Why Canada Gets Less For More When It Comes To Building Transit

This news item explains the huge cost of metro Vancouver’s transit construction. Though the article thinks that $500 million per kilometer, for the Broadway subway is reasonable, it must remembered that the subway it is being built on a transit route that has only a fraction of the ridership deemed necessary for a subway. Much […]

A Repost From November 2018 – Mayor McCallum Has Screwed The City of Surrey

After three years, the news about rapid transit goes from bad to worse. The Expo Line extension to Langley is now costing more than the revised cost of $3.95 billion and despite much false information that the line is fully funded, it is not. The claim that Prime minister Trudeau’s Liberal government will fully fund […]

The Cost Of Rehab

This article shows the full breadth of work that needs to be done when expanding a major rapid transit line, above, at or below grade. This will happen to all stations on the Expo and Millennium lines, when the much needed system $3 billion rehab takes place and must take place if the Expo Line […]

A Repost From 2019 – Here We go Again……

 A repost from Wednesday, June 19, 2019. Some things have changes since this item was posted in 2019. Alstom now owns the proprietary Movia Automatic Light Metro system, when they finalized purchasing Bombardier’s rail division earlier in the year. The estimated cost for the Langley extension is now over $3.95 billion mark and heading north […]

TramTrain For 2022

A re-post from earlier this year. With the devastation caused by this years heat dome, wild fires, tornado, atmospheric rivers, flood and of course our modern day plague, Covid, the provincial government must rethink its plans to spend over $10 billion to build less than 22 km of the SkyTrain light metro network. $10 billion […]

Time To Put Freight Back On The Rails!

A rolling motorway in Europe The recent fiasco with our regional highways, due to the “Great Deluge” has again spot lighted the massive amount of freight traffic that is carried on the public highway system. The trucking industry is highly subsidized by using the existing highways and the motor freight companies undercut the freight rates […]

SeaTrain – The Ongoing Columbia St. Station Fiasco

Yes, this is an ongoing problem but………………. The flooding and closing of the strategic Columbia St. Station should have been dealt with ages ago, but no, not TransLink. Always put off to tomorrow what should be done today and to hell with the customer! I wonder if anyone at TransLink knows what a sump pump […]

A Repost – McCallum’s $2.9 Billion Question – From 2018 – Updated To 2021

From October 20, 2018; well its November 2022 and the cost for The Expo Line extension to Langley has now surpassed $4 billion and Zwei’s prediction has come true. SkyTrain construction is not to be started until 2028, if ever and transit for the Fraser Valley has been set back not 20 years, but 40 […]

REM

The following article also aptly describes metro Vancouver’s transit planning, which is mostly dictated by the premier’s office and camouflaged in layers of bureaucracy. The result is very expensive, politically inspired rapid transit lines that soon become financial anchors. As a final note, the then Gordon Campbell BC government rejected LRT from the start, dropping […]

Building Back Better

In BC, we do the same thing over again hoping for different results. While in the UK the modern tram or light rail or supertram is now seen as one of the proven remedies for urban congestion.