Cutting edge to the cutter’s torch. (A repost from 2011)

What happens to old transportation technology? It becomes less valuable than scrap! The Birmingham airport MAGLEV was cutting edge transportation technology in 1984 (two years before the SkyTrain Expo Line opened) but by 1995 was scrapped as obsolete. This is reminiscent of another cutting edge transportation technology more than a century ago, the atmospheric railway. […]

Oops, Evergreen Line Guideway Shifts

When you do expensive jobs on the cheap, s**t happens. Looks like the guideway fell off its bearings, I wonder why? Coquitlam road closed by incident involving 300-tonne guideway at Evergreen Line construction site Ai??By TIFFANY CRAWFORD, VANCOUVER SUN March 14, 2014 METRO VANCOUVER – A 300-tonne beam dislodged early Friday on the new Evergreen […]

U.S. (And Canada) Taxpayers Are Gouged on Mass Transit Costs (a repost from 2012)

With BC Transit quoting silly prices for LRT in Victoria and TransLink doing the same in Vancouver and Surrey, the following article from Bloomberg should be essential reading. As the previous post has shown, modern LRT/streetcar can be built cheaply, if there is the political and bureaucratic will to do so. With thank to Justin […]

BRT to LRT in Ottawa

Until now, Ottawa invested in BRT to move transit customers into the city. This of course to an operationally expensive transit system as employee costs can be as much a 80% of a transit system’s budget. (Ottawa’s bus photo’s courtesy of Mr. Haveacow) With BRT, buses jams were frequent and city streets became congested with […]

The Moonbeam Line

The Moonbeam Line is an apt name for the for Vancouver Mayor, Gregor Robinson’s pet Broadway subway project, as the subway planning has a foundation of stuff and nonsense. This hokumAi?? that a subway would be of “national significance”, is pure hoopla, from a mayor eager to spend vast sums of other people’s money for […]

Hutzpa!

What hutzpa! The Broadway subway a transit project of national significance, really? I think Mayor Robinson thinks that the taxpayer are rubes. According to our friend, Mr. Haveacow,Ai?? Broadway’s peak demand numbers on average of 2000-3700 passenger trips per hour per direction, which is barely enough to support light rail, let alone a subway. What […]

Traffic Flows -What The Broadway Subway Boys & Girls Do No Want Us To Know

Mr. Havecow is a transit professional from Eastern Canada, who has studied our transit system and of course SkyTrain. His findings certainly point to the fact that the public have been inundated with porkies, big and small, from TransLink , The City of Vancouver, and other retread politicians and academics who are clinging to the […]

LRT South of the Fraser

A pleasant surprise in the Delta Optimist, Zwei’s home town paper, a light rail friendly article. Though I hate the term Light Rapid Transit, because I believe it is used deliberately to misinform people. The comment by Delta-Richmond East MP Kerry-Lynne Findlay, the minister of national revenue; “the fund is aimed at projects that have […]

TransLink, Act 5

Alas, poor TransLink, I knew it Ken. As the Vancouver Sun article alludes to the fact that, we paid a lot of money for vanity rapid transit projects and that my friends is why TransLink is in the financial glue it finds itself in today. Zwei has known this for a long time and only […]

The Greer Report & Rapid Transit

  From 2009 Reedited, but the message is the same. OverAi??14 years ago the Greer Report, done by Greer Consulting Services, issued a scathing report on the Broadway/Lougheed Rapid Transit Projects, later to be know as the SkyTrain Millennium Line. The report found: cost comparisons appear to have been contrived to favour SkyTrain over LRT […]