SkyTrain Gadgetbahnen Goes Ka-Put……Agian!
From our photo file: It would be a cold walk
on the guideway tonight.
The aging SkyTrain shows once again shows the pitfalls of building with a proprietary light metro and TransLink’s ‘hub to hub’ transit planning. There is no redundancy, no plan B, except for buses that are promised but never come, and the transit customer, armed with his or hers expensive Compass Card, is once again left waiting at the station.
It seems no one at TransLink or in the provincial government gives a damn, just roll out those bonuses for a job poorly done!
SkyTrain ‘power issues’ halt service in downtown Vancouver
Vancouver Sun November 24, 2015 – 5:03 PM
The Waterfront station in downtown Vancouver: Service on a key length of the SkyTrain went down just before rush hour Tuesday, leaving commuters scrambling to get in and out of downtown Vancouver.
Photograph by: Juanita Ng, Vancouver Sun
METRO VANCOUVER — Service on a key length of the SkyTrain went down just before rush hour Tuesday, leaving commuters scrambling to get out of downtown Vancouver.
TransLink shuttered its Expo Line and Millennium Line stations from Waterfront to Main Street-Science World and told customers to use shuttle buses to bypass the problem section.
Long lines outside downtown stations awaited those taking that advice as TransLink slowly bolstered its bus service.
Anne Drennan, a TransLink spokeswoman, said additional Transit Police were sent to the stations “to ensure passenger safety and crowd control.
“Our crews are working hard to restore full service, but passengers should expect delays and allow extra travel time,” Drennan said.
The transit authority first blamed the service outage on a problem train near Stadium-Chinatown Station, then narrowed it down to “power issues” at that and the Main Street-Science World stations.
Service between Commercial-Broadway and King George stations continued with delays, and trains kept running from VCC-Clark and Columbia stations, according to TransLink.
The Canada Line was running as normal, Drennan said.
A year ago TransLink committed to spend $71 million over five years to fix system faults identified by an independent review.
Reduce maintenance mtbf .
Worst case
https://www.maintenanceassistant.com/blog/poor-maintenance-cost-lives/
This latest s-train incident is just another warning before the “big one”. Statistically, there are only so many near fatal incidents before there are fatalities. Cathy McLay seems blissfully ignorant of this and doesn’t have any clue how the latest rail “bouncing” onto the track to almost derail the s-train could have sent s-train riders to their deaths. She’s living on planet loo-loo.
http://globalnews.ca/news/2359909/power-problem-causing-skytrain-delays/
After the rail “bounced” onto the track: the whole s-train system had to be shut down for the necessary investigation to avoid the imminent “Challenger Disaster” which is going to occur. I don’t see any “engineers” screaming about it at TransLink. In my opinion, they are negligent and culpable for what is surely going to happen to the public one day. TransLink is monitoring this blog and this comment could and might be used as evidence against TransLink in the future:
http://www.history.com/topics/challenger-disaster
What the ready and able diesel bus bridge network shows to me is that there is an entire back-up diesel bus system which moves 10,000 pphpd in parallel to the s-train network. In fact, s-train isn’t even needed.
Mickey Mouse and corrupt TransLink has to be gutted. All the “planners” and “others” at TransLink have to go. They have to be replaced with a small group of competent and ethical mechanical, electrical, structural and environmental engineers placing safety first.
What caused the latest s-train mishap? I’ll tell you: all the engineers and planners at TransLink are under qualified and over paid. They don’t have the requisite engineering competencies to design and maintain their infrastructure. What you have at TransLink are “project managers” who act as administrators to schedule engineering by consulting firms (SNC Lavalin). When things go bad, they simply point fingers at the consulting engineers.
Well, wait a minute. If the “project managers” are just hiring others to do their work, what’s the reason for the “project managers” at TransLink? Engineering is the side show at TransLink. TransLink’s prime role is building s-train lines for the firms indirectly paying the salaries of everyone at TransLink, including all the CEOs, presidents, directors and VPs who just collect a paycheck.
“TransLink – the end is near”
In essence, all the planners and others at TransLink are indirectly working for Lafarge, SNC Lavalin and Bomb-ardier making zillions of dollars from the s-train and subway lines. TransLink’s annual ~$150 million bureaucracy couldn’t exist without the approximately S1.5 billion dollar per year operating budget (for just transit) to maintain and build the s-train and subway lines. To have a job at TransLink: everyone at TransLink is there to fleece taxpayers and award billion dollar contracts for s-train and subway lines which due to the limited length of the elevated stations can’t move as many people as LRT at grade.
Really, planers at TransLink are the “sales” agents of Lafarge, SNC Lavalin and Bomb-ardier. Everyone at TransLink is fleecing taxpayers with false promises of reduced road congestion and carbon emissions. All we have to do is “invest” billions of dollars in transit by TransLink, say the sales agents at TransLink. Unfortunately, LRT and tram service moves more people, faster, and for less money than transit service (subway and s-train) by TransLink. This will ultimately be the undoing of TransLink if driverless cars offering door to door service to make public transit go the way of the Dodo bird doesn’t kill off TransLink first, that is:
“Wise believes that autonomous, driverless vehicles will so revolutionize our roads and transit systems that they will lessen the need for, or change altogether, the kind of expensive, big-ticket public transit projects governments now spend billions building.
He isn’t alone in this belief: In a paper entitled Automated Vehicles: The Next Disruptive Technology, the Conference Board of Canada suggested that any government that doesn’t take the soon-to-be-felt impact of automated vehicles into its future plans could be wasting its money.
When designing infrastructure projects,” the paper warned, “there is a tendency to assume that the future is simply an extension of the past. AVs are a truly disruptive technology and we cannot forecast the future by simply extrapolating from the past. (AVs) will change the forecasts for standard infrastructure and major infrastructure projects… Because major infrastructure projects that are being designed and built now will last for 30 to 50 years or more, i.e., well into the AV era, we recommend that all transportation-related infrastructure projects, especially major ones, include a detailed AV impact assessment study.”
http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Pete+McMartin+Could+driverless+vehicles+kill+transit+buses/11550080/story.html
Although I enjoy your zeal, I wouldn’t recommend moving 10,000+ p/h/d by bus, its why we in Ottawa switched to LRT to avoid the extremely high cost of bus operations at that passenger level.