Common Sense Transit Planning At last!

Common sense. Want a workable public transport system? One must plan on this scale as being done in the City of Surrey. Let us just add a Vancouver to Chilliwack TramTrain, instead of LRT to Langley and one would now have 270km of rail transit in the Fraser Valley. This is called “Vision”; this called […]

Surrey’s LRT Costs Skyrocket – As Planned?

And now, the real story. There is a growing number of politicians who want to build with SkyTrain instead of LRT in Surrey. What they ignore at their own peril is that SkyTrain will not cost $1 billion more than LRT to build, but it will cost over $6 billion! Why? TransLink has neglected to […]

The Regional Mayor’s $7 Billion FastFerry Fiasco!

FastFerry fiascos tend to be common in BC, where politicians play the part of transit experts and squander the taxpayer’s money on prestige projects, that are great for ribbon cutting photo-ops, but little more. That Translink’s American CEO applauds this only shows the Mayor’s Council on Transit picked nothing more than a “Useful Idiot” to […]

Some Smart People Out There, Not Here Apparently……

In Europe, transportation needs are designed to meet the needs of transit customers. In BC, transportation needs are designed to further political careers and money laundering. Example: The $3 billion Broadway SkyTrain subway, being built on a transit route which has peak hour traffic flows under 4,000 pphpd! Who is the subway being built for? […]

Madness

Good old Zwei has been blogging on local transit issues for the past 10 years, I can say that both recently announced “rail” transit projects are both hugely expensive, will not ease congestion and will fail to achieve their objective, except giving the excuse for land development adjacent to the routes. As advised by real […]

Those Who Do Not Read History Are Doomed…………….

………….to make the same expensive mistakes. In Toronto, metro madness is the order of the day, but the overlooked story is the Scarborough R/T, SkyTrain’s first cousin, being torn down because it will be soon “life expired”. The current debate is whether to build a hugely expensive one stop subway to replace the SRT or […]

An Idiot’s Delight At UBC Or Is UBC Offering Courses In Money Laundering?

And here I thought universities were filled with intelligent people; people who crave education and research. At UBC, evidently not! The ignorance and displayed by the UBC types is nothing more than appalling. Lysenkoism and jingoism has now become transit planning doctrine. The current cost of the proposed UBC subway is in excess of $3 […]

The Myth

The current transit philosophy is that transit be used to density the route it travels, to increase ridership potential. In Metro Vancouver, this has been taken to the extreme, where properties along a transit route have been up-zoned to permit high rise condominiums. The downside, of course, is that affordable accommodations are torn down and […]

Unintended Consequences

The unintended consequences of transit planning are embarrassingly many. What planners expected did not happen and the unexpected, proved challenging. In Germany in the 1960’s and 70’s, there was a big push to build subways. Subways were thought of great public works projects and many cities decided to abandon their surface tramways and build subways […]

People Before Cars – A Lesson Unlearned In Metro Vancouver

This is what should be happening in Metro Vancouver, but it’s not. SkyTrain is elevated or put underground, to keep streets free for cars. The cycle lobby is giving precedence over transit customers. Cars remain the most viable transit mode in the region. Our regional, provincial, and federal politicians only invest in transit to reward […]