SkyTrain Obsolete!

One can predict the wailing and gnashing of teeth by the SkyTrain lobby with long time transit advocate, Malcolm Johnston’s recent letter published in the Surrey Now. One wonders why TransLink, civic and provincial politicians almost worship SkyTrain in Metro Vancouver, as some sort of transit miracle, when the rest of world views it as […]

Myth Busting!

It seems that the same tall tales about modern LRT are being told is Sydney Australia, that are being told in Vancouver and Surrey. Like always. a lie often repeated soon becomes truth, well the following sets the record straight, but will the public remain deaf to the truth all depends on the amount of […]

War on Buses? Er…No, Just Very Bad Planning

Is there a war on buses in Vancouver? Sorry, no. Instead thereAi??has been an ongoingAi??war on good transit planning and those supporting bad transit planning won decades ago. The real problem is and always has beenAi??SkyTrain and the massive costs associated with the mini-metro. The taxpayer has paid about three to five times more for […]

CancA?n tram-train feasibility study commissioned

It is so sad that just about every country in North America and Europe are looking a TramTrain (Interurban) to help solve regional transit problems, except Canada andAi??especially BC and Metro Vancouver. That the now obsolete SkyTrain mini-metro is still being planned for the lower mainland only shows how backward and irrelevant our regional transit […]

The Tyee and Transit – Please do More Research!

TransLink is embarrassed because they oversee a rather expensive mini-metro system, a system that has now cost the regional and BC taxpayer nearly $9 billion, yet congestion in Vancouver is so bad, it is rated worst in Canada and second only to Los Angles. This certainly not good advertising for TransLink, especially when it wants […]

TransLink cuts half the senior executive positions from 2009. Why not just get rid of TransLink?

What most people don’t realize is that much of TransLink does, could be done easily by outside sources;Ai??the TransLinkAi??bureaucracyAi??tends toAi??duplicate what has already been done. West Coast Mountain Bus and its bureaucracy runs the buses and SeaBus and The BC Rapid Transit Company Ltd. runs the two SkyTrain lines and a private operator runs the […]

Bombardier’s Gambit, a Streetcar is not light rail: and only in Vancouver.

Interesting, that Bombardier Inc. is stumping in Surrey and Vancouver to drum up interest in their Toronto streetcar, which in reality is a reworked Flexity tram, so it can operate on Toronto’s heritage streetcar lines. After listening to a Bombardier Rep. claim that SkyTrain was cheap to operate because it has no drivers (he didn’t […]

After Over $8 billion Invested in SkyTrain, Vancouver Is The Most Congested City In Canada

No surprises here, Metro Vancouver has suffered from over 30 years of dreadful transportation planning, highlighted by meddling by the former Social Credit and NDP provincial governments and the meddling continues todayAi??with the provincial Liberal government. From Zwei’s perspective, the regional taxpayer has invested well over $8 billion on an extremely dated transit system and […]

Baffle-gab from the SkyTrain Lobby.

One just has to shake one’s head at this. The SkyTrain LobbyAi??is workingAi??hard toAi??haveAi??more of the proprietary mini-metroAi??built in Surrey, now with a glitzy news release claiming that the proposed SkyTrain will only cost a little more to build to Langley than LRT, so let’s build with SkyTrain. We have heard this before. The following […]

Urgent need for light rail transit in Surrey

The following editorial by Frank Buchholz continues the myth that at-grade light rail is slow and causes accidents at intersections. I am not surprised as the SkyTrain Lobby’s mouthpiece, the SkyTrain for Surrey blog is given prominence in the piece. From what I have read, SkyTrain for Surrey rehashes the same old myths about LRT, […]