The Vancouver SkyTrain Executive Committee – Looks Good In A Brochure

  In the UK, there is a plan to service Heathrow Airport with another rail link and one of the contenders is the London Air Rail Transit System or “LarTs”. The Buckley family are heavily involved with LarTs and includes: Captain Peter Buckley – Airline Pilot Hugh Buckley – P Eng, MPTIC – Vancouver SkyTrain […]

Mayoralty Candidate, Doug McCallum Wants To Delay Rapid Transit In Surrey Until The Late 2030’s

Why do politicians always think they are transit geniuses? Mostly because they are too stupid to understand the basics of transit planning and the application of modern public transit philosophy. Doug McCallum is one, a former Surrey Mayor who was and still is completely out of touch with regional transit planning, now claims if elected, […]

Light Rail on Toronto’s King St. Increases Ridership 27%

Welcome news. When a heritage streetcar route is upgraded to light rail standards, simply by giving it priority over autos, reliability increases dramatically as does ridership. The lesson to be learned is indeed very simple. One need not segregate transit in a subway or on a viaduct, to increase ridership, one only needs to operate […]

€300 (CAD $455) Million For 25 km of New Tram Line

€300 converts to CAD $455 million for 24km of tram line or about CAD $18.2km per km to build. This of course does not include vehicles or a maintenance depot, but does give a good indication of the cost for an economy light rail line to be built in Metro Vancouver. Even if the total […]

Unacceptable

Unacceptable! The Canada Line morning rush hour fiasco, last Friday was and is completely unacceptable and demonstrates TransLink completely inane policy of forcing as many bus riders as they can onto the light-metro system. What happened Friday, demonstrates the Achilles heel of TransLink’s lack of management and the photo-op CEO’s disdain of the traveling public. […]

And Light Rail Transit – Premier Horgan, Are You Listening? From 2017

And Light Rail Transit – Premier Horgan, Are You Listening?   Evidently not!   Posted by zweisystem on Thursday, July 27, 2017 What this story does not mention is that Portland has an extensive LRT/streetcar network, a transit network designed to meet the needs of the transit customer. Unlike Metro Vancouver where transit is built […]

Common Sense Transit Planning At last!

Common sense. Want a workable public transport system? One must plan on this scale as being done in the City of Surrey. Let us just add a Vancouver to Chilliwack TramTrain, instead of LRT to Langley and one would now have 270km of rail transit in the Fraser Valley. This is called “Vision”; this called […]

Surrey’s LRT Costs Skyrocket – As Planned?

And now, the real story. There is a growing number of politicians who want to build with SkyTrain instead of LRT in Surrey. What they ignore at their own peril is that SkyTrain will not cost $1 billion more than LRT to build, but it will cost over $6 billion! Why? TransLink has neglected to […]

Toronto Enters the Light Rail Era as Vancouver Decends Into Traffic Hell

This what LRT is supposed to do – traffic calm, by providing a quality public transit alternative. In Vancouver, light metro is built to increase density, thus increasing auto use. The modern tram, provides transit, on the pavement, easy to use, just what the transit customer wants. Maybe trams on Broadway will bring a Renaissance […]

The Greer Report – 20 Years On

This item is a reprint from 2009. After rereading the Greer Report, I see TransLink making the same unsubstantiated claims about SkyTrain. Another decade has passed and TransLink is still the autocratic organization, as it was twenty years ago! Who is not afraid to “Bell the Cat?” The Greer Report – Review of Rapid Transit […]