“Even Your Auditor General Seems To Have Done His Sums On The Back Of An Envelope.”

From 2013, updated. I am reposing this from 2013 because I just heard on the radio, the often repeated nonsense, that SkyTrain has a greater capacity than light rail.   The SkyTrain light metro system doesn’t and it never did. From Thales News Release concerning the $1.47 billion signalling upgrade of the Expo and Millennium […]

Edomonton’s Valley Line Southeast LRT Officially Opens

News from Edmonton. The $1.8 billion and delivered on budget,  Valley Line is a low-floor urban light rail line in Edmonton, Alberta. The 13.1-kilometre (8.1 mi) line runs southeast from downtown at 102 Street stop to Mill Woods Town Centre at Mill Woods stop, and connecting to the Capital and Metro lines at Churchill station […]

Helsinki’s New Jokeri LRT Opens Early And $19 Million Under Budget

Europe’s newest light rail line just opened and our local tax hungry politicians and bureaucrats should take note! Broadway subway – $2.7 billion for 5.7 km. (not including vehicles, electrical/signalling upgrades) Proposed Expo line Extension to Langley – Almost $5 billion for 16 km. (not including vehicles,  electrical/signalling upgrades) Helsinki’s Jokeri Line, including vehicles – […]

10 Questions

I do not have the answers to these questions or rather I may know the answers but with libel and slander laws the way they are, I will not offer an opinion. Why do TransLink and the Mayor’s council on Transit still continue planning for the obsolete Movia Automatic Light Metro system (A.K.A. SkyTrain), when […]

Why Not TramTrain?

Why not TramTrain? The genesis of this blog was to advocate and support reintroducing a passenger rail service from Vancouver to Chilliwack and after 13 years since the release of the Leewood Study, which created a template for such a service, the need today is greater than it has ever been. As the upper Fraser […]

Why Light Rail?

Why Light rail? This question has been asked over and over again by those who only know our MALM (SkyTrain) light-metro system. After 40 years of non stop rah-rah, propaganda by the federal and provincial governments, civic governments and bureaucracies; and the various groups made up of, what I call, the “SkyTrain Lobby”, Light-Rail, locally […]

Back To Basics

What is light rail? LRT is a transportation system based on electrically powered light rail vehicles (LRV) that operates on a track in a dedicated right-of-way (meaning separated lanes). It is the operating on dedicated or “reserved rights-of-ways that makes a simple streetcar or tram light rail! many simple streetcar or tram systems have sections […]

Vancouver Will Need To Adopt Lower-Cost LRT In Its Lesser Corridors – Updated

The consensus is the same, Metro Vancouver will need to adopt lower-cost LRT for its future transit needs. This was first posted in 2019 and the costs and the financial numbers have changed somewhat. Currently, the province and metro Vancouver is spending over $11 billion for 21.7 km of new light-metro line, including the Broadway […]

Can A City Fall In Love With A Tram?

    Can Vancouver fall in love with trams?

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 […]