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.
Off The Rails – Part 2
I have issues with all of these projects as most have wandered from being light rail and instead become a light-metro.
Part of the 19km Eglinton Crosstown LRT is in a 6 km subway and the costs of subway construction is huge. Though the line does operate as classic LRT on portions of line a 6 km subway puts it in the much more expensive ‘light-metro’ category.
The 10.3 km Finch LRT has two underground stations and with subway access for trains, would add to the already bloated costs.
Calgary’s 19 km Green Line also included 4km of subway and as we all know, once you start going underground costs rise exponentially.
The Expo line extension Langley started as a $1.65 billion LRT project and now has climbed to a $7 billion (including OMC#5) light-metro project.
The article did not delve deep enough, as the entire 21.7 km extension package of both the Expo and Millennium (Broadway subway) Lines has now climbed beyond $16 billion!
Ottawa’s fiasco is strictly politcal in nature and I am puzzled at calling the light rail vehicles used in Ottawa, “unproven technology” as the tram has evolved over a time span of 150 or more years. This sound more like blaming “that mysterious other person” routine from six year olds, rather than trying to honestly understand and fix the situation.
In Canada, light rail is rather a novelty, as there are only three actually in operation (Toronto being a classic streetcar system), with Edmonton’s and Calgary’s LRT being modeled on German Stadtbahn, before the term LRT came into general use.
Most bureaucrats, planners and engineers, tend to use extremely dated information about light rail and most confuse it with a streetcar and make assumptions based on ignorance.
Until Canadian Universities have faculties in “Urban Transport” and offer degrees in Urban Transportation, I think we will continues to see huge costs for what should be much simpler light rail installation. Except for a small cadre of transit specialists, like our Mr. Cow, many transit projects design teams will base their planning on faulty assumptions, based on dated information (example: a local transportation engineer recently told me that LRT cannot travel faster than a bus and holds back traffic, yet he failed to take into account of the tram using a dedicated R-o-W which LRT operates on) and studies 40 to 50 years ago, with the resulting high costs and disappointing operation.
Six transit projects that went off the rails
Eglinton Crosstown LRT, Toronto
When construction on the 19-kilometre light-rail project across midtown began in 2011, the project was budgeted at $11-billion for building it and a generation of operations, and expected to be complete in nine years. However, just over 13 years in, estimated costs have risen to $12.8-billion and the date it will enter service remains elusive.
What went wrong? The list is lengthy and includes some huge issues, such as the COVID-19 pandemic and attendant supply chain shortages and labour constraints, as well as small ones, such as fixing work that wasn’t done properly. Throughout, a fractious relationship between Metrolinx and the consortium of international companies that are actually building the line has brought the two parties to court repeatedly.
Finch LRT, Toronto
A surface light-rail line on Finch Avenue, running about 10 kilometres west from a subway station at Keele Street, began construction in 2019 and appeared to be on track to open in 2023.
However, Metrolinx announced in 2023 that the opening for the $3.4-billion project had been pushed to the first half of 2024, and then the second half of the year.
Then, in August, 2024, the companies building the line filed suit against Ontario Infrastructure and Lands Corp. and Metrolinx. The suit has spawned a flurry of counteractions and Metrolinx does not currently have a public target date for the line opening.
Hazel McCallion LRT, Peel Region
The Hurontario-Main LRT became the 18-kilometre long Hurontario LRT when city council in Brampton, Ont., voted in 2015 to keep it out of downtown. Instead, the line will end more than three kilometres south of the city-centre GO train station.
A project originally described as costing $1.2-billion to build was by 2019 expected to run $5.6-billion, including 30 years of operations and maintenance. It was later renamed after former Mississauga mayor Hazel McCallion and was scheduled to open in 2024.
But in June, the builders reported delays owing to track procurement and construction issues. And then S&P Global Ratings warned in October the builders risked being downgraded over the prospect of the project not finishing this year.
There is no official opening date.
Green Line LRT, Calgary
In 2021, the city, Alberta and Ottawa agreed to fund the first part of an LRT line eventually planned to stretch 46 kilometres. But this past summer, facing growing costs, city council voted to reduce the length of the line and boost its budget by $700-million, to about $6.2-billion.
The province, which had earlier promised its $1.53-billion funding commitment was secure, dismissed the short version as too expensive and serving too few people. It pulled its money, effectively killing the project.
But then, early in October, the province and the city announced a new deal. The scope of the project scope has changed again and there is no longer an opening date. The two levels of government were still haggling over the route, and who would handle cost overruns, with a January provincial deadline looming for city council to approve the plan.
Surrey Langley SkyTrain, British Columbia
This project would extend the subway-like Expo Line 16 kilometres past Surrey, through a fast-growing area of suburban Vancouver, to terminate in Langley. The elevated route was intended to open in 2028 and cost $4-billion.
The extension has been formally on the books since 2014, but its business case was not approved until 2022, when the pandemic was still front of mind and inflation rising. Despite that, the provincial government blamed unforeseen circumstances for a 50-per-cent cost increase revealed last year.
In the same release, the B.C. government announced that the project, as well as costing nearly $6-billion, would also open a year late.
Confederation Line LRT, Ottawa
The line was budgeted at $2.1-billion, including 30 years of maintenance. It was a fixed-price contract, putting the builders on the hook for cost overruns. The line was expected to open in May, 2018, a promise that was modified four times before the line began operating in late 2019.
After a public inquiry, Justice William Hourigan issued a scathing report in 2022 that called out serious failures by the builders and city government.
He blamed the city for choosing “an essentially new vehicle based on unproven technology.” He found deadlines were unrealistic, that problems with testing were hushed up and that political pressure pushed the line into service.
Off The Rails Part 1
The following is from the Globe and Mail and attempts to address costly issues building rail transit in Canada.
I think three issues are paramount. First major transit projects in Canada are built to win elections and tend to be gold plated, with little consideration about actually providing a user-friendly transit service. Second, there is no standard for transit systems, thus in Canada, most light rail systems tend to be much more expensive light-metro systems and the term light-metro has all but but disappeared from the Canadian transit lexicon. Third, lack of due diligence as the government shovels out billions of dollars for transit, but there is zero due diligence as to what the politician’s and transit authority wants and the actual product they will get.
A good example is now the $16 billion investment extending the Expo and Millennium Line 21.7 KM, yet both extensions will attract very few new customers to transit, catering to traffic loads that buses can easily carry.
We hear all sorts of terms such as rapid transit (heavy rail metro) rail rapid transit (anything you want it to be) light rapid transit (again can mean anything you want it to be), which adds to the public’s and most politician’s confusion.
Calling Montreal’s REM light rail instead of being called what it really is, a light-metro is a classic example.
The current BC NDP government and TransLink’s spiel about new BRT lines, which are really BRT “light” or just tarted up B-99 Express buses is another example of a “bait and switch” transit planning.
A final note; the Canada Line is used as an example of a good transit project coming in on time and on budget, yet the Canada Line is the only heavy-rail metro in the world, built as a light metro, having less capacity than a modern tram or streetcar costing a fraction to build. Also the now around $150 million annual operating fee charged by the SNC Lavalin lead consortium, operating the Canada Line has greatly added to is initial cost.
I doubt this system would have passed any true due diligence or independent peer review.
Dud on the tracks
Across Canada, much-needed transit projects are indefinitely delayed and way over budget. Why? Political micromanagement and public-private partnerships each play a big role.
Canadians waiting for new transit could be forgiven for feeling like Charlie Brown having the football snatched away. The opening dates for major projects slip repeatedly, and sometimes disappear entirely. When will the $13-billion Eglinton Crosstown LRT line in Toronto open? No one knows.
These difficulties are not unique to Canada. The English-speaking world is rife with examples of hugely expensive and delayed transit projects. But the problems pose a challenge to political leaders as cities grow rapidly, straining already clogged roads.
Building more roads doesn’t reduce congestion, decades of research shows. The only way to do that is to give people options that don’t require driving. Transit is far more efficient at moving people than personal automobiles. But first it has to get built, and people have to have enough confidence that will happen to be willing to support the disruption and cost of construction.
As Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservative government touts Toronto’s new Ontario Line subway project, part of the biggest transit-building effort in provincial history, the government is undermined by the awkward fact that it has opened no Toronto-area transit lines during the party’s more than six years in power.
The provincial government announced in early December that Phil Verster, the embattled chief executive officer of Ontario’s public transit agency, Metrolinx, would be resigning. However, he will be replaced by the CEO of a Crown agency that has worked closely already with Metrolinx on transit delivery, suggesting that the switch does not portend a radical change in direction.
Also in December, a report from four researchers at the University of Toronto’s School of Cities shows that the cost per kilometre to build rail transit in Canada is more than 60 per cent higher than the global average. The authors, who blame this on factors including designs that are overbuilt and the heavy use of consultants, warn that soaring costs are undercutting efforts to create meaningful transit capacity.
They note that Canadian officials have reacted to cost increases by shrinking transit projects to make them cheaper, rather than by tackling the reasons for price inflation. “If construction costs can be meaningfully reduced, more ambitious projects with greater benefit and larger scope can be built at lower costs,” they wrote.
Not all Canadian transit projects go sideways. The Canada Line SkyTrain project in Vancouver was completed on time in 2009, albeit under the looming deadline of the city hosting the 2010 Winter Olympics. Montreal’s 16-kilometre Réseau express métropolitain had a few teething problems when it opened last year, but nothing like the issues seen on other projects. And other transit expansions have begun to look better as they recede in the rear-view mirror. Although the extension of Toronto’s subway to the suburb of Vaughan, Ont., that opened in 2017 went over budget, and was one reason Queen’s Park took responsibility for transit construction away from the Toronto Transit Commission, its price per kilometre was far lower than for the Ontario Line now being built by the province.
But there is also a long list of projects that have limped into service late, been delayed indefinitely and seen their budgets surge. While the problems with each one are different, there are some common themes.
Experts say that transit approvals and design are highly politicized. There’s also been so little transit built in the last generation in Canada that governments have lost the knowledge needed to oversee a project, even one built by the private sector. And methods used on some early projects held up as success stories would no longer fly politically. Toronto transit watcher and blogger Steve Munro notes that much of the city’s east-west subway line was built in the 1960s using a method called cut and cover. This involves digging a trench, building subway infrastructure in it and then capping it. “The entire Bloor line was built north of Bloor [Street] and demolished everything in its path,” he said. “You can’t do that any more.”
Another development is that city transit agencies no longer do their own expansion work. In recent decades, governments in Canada and elsewhere have relied heavily on arrangements known as public-private partnerships. These were once lauded, but in the public transit world, they have now fallen from favour, for governments and the private sector.
A recent Canadian project that showed off problems with the P3 model was in Ottawa. The public inquiry into that city’s troubled light-rail project found the approach contributed to an adversarial relationship between the city and the companies building the line, leading to litigation. This poisoning of the well may have long-term effects, inquiry commissioner William Hourigan noted, with the same private partners contracted to maintain the line for 30 years.
“The people of Ottawa now face the prospect of a rail system being maintained in circumstances where the relationship between the City and the maintainer is largely dysfunctional (and bearing the costs of any disputes that result),” he wrote.
Before the age of the P3, transit agencies generally designed projects (either in house or with a hired firm) and then picked construction companies to build them. The new P3 model was meant to rein in costs while also transferring more of the risks of a project to a contractor, which is often tasked not just with building a transit line, but with designing it, borrowing the money required up front, and even operating and maintaining it for decades. Vancouver’s Canada Line was the first major transit project in the country to embrace this P3 model.
Matti Siemiatycki, a geography and planning professor who heads the Infrastructure Institute at U of T, said P3s swept Canada as an unassailable orthodoxy for governments for all sorts of building in recent decades, and remain common. But the model faltered as it ran up against the sheer size and unpredictable complexity of large public transit projects.
“It started with hospitals, and it moved into other types of social infrastructure, and in those instances worked generally okay. And then it came over to transit, and it just hit a wall,” Prof. Siemiatycki said. “And you can see it right across the country.”
Governments here and in other places, including once-P3-happy Australia and Britain, have started to back away from this approach for large transit projects, at least as they used to be conceived. So have big companies in the private sector that used to bid on them.
P3s generally have fixed prices, with financial penalties for contractors that miss deadlines, but would leave most of the details of construction up to the private sector. This has led, in some cases, to bitter legal disputes between governments and companies hired to build transit when things have gone awry.
Toronto’s Eglinton Crosstown LRT is among the projects that have ended up in court. It remains in limbo without an opening date, long after its proposed 2020 opening day came and went, and is among the botched projects that have forced a P3 rethink. Andrew Hope, the chief capital officer for rapid transit with Metrolinx said lessons have been learned from the Eglinton Crosstown experience and put into practice with the Ontario Line subway now under construction. Instead of a massive, risky P3 contract – in which private-sector bidders were no longer interested – the latest line was broken up into several more manageable pieces.
Parts of the Ontario Line, including its main operations and maintenance contract, are conventional P3s. Other chunks, however, use what the industry calls a “progressive” or “negotiated” model, which sees governments and contractors collaborate in the early design phases to iron out problems and anticipate cost overruns before a final price tag is set. This avoids a key issue with P3s, which generally force contractors to lock in pricing before they are able to do a fully costed design – a situation that set the stage for delays and lawsuits.
“The world has changed pretty dramatically,” Mr. Hope said. “We’ve learned a lot. Contractors have learned a lot.”
These lessons have not kept a lid on price increases. In 2019, Ontario Line construction was pegged at $11-billion. Three years later and the cost, now including trains, signalling and 30 years of operations, was up to $19-billion. In 2024, it was up again, according to Global News, to $27-billion.
Although eager to offload risk through the P3 model, politicians have remained keen to insert themselves into transit planning – which doesn’t help keep prices down or projects on time.
In Calgary, the planned Green Line has changed scope repeatedly and nearly died after the province pulled its funding. Only after recent talks was there an agreement to preserve the provincial investment and find a new way to move forward with a shorter version of the light-rail project.But its fate still remains unclear.
In Toronto, residents with long memories remember that the Eglinton Crosstown LRT was not the first time the need for underground transit in midtown was recognized. A subway there was part of a plan called Network 2011, and was approved by Bob Rae, Ontario’s NDP premier in the early 1990s. But it was killed by his PC successor, Mike Harris. It wasn’t until 2011 – the year the original subway would in theory have opened – that construction began on the Eglinton Crosstown, a partly buried light-rail line.
Politicians also throw sand in the gears by micromanaging aspects of design, said Marco Chitti, a fellow in the transportation and land use program at New York University who has studied Canadian transit.
He noted that elected officials can be susceptible to hyperlocal concerns that complicate a project.
Drivers might want a transit line buried, so as not to interfere with traffic, increasing the price tag by billions. Residents might then complain about plans for an exhaust outlet for that line near their property, forcing a cascading series of design changes that add cost. And then homeowners might raise concerns about vibration, forcing very deep construction that costs massively more.
Mr. Chitti said that a loss of transit-building knowledge exacerbates these issues, as leaders make political decisions with little sense of the impact on a project.
“The people who are making choices are not fully aware of the cost and the implication,” he said.
Is a real Tramway (Read: Light Rail) Coming to Canada?
The question I have, will this be real light rail, operating real trams or another hybrid light metro/rail system, currently in operation in Ottawa?
In Canada, what is called light rail tends to be more light-metro, than LRT, with very expensive subways and grade separation.
Remember, Ottawa had a signed contract with Siemens to build a 27 km light rail system for Ottawa, only to be sabotaged by the Harper government. This cost the city of Ottawa, $34 million in punitive damages for breaking a signed contract and what was built instead was a much more expensive hybrid light metro/rail system which due to politcal, incompetence has come to grief several times.
I hope the good burghers in Ottawa-Gatineau get it right this time and without interference from the federal government.
Consultants picked to lead Ottawa-Gatineau tram project
A joint venture led by Systra has won a US$79m technical services contract to prepare a tram system linking the Canadian capital Ottawa in the province of Ontario to the city of Gatineau directly across the Ottawa River in the province of Quebec.
The Groupe Porteur JV was appointed by the Société de transport de l’Outaouais. French infrastructure group Egis and local construction consultant EXP are the JV’s other two members.
When finished in 2035, the 24km tramline – called TramGO – will stitch together the fast-growing western districts of Gatineau with its city centre and downtown Ottawa.
It will have 37 stations and four intermodal exchanges.
Planners chose a tram over a rapid bus system because the former has up to five times the passenger capacity, and the population of Gatineau’s west end is expected to grow 50% in the next 25 years.
Working with architectural firms Richez Associés and Provencher Roy, Groupe Porteur will help the TramGO project office with technical and environmental studies, procurement, construction work supervision, and commissioning.
Egis chief commercial officer in Canada, Jean Steenhouwer, said the JV would submit a work plan in the second quarter.
Technical and environmental studies for the route on Quebec territory will also begin then.
Systra Canada’s executive vice president Samuel Derosiaux said: “Together, we are committed to offering citizens an efficient, sustainable and innovative transportation system that is perfectly integrated into the urban environment of the cities of Gatineau and Ottawa.”
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