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 […]

What is Translink Afraid Of?

I can see with the TransLink referendum, that the SkyTrain lobby is claiming all sorts of misleading information about SkyTrain; a SkyTrain subway and SkyTrain fiances. The following is from the GVRD’s 1993 The cost of Transporting People in the British Columbia Lower Mainland. Please note that the annual subsidy for one SkyTrain line was […]

The GVRD’s 1978 LRT/Rail/Road Bridge – A Bridge Too Practical

In 1978, the GVRD were poised to install a three leg light rail system on the region and to cross the Fraser river a new bridge would have to be built. Demonstrating the forward thinking of the era, GVRD planners conceived a multi-use bridge for ‘rapid transit’; the mainline railways; a cycle path; and when […]

Capacity and speed of transit vehicles in the city

In the past few weeks, the merchants of misinformation have been busy spreading their anti tram rhetoric in a vain attempt to justify a Broadway subway. Unfortunately the mainstream media have repeated the same misinformation without any independent research done. The following charts come from Bus or Light Rail Making the Right Choice, Second Edition, […]