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 […]

Faregate Hoopla – In TransLink’s World 1 + 1 =3

Lots of hoopla in the media today about TransLink’s daft $175 million fare-gate program, with the first fare gates being installed at the Marine Drive Canada Line Station. The taxpayer is anteing up over $175 million to retrofit fare-gates to Vancouver’s mini-metro system and with operating costs estimated to exceed $15 million annually, one wonders, […]

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 […]

Detroit’s “Mugger Mover” celebrates 25 years of ‘sort of’ operation

We don’t hear much about SkyTrain elsewhere and I wonder why? Well I know the answer, SkyTrain reign of operation elsewhere has not been as successful as the SkyTrain lobby would have us believe. Please take note of the serious issues regarding the Detroit’s ICTS’s guideway, as previous discussion on the RftV commnets has been […]

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 […]

Vision(less) Vancouver May Dump the Heritage Streetcar

It seems Vision Vancouver lacks any vision at all. There is no debate that the Vancouver heritage streetcar is nothing more than a tourist line and it operates on tracks that never saw any streetcar or interurban service at all. What some within Vision VancouverAi??are afraid of is the line becoming a demonstration line for […]

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 […]