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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

British Politicans Get It, While Canadian & BC Politicans Don’t

Britian’s politicans get it about TramTrain, while in BC, our politicians haven’t a clue. Money for transportation projects or even maintaining an affordable public transit system is finite. All to often, people support horrendously expensive transportation projects without an inkling as how toAi??pay for it. The clarion call for new or higher taxes to fund […]

Transit Planning in the Vancouver Region – The Years The Locusts Have Eaten

In the beginning, Vancouver was serviced by a sizable streetcar network and several interurban lines, but by 1960 the streetcars were long gone and the last interurban route saw its final service. There was a last ditch attempt to operate a New Westminster to Vancouver interurban service on the Central Park Line using coupled pairs […]

It is interesting how TransLink has used this cunning method of manipulating analysis to justify SkyTrain in corridor after corridor, and has thus succeeded in keeping its proprietary rail system expanding.

The Great transit philosopher’s stone, the Evergreen Line saga continues and it is once again time for Rail for the Valley how suspect TransLink’s business case for the (N)Evergreen Line was. In, 2008 Gerald Fox, a well known American transit and transportation expert shredded TransLink’s Evergreen Line business case and found it grossly biased in […]

Light Rail for Surrey The WKW Line ai??i?? A Rerun from May 2011

  It has been over one year since this post was printed and in that year nothing of substance has been done. In the lower mainland, transit is designed to increase density, thus increasing property values and profits for friends of the government at the expense of the taxpayer. The same is true forLRT/streetcar for […]

A Poll That TransLink Wishes To Suppress

Reprinted from May 2010   A very strange thing happened yesterday with ‘Zwei’. When I was discussing a transit matter with an US transit type about the RAV/Canada line. He told me that TransLink officials claimed that over 80% of Vancouverites supported RAV and if it were not for the high costs of the metro, […]