User-Friendly Is Not In TransLink’s Lexicon

TransLink has a problem, overall decline ridership on its transit system and resent assaults and a murder on the bus and light-metro system is not helping transit customer confidence. TransLink must adjust accordingly and is by cutting bus service. There have been cutbacks to 50 bus routes in Vancouver, North Shore, Burnaby, New Westminster, Richmond […]

Carbon Tax Follies

The Carbon Tax flim-flam in BC and Canada gets exposed by Norm Farrell’s excellent In-Sights blog. Zwei has always thought the Carbon Tax was mere politcal theater as all Carbon Tax revue is deposited in “general revenue”, spent at the government’s whim. With a compliant mainstream media, the Carbon Tax scam continues unabated, being nothing […]

Businesses Close Along the Broadway Subway Route – What the Public is Not Told

If anyone believes that the government did not know that subway construction was going to negatively impact businesses along its route, I have shares in the Lions Gate Bridge to sell you. Both the provincial government and the City of Vancouver have selective amnesia with subway construction as the ills associated with the Canada Line […]

After $30 Billion is Spent on SkyTrain – Metro Vancouver 2nd Spot For Worst Traffic

It is the old story, spend $billions$ dollars spent on SkyTrain light metro and traffic gets worse. Memo to Premier Eby and TransLink: ‘Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.’” Metro Vancouver takes 2nd spot for worst metro traffic in North America: TomTom By Charlie Carey and Robyn […]

The Coward’s Way Out

Insanity Is Doing the Same Thing Over and Over Again and Expecting Different Results The preceding quote, often misattributed to Einstein, conveys the huge financial issues facing TransLink. The provincial government’s bailout of TransLink, to a tune of $479 million, is nothing more than per-election politics as a financially floundering TransLink, does make good politics […]

Canada Line Deja Vu

Subways tend to cause ground subsidence and when two two cylindrical tunnel boring machines (TBMs), six metres wide and weighing around a million kilograms, gnaws away underground, subsidence will occur. Memo to Rob Fleming, Minister of Transportation: It is not vibrations you should be worried about, it is subsidence as the tunnel boring machine chews […]

Hub And Spoke Transit Planning – Is TransLink ‘s Planning Out of Date?

A subway here, an elevated guideway in the countryside there, begs the question: “Has TransLink badly erred with their transit planning.” TransLink is completely hooked on the “hub and spoke” philosophy of transit, where buses bring passenger to light metro hubs, to be transported to another transport hub, and the either arrive or take another […]

Wise Words

Zwei belongs to several transit oriented groups. The following is from the LRPPro group, which is made mainly of experts in the field of public transport and well worth a read. The big question for me is: Is today’s transit tech be tomorrow’s transit tech? Those questions should be asked, lest we again invest in […]

Metro Vancouver’s Metro Mania

The following article is eerily familiar with TransLink’s continued building of light metro, especially subway construction. In Australia the state of New south Wales is spending AUD $11 billion (CAD $10.1 billion to build 23 km of rail line that will not generate the ridership that would demand such an expenditure, while Metro Vancouver is […]

Regional Mayors Want A new Funding Model, Instead They Need A New Planning Model

It seems our regional mayors have been smoking some good weed because they want $20 billion for transit and playing the old gambit that transit is really a Social Service, a human right. That sort of thinking has gotten us where we are today: a massively expensive transit system that does not attract new ridership, […]