Entering The Land of Unicorns and Pixie Dust – TransLink’s Current P.R. Gamble

A re-post. First posted on Wednesday, October 13, 2021 Memo from Zweisystem: This post is from 2021, yet we still see TransLink beating the drum for more and more money, as politicians, both regional, provincial and federal are afraid to say no more money and live within your means. All financial numbers will be updated […]

50 Years Out of Date

Memo to the Caisse du Depot: REM is a light metro and light metro is obsolete. Automatic (driverless) railways have issues in the snow. It snows in Montreal, doesn’t it? What Vancouver calls SkyTrain is a light-metro and it was deemed obsolete back in the late 70’s and why it was unsalable. Six marketing names […]

Court Case? What Court Case?

The following comment from Mr.Cow has raised eyebrows. “By the way it’s not 205 Mk 5 Cars, its 41, 5 section vehicles, at approximately 17.63 Million per 5 section vehicle. With entirely new sub systems not the longer versions of the Mk 3 trains with similar equipment that the BCRTC thought it was getting. You […]

A Pre Election Band Aid

When the provincial government spends in excess of $16 billion to extend the somewhat obsolete Movia Automatic Light Metro (a.k.a. SkyTrain) system a mere 21.7 km, the regional transit system as a whole suffers. The federal government is partly at fault for this growing financial debacle by compelling the provincial government to continue building with […]

$7 Billion to Move 56,000 (or less) Persons A Day.

If one wishes to know why emergency rooms are being closed on weekends in hospitals around the province, the NDP are spending $7 billion to move 56,000 people a day. 56,000 thousand riders a day? According to Wikipedia, the Broadway 99-B Line bus to UBC, averages 39,900 customers a day (2023)! One thinks that the […]

Time To Rethink SkyTrain Premier Eby

With a looming trade war with the USA, it is time to rethink the BC Governments exclusive planning, centred around the proprietary SkyTrain light metro system. Yes, I know the NDP government ministers call SkyTrain a world class system, but it is the only world class system I know of that no one wants to […]

The Geneva Model

The problem in Canada, is that transit is built to win elections and not move people. Transit projects become “gold-plated”, ponderous and not user-friendly. In Canada the transit customer is all but ignored. In Switzerland transit is built to meet the needs of the transit customer and the transit customer approval is needed at all […]

Off The Rails – Part 2

I have issues with all of these projects as most have wandered from being light rail and instead become a light-metro. Part of the 19km Eglinton Crosstown LRT is in a 6 km subway and the costs of subway construction is huge. Though the line does operate as classic LRT on portions of line a […]

Off The Rails Part 1

The following is from the Globe and Mail and attempts to address costly issues building rail transit in Canada. I think three issues are paramount. First major transit projects in Canada are built to win elections and tend to be gold plated, with little consideration about actually providing a user-friendly transit service. Second, there is […]

Eby’s Reality Check On Transit

From what I can read, Eby is playing footsie with the Broadway subway to UBC. Farnsworth, who is now minister in charge of transit is doing penance for his complete screw-up of the Surrey RCMP/police fiasco, which many in the NDP blame their poor showing in the recent election. Subways are expensive, both to build […]