Metro Madness – FastFerry Fiasco 2

Vancouver wants subways and nothing else. Vancouver wants the region to pay for those subways. Vancouver’s pet SkyTrain subway, just to Arbutus Street, may cost upwards of $4 billion. Vancouver’s pet SkyTrain subway will use the now obsolete ALRT/ART proprietary railway, jointly owned by Bombardier Inc. and SNC Lavalin. Vancouver’s pet SkyTrain subway will have […]

Expensive Projects = Expensive Costs

Most people championing expensive transit, fail to see three minutes into the future. The failure of a switch motor on the Expo Line last week caused transit chaos. Switch motors fail and on automatic railways, the regimen is to replace motors on a preventative basis before they fail in revenue service to maintain the integrity […]

No Transit Project Is A Project Unto itself, It Is Part Of The Whole

  As TransLink wheezes along, planning two very expensive rapid transit projects, the Broadway SkyTrain subway under Broadway and the Surrey LRT, both projects are being built to suit a political timetable and not to provide good public transit. Both projects are being planned to be built to both subsidize developers and land speculators in […]

La renaissance du tramway en France

Tours The French (Tram) Renaissance is amazing! 17 brand-new systems opened since 2000. A single line in Montpellier, line T1, carriess over 130,000 weekday riders! And thatai??i??s with no tunnels, mostly street running. Systems in Nantes, Bordeaux and Montpellier have ridership at or near 260,000 riders a day! That exceeds Boston. The French do it […]

Requiem For The Massey Tunnel Replacement Bridge

The Massey Tunnel Bridge replacement project is again in the news, as the massively expensive replacement bridge for the Massey tunnel has been mothballed. Now, the CBC has found hugely expensive financial irregularities with the new Port Mann Bridge, and the air of political corruption hangs heavily in the air. Was the proposed mega bridge […]

Premier Horgan’s TransLink Dilemma

  The new NDP government must reassess TransLink’s grand transit schemes and the lack of any real regional transit planning, except for their two grossly expensive vanity projects. The Broadway subway, a classic Vancouver “vanity project“, now rumored to cost around $4 billion, will offer no real advantage to transit customers, yet greatly increase the […]

The Perils Of A Proprietary Railway

ALRT/ART is what we call a proprietary railway and because Bombardier Inc. hold the technical patents for ART, they are the sole supplier of ART cars, as they can always undercut the competition, who must design a Linear Induction Motor powered car from scratch. Designing a specialty transit vehicle from scratch is a very expensive […]

Seeing Is Believing – Why Doesn’t Translink Understand The Simple Facts Of LRT?

Courtesy of Mr. Haveacow from Ottawa. Zwei, I am sending you a very telling photograph. Its near Blair Station and the Ottawa LRV is undergoing testing. Notice the complete lack of paint effects and graphics as well as the fact that, many of its portals and access panels are in the down position, so equipment […]

What The Hell Is Going On At TransLink?

Zwei knows that there are huge issues with TransLink’s mega-projects, but does this ponderous bureaucracy have a clue what it is doing? I don’t think so. Past comments from Mr. “haveacow” from Ottawa has the cost of the Broadway SkyTrain subway passing the $3 billion mark and two thirds of the Surrey’s $2.5 billion LRT’s […]

How Many Fatal Accidents Does it Take For Politicians to Support A Chilliwack To Vancouver TramTrain!

  On Wednesday last (Aug. 9) the misses and I went to Harrison Hot Springs for some well deserved R & R. The trip to Harrison only confirmed the need for a Vancouver to Chilliwack rail service, to give aAi?? transportation option for those living in the Fraser Valley. The many accidents, that I passed […]