And You Think SkyTrain is Cheaper Than Light Rail -Think Again!

Who says LRT is too expensive? The estimated cost to rehab both the Expo and Millennium Lines is now topping $4 billion (now, not including rail, OHE, stations and cars) and with already $1.47 billion spent on resignalling the proprietary automatic railway, the cost now seems to be well over $5 billion for 16 km […]

TramTrain – Regional Railways – Why Not Here?

As all levels of government pretend they are fighting Global Warming and Climate change, via the much hated Carbon Tax, real solutions such as TramTrain and regional railways are ignored. Germany has been a forefront in the fight against Global Warming and Climate change and part of that fight is reopening abandoned rail routes and […]

Man of Straw Arguments

  “Man of Straw” argument: The straw man fallacy is an informal fallacy, which means that the flaw lies with the arguer’s method of arguing rather than the flaws of the argument itself. The straw man fallacy avoids the opponent’s actual argument and instead argues against an inaccurate caricature of it. When dealing with arguments […]

Five Reasons Why The NDP Don’t Want The “Return of the Interurban”.

  This post was released on Wednesday, February 11, 2009,under the title, “Five reasons Why Gordo and his ‘Falcon’ don’t want the “Return of the Interurban”. It is still relevant today, only the names have been changed. Under the NDP, nothing has changed. So, with a little tweaking here and updating there, we have the […]

TransLink for Dummies

……….. or cutting through the BS about Light Rail, SkyTrain and BRT. The following is a guide plus definitions. ALM: Automatic Light metro, the fourth marketing name given for the SkyTrain family of light-metros, when Lavalin briefly owned SkyTrain before going bankrupt. ALRT (1): Advanced Light Rail Transit, the second marketing name after ICTS for […]

Number One Highway Constructions Costs Climbing

This bodes ill for the Expo Line extension to Langley. Transportation Minister Rob Fleming attributes the delays to soil and geotechnical issues. These are the same geotechnical issues that the Langley extension also must face. The following quote is also of interest: This is in addition to the previously approved budget of $2.34 billion for […]

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 […]

Regional Mayors Want A new Funding Model, Instead They Need A New Planning Model

It seems our regional mayors have been smoking some good weed because they want $20 billion for transit and playing the old gambit that transit is really a Social Service, a human right. That sort of thinking has gotten us where we are today: a massively expensive transit system that does not attract new ridership, […]