Two Years Since the Leewood Report and the Silence is Deafening!

It has been two years since Rail for the Valley released the historic RftV/Leewood study and the silence has been deafening. The RftV/Leewood study is light years ahead of anything that TransLink has produced, yet it has been given the silent treatment; “being sent to Coventry“, while TransLink squanders tens of millions of dollars promoting […]

U.S. (And Canada) Taxpayers Are Gouged on Mass Transit Costs

With BC Transit quoting silly prices for LRT in Victoria and TransLink doing the same in Vancouver and Surrey, the following article from Bloomberg should be essential reading. As the previous post has shown, modern LRT/streetcar can be built cheaply, if there is the political and bureaucratic will to do so. With thank to Justin […]

A Blast From the Past – Zwei Was Advocating the Stadler GTW in 2009!

I seems Zwei has had it right all along with the Stadler GTW! Here is a repost from October 2009! The Stadler GTW ai??i?? A new generation of Diesel light rail. Posted by zweisystem on Wednesday, October 14, 2009 The Stadler GTW Diesel light Rail car The Stadler GTW, sold by Stadler Rail, Switzerland, is […]

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 […]

Letters To The Editor

On-street running on Portland’s MAX LRT.Ai?? Malcolm Johnston, erstwhile supporter for modern light rail since the mid 1980’s, again has another letter published in the Surrey Leader newspaper. The letter, which is just a rehash of the operating characteristics of modern LRT, something that most European transit planners take for granted. No wild claims, no […]

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, […]