Sounds of Silence

No surprise here, as Zwei has been sounding alarm bells over this upcoming fiasco for years Now TransLink has an American out of Seattle as the new CEO and this means the sky is the limit for spending on rail transit. Seattle’s LRT is LRT in name only as it is actually a light metro […]

Broadway Subway Is Luxury Wrapped In Opulence – Designed To Sell A Mock P-3?

It did not take long for the Liberal fixers in Ottawa to hatch a scheme to keep their political friends awash in taxpayer`s dollars. Public transit schemes are generally not money makers, in fact the vast majority of public transit operations around the globe are subsidized, many heavily subsidized. A few light rail transit lines […]

Subways – Red Flags in Ontario – Should The Same Be Happening Here?

It now seems Ontario’s big subway plans are costing more, a lot more to build than what was first proposed as exampled by the Toronto York Spadina Subway Extension, whose cost soared over from $1.5 billion to $3.2 billion! TransLink is blithely planning away for both a hugely expensive SkyTrain subway under Broadway and an […]

TransLink Will Not Come Clean On Subway Costs

Nothing new here. The truth is very simple, subways are very expensive to build, as TransLink found out with the Canada Line. We have to remember that the cost of the Canada Line soared past the first estimated cost of $1.3 billion, to around $2.7 billion. The Gordon Campbell Liberal government then forced TransLink to […]

Metro Mayors Bite The Bullet

Metro Mayors, with visions of federal cash dancingAi?? in their heads approved a draft transit plan part of their so called ten year plan. Like all other transit ten year or twenty year plans that have come and gone, this one was drafted, probably on orders of the premier who is afraid of any negative […]

An Open Letter To The NDP & Leader John Horgan

To the Leader of the Official Opposition, John Horgan, Dear Sir; As the NDP have been extremely weak with urban and metro transportation policies in the past two elections, may I offer a suggestion that the NDP take another look at the Rail for the Valley TramTrain plan, providing a TramTrain service from Vancouver to […]

Three Minutes Into The Future!

More wise words from Mr. ‘Haveacow’ who is an extremely experienced transit planner working on Ottawa’s new regional light rail line. This was originally a post from the recent Calgary blog and contains a wealth of information that the powers that be don’t really want in the public realm. What this boils down to is […]

New Jersey’s River Line

New Jersey’s River Line, using diesel light rail TramTrains, enables to provide a quality transit service on a predominantly single track rail line. The River Line could be a template for several rail services, both in metro Vancouver and Vancouver Island, track-sharing with lightly used freight lines.

Over to You Mr. Cow – The Vancouver Sun’s Recent “Puff” SkyTrain Story

This comment from Mr. Cow deserves a post of its own as there is so much information here, it deserves a wider audience. As Mr. Cow is a Canadian Transit Engineer, his comments are well worth reading. When SkyTrain ‘crapped-out’ in the Summer of 2014 there were no drivers or attendants to oversee the evacuation […]

Rail for the Valley – Where do we go from here?

It has been six years since the release of the Leewood Study,Ai?? yet to date most regional politicians do not even realize that it exists. Internationally, the Leewood Study is a winner, featured in two international transportation magazines, locally though the Leewood Study has been ignored or discredited by neanderthal thinking municipal politicians. There are […]