Politcal Penis Envy Drives Subway Costs

This is rather old news and one questions why the media have not picked up on this earlier. Subways cost a lot of money to build, yet they provide no better service than modern light rail, unless traffic flows on the transit route surpass around 20,000 pphpd. Vancouver does not have one route that has […]

Subway Blunders in Europe ai??i?? Can “Old Dog” TransLink Learn From Otherai??i??s Mistakes?

Subway Blunders in Europe ai??i?? Can TransLink Learn From Other’s Mistakes? From a September 2012 post. Unfortunately, many of the links no longer work and have been omitted for brevity. Herr Keller is a German transit specialist from Germany and gives wonderful insight to the pitfalls of building new subways for the sake of building […]

The Fiscal Realities of Subways Surface

Taxpayers in Ontario are slowly awakening up to the fiscal realities of modern subway construction, just as their European counterparts did in the 1970’s and 80’s. Little known on this side of the pond, is that subway construction in Europe has almost bankrupted public transit en mass and by the 1990’s subways were only considered […]

The SkyTrain Subsidy Revisited

The SkyTrain and Canada Line light-metro are bleeding over $350 million from TransLink’s $1.2 billion budget! In 1993, the GVRD (now Metro) and Transport 2021, published the study, “The Cost of Transporting People in the BC Lower Mainland” and for the first time the annual SkyTrain subsidy was mentioned. In 1991, SkyTrain was subsidized to […]

Will TransLink Overly Invest In Subways In Vancouver?

Interesting article from Toronto. In Germany in the 1960’s and 70’s many cities started building subways and replacing their surface tramways. The first noticeable change was that ridership dropped and for many, journey times increased. This was due to many more km. of tramway being abandoned compared to the very few km. of new subway […]

TransLink’s Subway Fiscal Time Bomb

The SkyTrain/metro Lobby remain mute on the long term fiscal effects of operating subways, especially on routes that have low ridership, say less than 15,000 pphpd. Building a subway is a very expensive proposition and many factors should be considered before embarking on such a costly investment. The first questionAi??any knowledgeable transit planner must ask […]

The huge cost of building subways: is TransLink listening?

What was once going to be a much more affordable hybrid light-metro/light rail line, before the election of Toronto’s Ai??Mayor Ford, Ai??is now being replanned as a full scale subway, dramatically increasing costs. Those wanting to build a subway under Broadway had better get out their calculators because new subway construction in Toronto is getting […]

Appeal Court upholds Canada Line class-action of Cambie Street merchants – From the Vancouver Sun

It seems in BC, justice from the courts depends on the judge presiding over the case and not the law. From the same court of appeal which rejected former Cambie Street merchant Susan Heyes award for ‘nuisance‘ due to Canada line cut-and-cover construction, now upholds a class-action lawsuit by Cambie Street merchants for nuisance for […]

Susan Heyes

It seems TransLink, in the guise of RAVCo; in the guise of the Canada Line P-3, is the only major subway cut-and-cover projects that did not plan for compensation to affected businesses. In three years of research, Zwei has failed to find a major transit scheme, let alone a cut-and cover subway projects, that didn't […]

Susan Heyes and the Canada Line fiasco – Justice denied!

The Canada Line was never about providing good public transitAi??for the region, rather the metro was all about political and corporate prestige. The Vancouver International Airport gang wanted a prestigious metro to connect YVR to downtown Vancouver, for corporate prestige because they thought that a metro would make YVR ‘world class’; the City of Vancouver […]