The NDP Are paving Paradise And Turning It Into A Parking Lot – An Updated Repost from 2021

First posted by zweisystem on Thursday, April 8, 2021 Updated. Reinstating passenger services on regional railways, it is what government should be doing, to deal with traffic congestion and pollution, but they are not, as government would rather spend money on prestigious “rapid transit” monuments to cut for photo-ops at election time. The E&N, the […]

Memo to the M.O.T. – Time to Reread The Leewood Study – Updated

First posted by on Saturday, May 2, 2020 Now fifteen years old, the Leewood Study, done by Leewood Projects (UK), to assess the viability of reinstating a passenger rail service from downtown Vancouver to Chilliwack via the former BC Electric R.R. route, is worth a revisit. Leewood Study The Leewood Study brought a fresh set […]

Mobility Pricing – The Rapture of Megaprojects

This was first posted in 2020 and five years later mobility pricing is back on the agenda. Why? Simple, TransLink is broke. The now $16 billion price tag, for the full program to extend the Expo and Millennium Lines a mere 21.7 km has hit a financial iceberg and is $3 to $4 billion short […]

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 […]

Tram Trains for Romania!

The flexibility of the modern tram to operate on mainline railways is now being exploited in Romania. This means affordable, quality public transport can be extended to service customers, who would otherwise be excluded from transportation planning. Until our politcans and public clearly understand that building subways and elevated transit is not how to increase […]

An Independent Audit Of TransLink Needed – NOW!

What TransLink wants, TransLink gets as fiscal responsibility is not in TransLink’s lexicon. Public scrutiny of TransLink is non existent. The Mayor’s Council On Transit invests in Transit to secure future elections and reelections and the public is left with a largely 1950’s bus system, tarted up with a now obsolete 1970’s light-metro system. Positive […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]