The Subway To Stupidville

Patrick Condon is the James Taylor chair in Landscape and Livable Environments at the University of British Columbia’s School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture and the founding chair of the UBC Urban Design program. Prof. Condon is worth listening to, as he gets it about transit, which is a rare commodity with Metro Vancouver’s academia […]

A Matter Of Perspective

What is interesting with this story is the matter of perspective comparing Vancouver and Toronto. In Toronto, the 504 streetcar servicing carries around 80,000 riders a day in 2018. In Vancouver, where a subway is being proposed for Broadway, as far as Arbutus and with some promoters wanting it to terminate at UBC; in 2012 […]

If the SkyTrain News Fits, the Globe & Mail Will Print It.

So, where are the important stories about SkyTrain and transit Ms. Bula? Any mention that Transport Canada’s Operating Certificate for the Innovia SkyTrain system (Expo and Millennium Lines), limits capacity to 15,000 pphpd? No? Have you ever penned a story about how the Expo line is worn out and much of it’s existing infrastructure needs […]

The SkyTrain MK. 3 – The End of an Era?

  The new Mk.3 car is really a tarted up Mk.2 car, with one noticeable difference, the MK.3 sets now include a powered “saloon” vehicle, gangwayed at both ends. This will enable TransLink operate 3-car trains. The problem with the proprietary SkyTrain is that they cannot operate larger cars than the present MK.2’s do to […]

The Sum of Zwei’s Fears – Part 3 The New FastFerry Fiasco

It is interesting indeed that Vancouver Sun columnist, Vaughn Palmer is writing about transit and the two massively expensive rapid transit projects, the Surrey LRT and the Broadway subway. With both federal and provincial backing, these two ill conceived projects will cripple transit planning for the next quarter century. In the long term at least, […]

Signal Failure – The Achilles Heel of a Driverless Light Metro

Portend of what is going to be more and more common on SkyTrain, signal failure. As our SkyTrain ages, more and more service is disrupted by signal or a switch failure and with almost no redundancy in our transit system, the results for the transit customer is a fiasco! The lesson is simple, the more […]

Talking Though One’s Hat – Doug McCallum on SkyTrain

Talking through one’s hat,  definition: Talk nonsense; especially on a subject that one professes to be knowledgeable about but in fact is ignorant of. This is exactly what former Surrey mayor and current morality candidate, Doug McCallum is doing. As  Mr. Cow, our expert from Ontario, said; ” You can expand SkyTrain to  Langley, there […]

Never Attribute to Malice What Can be Explained by Incompetence – Factbender on Transit

You don’t have to be smart to be the Minister responsible for TransLink, rather you just to have to be a very good BS artist, that’ all. As the LRT or SkyTrain tap dance continues south of the Fraser, many politicians reveal that their knowledge about SkyTrain comes mainly from picture books and not engineering […]

The $11 billion Solution!

It seems our politicians and political wannabees are living in a financial ennui. The massive costs of our current transit planning are being ignored, with the rah, rah rant of the various rapid transit promoters glossing over the real costs of their various pet projects. Our so called experts ignore the costs and it is […]

Watch The Lawsuits Fly!

There will be no SkyTrain to Langley. Comments from real experts, you know they type, guys and gals who plan, design and operate transit systems, have all said, almost in union, that SkyTrain will not be built to Langley. The terse comments by people who actually know what they are talking about, should give cause […]