Has TransLink Given Up?

Forget the hype and hoopla from politcans about transit; forget the well timed media releases; forget the staged photo-ops for the local papers, if any local papers have survived. The big question facing the region is; has TransLink given up? The big news is that fares are going up, yet the service provided seems unattractive […]

The Eglinton Light Rail – The Story from The Ground!

One of the problems with commenting on “other people’s” transit stories from “other cities” is that one does not get the full story and what may seem to be a problem caused by “A”, was really caused by “B”, compounded by “C”. Mr. Cow is a Canadian Transit Professional, who lives not far from Toronto […]

Memo to the M.O.T. – Time to Reread The Leewood Study – Updated

First posted by on Saturday, May 2, 2020 Now fifteen years old, the Leewood Study, done by Leewood Projects (UK), to assess the viability of reinstating a passenger rail service from downtown Vancouver to Chilliwack via the former BC Electric R.R. route, is worth a revisit. Leewood Study The Leewood Study brought a fresh set […]

TramTrain – It’s Time To Have Another Look At The Leewood Project – Updated

While local politicians squabble about expensive transit planning and gouging the taxpayer to pay for multi billion dollar transportation vanity projects, economic and user friendly TramTrain construction and operation continue to increase. Is it not time for politicians have another look at the Leewood/Rail for the Valley Study?

Farnsworth Is Selling Porkies – So What Else Is New!

The NDP’s master of the screw-up with the Surrey police fiasco and now the minister responsible for SkyTrain, Mike Farnsworth took to the corporate media selling porkies about the Broadway subway. Farsworth is sticking to the creative accounting by TransLink and the NDP government, that the cost for the 5.7 km subway project will still […]

Road Pricing – Back from the Dead

From 2018. Zwei has studied “Road Pricing” and “Congestion Charging” for over 20 years and……………… the very first rule for a successful road pricing scheme is that the region have a user friendly and affordable public transit alternative. With TransLink we don’t…….. not even close and TransLink is so incompetent at what it does, will […]

Mobility Pricing – The Rapture of Megaprojects

This was first posted in 2020 and five years later mobility pricing is back on the agenda. Why? Simple, TransLink is broke. The now $16 billion price tag, for the full program to extend the Expo and Millennium Lines a mere 21.7 km has hit a financial iceberg and is $3 to $4 billion short […]

Entering The Land of Unicorns and Pixie Dust – TransLink’s Current P.R. Gamble

A re-post. First posted on Wednesday, October 13, 2021 Memo from Zweisystem: This post is from 2021, yet we still see TransLink beating the drum for more and more money, as politicians, both regional, provincial and federal are afraid to say no more money and live within your means. All financial numbers will be updated […]

50 Years Out of Date

Memo to the Caisse du Depot: REM is a light metro and light metro is obsolete. Automatic (driverless) railways have issues in the snow. It snows in Montreal, doesn’t it? What Vancouver calls SkyTrain is a light-metro and it was deemed obsolete back in the late 70’s and why it was unsalable. Six marketing names […]

Tampere, Finland – One Of The Best Modern Systems

The Tampere light rail (Finnish: Tampereen raitiotie), branded as Tampere Tram (Finnish: Tampereen Ratikka), is a public transport system in Tampere, Finland. In November 2016, the Tampere city council approved plans to construct a 330-million-euro (CAD $516 million in 2016 dollars or CAD $660 million in 2025 dollars), 24 km light rail system on the […]