
Passenger Rail – Mexico Gets It, Why Doesn’t Canada?
Mexico’s politicians get it, to mitigate the effects of global warming and climate change, rail is the only option to reduce both personal and commercial vehicle use. 3,000 km of revitalized passenger rail route is ambitious, but at least Mexican politicians seem to understand the need of a modern passenger rail service, unlike their Canadian […]

TransLink for Dummies
……….. or cutting through the BS about Light Rail, SkyTrain and BRT. The following is a guide plus definitions. ALM: Automatic Light metro, the fourth marketing name given for the SkyTrain family of light-metros, when Lavalin briefly owned SkyTrain before going bankrupt. ALRT (1): Advanced Light Rail Transit, the second marketing name after ICTS for […]

Single Track Operation? More common Than You Think!
OK folks, the following is a small list of the many European regional railways, operating on single tracks or which route operates on portions of single track. Why am I posting this, you say? Last week I received an angry phone call from a gentleman who claimed had done some work for Metro Vancouver […]

Eby And The NDP Have Missed The Train
It seems Premier Eby and the NDP have been left behind at the station with this. With two railway projects that would have set BC as a leader in “Green” transportation, Premier Eby and the NDP continue to promote Greenhouse gas projects with new highway and tunnel construction: in other words, good old “rubber and […]

Flexibility To Fight Climate Change
Flexibility is the key in today’s transit planning. More and more, freight that used to be carried on railways, then switched to heavily subsidized trucks on heavily subsidized highways, is now goring back to the railways. Ignoring Global Warming and climate change is a fools game, played by civic, provincial and federal politicians to the […]

Doing The Same Thing Over Again Just Will Not Work
After receiving a number of abusive amount of Emails about the post (all deleted), has indicated to me that most people do not have a firm grounding in modern public transport philosophy, nor a good knowledge of provincial finances. Most forget, that in the end, both LRT and light metro are trains and there is […]

How Metro Vancouver’s Regional Transit Planning Has continued To Get It Wrong!
Please Deliver to Mayor and Council From: Rail for the Valley My name is (name withheld by request) and I have been involved with transit issues in the lower mainland for four decades. I have been a forty year member of the Light Rail Transit Association and through my long membership, I […]

Observations On A Broken Regional Transit System
The past few month, Zwei has been on the road, throughout the lower mainland attending rugby games (my son plays first div.) and has made a very depressing observation. Despite over $30 billion invested or will be invested in the regional light metro system, traffic is getting worse and congestion, spiced with gridlock is endemic. […]

BC Transportation Minister, Rob Fleming, Must Resign!
Zwei has real issues from the following two statements from BC Transportation Minister Rob Fleming. . “In fact, what they analyzed was the superiority of high-frequency bus service, both from a capacity point of view – to move people out of their cars as the member wished for – and also to give flexibility in […]

The $400 million Per Killometre SkyTrain To Newton – Really?
Zwei has a simple question: Where is the funding? With the cost of the Expo Line extension to Langley, exceeding the last estimate of $3.95 billion; the Broadway subway completion to UBC now exceeding $5 billion; and of course that pesky $3 billion rehab to the Expo and millennium Lines that TransLink refuses to acknowledge […]
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