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 […]

TransLink cuts half the senior executive positions from 2009. Why not just get rid of TransLink?

What most people don’t realize is that much of TransLink does, could be done easily by outside sources;Ai??the TransLinkAi??bureaucracyAi??tends toAi??duplicate what has already been done. West Coast Mountain Bus and its bureaucracy runs the buses and SeaBus and The BC Rapid Transit Company Ltd. runs the two SkyTrain lines and a private operator runs the […]

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 […]

Bombardier’s Gambit, a Streetcar is not light rail: and only in Vancouver.

Interesting, that Bombardier Inc. is stumping in Surrey and Vancouver to drum up interest in their Toronto streetcar, which in reality is a reworked Flexity tram, so it can operate on Toronto’s heritage streetcar lines. After listening to a Bombardier Rep. claim that SkyTrain was cheap to operate because it has no drivers (he didn’t […]

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 […]

New But Unused – The Yongin SkyTrain EverLine White Elephant.

The new but unused EverLine white elephant in Yongin Korea The following item from Railway Gazette International has raised Zweisystems’s eyebrows; “Following arbitration, the South Korean city of Yongin has revised the contract for Bombardier to operate the completed but unused 18Ai??5 km (11.4-mile) EverLine automated light metro. Opening is now planned for April 2013, […]

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 […]

Urgent need for light rail transit in Surrey

The following editorial by Frank Buchholz continues the myth that at-grade light rail is slow and causes accidents at intersections. I am not surprised as the SkyTrain Lobby’s mouthpiece, the SkyTrain for Surrey blog is given prominence in the piece. From what I have read, SkyTrain for Surrey rehashes the same old myths about LRT, […]

British Politicans Get It, While Canadian & BC Politicans Don’t

Britian’s politicans get it about TramTrain, while in BC, our politicians haven’t a clue. Money for transportation projects or even maintaining an affordable public transit system is finite. All to often, people support horrendously expensive transportation projects without an inkling as how toAi??pay for it. The clarion call for new or higher taxes to fund […]