from one end of Zurich to the other in 15 minutes,” says Antoine Belaieff, an urban planner who, after working at Ontario’s Metrolinx for a decade, has returned to work on ticketing systems in his native Switzerland. “It’s almost magical. In cities where trams are common, like Zurich and Bern, they’ve taken an almost inch-by-inch approach to removing obstacles, ensuring the trams circulate unimpeded.”
Key to this success is the way automobile access is limited in city streets. Surface parking was capped in the centre of Zurich in a 1993 initiative known as the “Historic Compromise,” and since then, spaces have gradually been reduced. (Underground lots are permitted, but they are prohibitively costly to build.) Zurich also monitors the number of cars in the city using sensors in the pavement, which relay the data to a single small control room. Once the limit has been reached, traffic lights on exterior roads hold back cars trying to enter, preventing gridlock in the city centre. While London and Stockholm use congestion charges, in the hopes that market-based fees will reduce traffic, Swiss cities have opted to combine the stick of traffic management with the carrot of superior public transport.
The results are impressive. Over two-thirds of Zurich residents now commute by S-Bahn or tram; less than a fifth rely on private automobiles, and per-capita car ownership has plummeted. (Outside of Bern, arguably Switzerland’s leader in bicycle commuting, bike infrastructure is nowhere near as developed as it is in Paris, Copenhagen, or Amsterdam. Not surprising, given the mountainous terrain, though e-bikes have become wildly popular.)
On a week-long stay in Zurich, I learned to love the tramway system, which, thanks to high frequencies and easy transfers between routes, actually functions more like a heavy-hauling metro. Most of the trams I rode on dated from the 1970s; while some of the fleet has since been upgraded to newer models, the operator prefers to keep its perfectly functional half-century-old trams running with regular overhauls.
Transit in the canton of Zurich is administered by an organization that has no counterpart in North America: the Verkehrsverbund, or “public transport federation.” Adapted from a model pioneered in Hamburg in the 1960s, the Zürcher Verkehrsverbund (ZVV) has overseen transitsince 1990. Responsible for strategic planning, the ZVV is a lean organization, with a few dozen employees, and it leaves day-to-day operations to the canton of Zurich’s 18 separate transit agencies, which range from the state railway, to the private operators of single-line funiculars. ZVV oversees ticketing, schedule co-ordination, and trip planning, and then distributes revenues from fares to the different operators.
Without having to think about it, passengers use buses and trams run by different companies, with Verkehrsverbund ensuring that their journey from one mode to the next is seamless.
A well-known series of ads for ZVV showed an image of a tram painted with the slogan “I am also a bus,” a ferry with “I am also a tram,” and a tram with “I am also a train.” The campaign got across the idea that it wasn’t the mode that mattered, but the idea of mobility itself.
“The accountability is much higher than in Canadian metro areas,” points out Mr. Belaieff. “In Toronto, there’s an executive committee for planning, one for infrastructure, but no one is responsible for strategic transport planning.” (The metro area that gets closest to getting it right is Vancouver, whose TransLink gives its users access to a region-spanning network – which includes the SeaBus, the Skytrain, and trolleybuses – with a single fare-card, and now with the tap of a credit card.)
The real genius of the Swiss system, though, lies in the co-ordination between all the moving parts, at the municipal, cantonal and national levels.
“Every December, a new national railway schedule is released, and throughout the year there’s a continual process by which the schedules of local buses and trams are hung on this master schedule.” The railway lines of SBB, which link all major cities, provide the master schedule from which the smaller agencies take their cues. “In Canadian cities like Toronto, the transit agencies hardly talk, and they definitely don’t co-ordinate schedules.”
Mr. Belaieff notes that Switzerland almost never makes headlines for spending billions of francs on glamorous new transport technology. In fact, Zurich shows a budget-breaking metropolitan light-rail megaproject isn’t a prerequisite for great transit: you can even have a high-functioning system using half-century old trams. A German expression sums it up: Organisation vor Elektronik vor Beton – “Organization before electronics or concrete.” In other words, the latest tech and expensive infrastructure projects are less important than strategizing a master plan for mobility – and being really, really, well organized about implementing it.
The real secret to Switzerland’s transport supremacy is hidden in plain sight, on every railway platform. The “Swiss Railway Clock,” with its signature white-and-black face, was designed by Hans Hilfiker, an SBB employee, in 1944. The red dot at the end of the second hand represents the baton that platform attendants still use to signal the departure and arrival of trains. As the dot approaches the top of the dial, it pauses for exactly one and a half seconds, as an electronic pulse is sent out to synchronize the other clocks in the station.
This is the symbolic foundation for the Taktfahrplan, inexactly translated as “clockface timing.”It may be Switzerland’s least-known contribution to civilization. The idea is that all rail lines should run trains so they converge on key interchange stations, arranged in a hub-and-spoke pattern, arriving at roughly the same time, at regular intervals on the clockface – say, at the top of the hour, then 20 minutes after, then 40 after.
If you sit outside a train station in any mid-sized town, you’ll see the system at work. Buses are timed to pull into the station just before the trains’ arrival; waves of passengers alight from the buses, and then walk, rather than run, to their platforms.
The transfer functions like a heartbeat, sending pulses of satisfied customers coursing through the veins of the system, from city centres to remote villages. If you’re a commuter, you only have to remember a couple of numbers on the clock, rather than consulting an ever-changing timetable.
The New York subway, the Paris métro, Vancouver’s SkyTrain, and otherhigh-capacity transit systems rely on high frequencies to function; with headways of a few minutes, you can be sure there’s always another train coming. Such brute force is effective, but costly to keep up. Switzerland compensates for longer headways by putting the emphasis on the smoothness of the connection, which in turn is based on clockface-driven punctuality. The trains, buses, and trams are where they’re supposed to be, when they’re supposed to be – largely because they’re given absolute priority over cars, trucks, and anything else that might get in their way.
I saw this in action last September, as I stood at the front of an articulated trolleybus in Lucerne. It was rush hour, and we were using one of two lanes that paralleled the lakefront in the direction of the city-centre train station. To our left, there was a lane filled with a line of virtually motionless cars. Yet our bus rushed past these idling Audis and BMWs in its own dedicated lane; when we approached a signal, the light automatically turned green to let us pass. There was no physical separation between the lanes: bulky traffic-cameras on the roadside ensured compliance. Any driver who dared to pull into the bus lane, and interfere with our progress, would be guaranteed a hefty ticket.
The origin of the Taktfahrplan, which is planned by an independent organization known as Trasse Schweiz, lies in a proposal to bring high-speed rail to Switzerland, after Japan launched its first Shinkansen bullet train in 1964. Critics pointed out that, given the corrugated topography, there were few straightaways where a train could actually attain their top speeds of 300 kilometres an hour. A small country would be better served by a reasonably fast, but always predictable, intercity train network.
“There are still some people who say we need high-speed trains in Switzerland,” Peter Füglistaler, who directed the federal department of transportation from 2010 to 2024, told me. “Really, there are only a few clients who have to go that fast. But there are a lot of people who want to get to work on time every day. We’ve provided trains that can go two hundred kilometres an hour. That’s better, and faster, than driving a car. It’s enough.”
For Mr. Füglistaler, who earned the nickname “The Train Accelerator,” ubiquity of service is just as important as speed and reliability. Even if an unprofitable rural bus route or funicular requires hefty subsidies from the canton and the federal state, it remains worth keeping alive. “We have to have public transport everywhere, in the cities and small towns. Because if you do nothing for the rural regions, they will vote against investments in the cities.”
The strategy continues to produce results that drive down emissions. Late last November, even as Ontario Premier Doug Ford was making global headlines by promising to rip out bike lanes while widening highways, the people of Switzerland voted to reject a $7.9-billion plan to expand expressways in a national referendum. Suburban voters were in favour; the vote was decided by the cities, and, crucially, people in remote rural areas who have come to value their links to the national transport network.
Everyone I talked to agreed that, geographically, culturally and historically, Switzerland wasunusual. It was one of the first countries in the world to assume federal control of a rail network, nationalizing most of its private lines in 1902. You’d think such uniqueness – all those 4,000-metre peaks and charming mountain villages – would be an impediment to building transit. But instead of using low population densities as an excuse to rely on roads and private automobiles, the Swiss got to work building the ingenious cog railways, funiculars, and cable-cars that would ensure every citizen had access to high-quality public transport.
The experience of this small European country is more relevant to Canada than you might think. Consider this: Switzerland has almost the same number as inhabitants as Quebec, nine million. Superimpose it on the map of Quebec, and it would cover the dense, linear band of settlement from Gatineau to Quebec City, which is home to more than 80 per cent of Quebec’s population. The same exercise could be applied to the GTA, which has about 10 million inhabitants; the width of Switzerland is roughly the distance between Hamilton and Kingston. (Indeed, the logic applies to the Bay Area, “Chicagoland,” New York and many other metro areas that tend to have as many inhabitants as Switzerland.) The difference is that the most densely peopled areas of eastern Canada, home to half the country’s population, are relatively flat, meaning they would be far easier to serve with a well-organized system of trains, light-rail and buses than Switzerland.
Even more so if the proposed high-speed, and, one hopes, high-frequency, rail line between Toronto and Quebec City becomes a spinal cord around which municipal and regional transit services could be structured.
That, of course, would require long-term planning and organization, as well as interagency and interprovincial communication: all things that resource-rich Canada has proven itself poor in. It turns out the thing we are richest in – at least when it comes to sustainable transport – is excuses.
All this was on my mind lastautumn, on my latest trip to Switzerland, as I stood on a viewing platform looking out over the Aletsch Glacier. Nestled in a valley among alpine peaks, it is a curving tongue of ice, 800 metres at its thickest point. At 23 kilometres, the Aletsch is the longest glacier in Europe, and one of the main sources of the Rhone, the river that supplies drinking water to Geneva, Avignon and Lyon. Higher temperatures mean it has been shrinking at an alarming rate; in the last 40 years it has lost 1.3 kilometres in length, and 200 metres in thickness. By the end of the century, global warming means that nine of ten glaciers in the Swiss Alps are expected to disappear. The main driver of the higher temperatures, according to NASA, is no longer power generation – the global grid is actually getting greener – but emissions from the transportation sector, which now mostly come from private automobiles.
I thought about the journey that had brought me to that staggering vista. Using an eight-day Swiss Travel Pass, I’d taken a panoramic-windowed cog railway from the town of Brig, and then transferred to a cable-car that took me to the car-free village of Bettmeralp.
Small electric buses were waiting at the station, timed, following the Taktfahrplan, to take passengers to the next gondola, which whisked us up to 2,600 metres; from there it was a short walk to the viewing platform. That night, back in Bettmeralp, I would sleep in a gabled, chalet-style inn, in an atmosphere of perfect tranquility. Because there was no car traffic, all I heard was the sound of children laughing, birds chirping, and the clanging of distant cow bells. It was a comfort, and a marvel, to think that I could use my affordable travel pass to get to anywhere else I decided to go in this beautiful, and admirably sensible, country.
All of the transit I’d ridden was powered by electricity, not fossil fuels. As of 2025, one hundred per cent of the electricity that drives SBB’s trains comes from hydroelectricity, solar and other renewable sources. All that week, I’d been talking to a wide range of Swiss people about their travel habits. The younger ones didn’t own cars, and told me they probably never would.
Everybody I met either had a national rail pass or the subscription that gave them half price on trains. Some cited the environmental benefits. But everyone told me they used transit because it was affordable, and it worked.
I thought of something Norman Garrick, the American expatriate living in Zurich, had told me: “I think we’ve really been sold a bill of goods in North America. We have the most expensive transportation system in the world. Not because it’s any good. But because it’s car-based.”
Even though the Swiss can rely on a transport system that isn’t a significant contributor to global emissions, they live on the front lines of climate change, which is manifest to them in the Aletsch and other shrinking glaciers. That’s definitely not fair. But – for now, at least – it’s us, the car-dependent citizens of Canada and the United States, who should be pitied.
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