Beijing’s Subway Needs Fare Hikes

An interesting item from China, Beijing’s metro system, despite being one of the world’s busiest, is having funding problems and fares are escalating. Beijing metro price hike ‘squeezing poor’ 7 January 2015 Despite it being one of the biggest and busiest in the world, the Beijing metro is making huge losses and the government is […]

Seattle’s “big Dig”, Is Digging The City Into a Finacial Morass

As predicted by so many, Seattle’s “Big Dig” to build an auto tunnel to replacing the decrepit stacked Alaskan Way Viaduct, has hit a pipe and stopped. It seems the entire highway tunnel under Elliot Bay, is sinking into a sinkhole created by political prestige laced with engineering hubris. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it. Instead of […]

The Broadway Subway, No Value For Money

Despite a growing number of supporters, such as the business community, the City of Vancouver; most of the regional mayors, the provincial NDP and their combined sundry of shills clamouringAi?? for a SkyTrain Broadway subway, many serious questions remain unanswered. The following op-ed commentary published by The Toronto Star questions whether the concept of building […]

Some New Year’s Reading – Eric Chris’s Six Facts About Hub to Hub Transport

Eric Chris is an Australian professional engineer with a masterai??i??s degree in chemical engineering and has been living in Vancouver near UBC on the 99 B-Line route for the last 16 years.Ai?? He works in the hydrocarbon industry as a design engineer for his entire career.Ai?? His masterai??i??s thesis was on real time air dispersion […]

An Innsbruck Christmas

Complete Street the French Way

Complete Streets: From Policy to Implementation How the French Blend Light Rail and Complete Streets for Total Accessibility A PowerPoint presentation from Rail~Volution Minneapolis, 22 September 2014 by Greg Thompson . Tom Larwin . Tom Parkinson ofAi?? the Transportation Research Board SubcommitteeAi?? on International Light Rail Development Since 1985 when the first modern tram line […]

After Intense Pressure From the Provincial Government……………..

The following is part of an article, The direction of TTC planning in the 1980’s, by Philip Webb, which appeared in the December 1983 edition of Modern Tramway and Light Rail Transit. By 1983, the UDTC knew that the ICTS/ALRT system could not offer the capacity as advertised. The ICTS/ALRT proprietary transit system did not […]

A trip down memory lane

The shape of things that never were; a model of an articulated UTDC ALRT vehicle. An advert for ALRT, circa 1983. Sadly for Diane Edgecomb, the Detroit ICTS has been nothing more than a curiosity, which quickly earned the name the “Mugger Mover”. Notice that the gap between the two MK.1’s have been ‘photo shopped’ […]

Oh, what fools we mortals be

In charge of our of our Metro band, Moonbeam is here at hand, With a higher PST, mistook by me, While pleading for a congestion fee. Shall we their fond referendum see? Lord, what fools these mortals be! Apologies to the bard! The regional mayors who support a $0.5% increase to fund TransLink have shown […]

Incresing Transit Capacity By Reducing Transit Stops – A New Stragety For Broadway

The following table from Bus or Light Rail – Making The Right Choice, shows that in Germany, the distance between bus stops is far greater than that of the City of Vancouver. On Broadway, from Granville Street to Alma, on average there is a bus stop every 260 metres, making bus stops very much closer […]