Unintended Consequences

The unintended consequences of transit planning are embarrassingly many. What planners expected did not happen and the unexpected, proved challenging. In Germany in the 1960’s and 70’s, there was a big push to build subways. Subways were thought of great public works projects and many cities decided to abandon their surface tramways and build subways […]

How a New Transit System Could Hobble Montreal, As It Hobbled Vancouver

Light-metro, the great philosopher’s stone for urban transportation in the 1970’s has turned out to be nothing more than a wet squib. BC’s provincial politicians have continually forced light-metro onto metro Vancouver, forcing bus riders by the tens of thousands to make transfers to pretend there is high ridership. Light-metro was so expensive that a […]

Repeating The Subway Lie And The Broadway SkyTrain Subway

TransLink and the City of Vancouver have trundled out their end game for the Broadway subway and it is nothing more than a grifter’s delight of fake news and alternative facts. To remind everyone, subways are only built on transit routes when passenger flows exceed 15,000 pphpd (20,000 pphpd in Europe). Current traffic flows on […]

People Before Cars – A Lesson Unlearned In Metro Vancouver

This is what should be happening in Metro Vancouver, but it’s not. SkyTrain is elevated or put underground, to keep streets free for cars. The cycle lobby is giving precedence over transit customers. Cars remain the most viable transit mode in the region. Our regional, provincial, and federal politicians only invest in transit to reward […]

Will This Be The End Of The Innovia Light-Metro?

Bombardier Inc. is in big trouble. The company lost Montreal’s tailor made tender for its REM light-metro project and continues to be late in delivering trams to Toronto and combined with a sundry of other problems has, made the Bombardier product a piranha. If Bombardier lays off a good number of its employees at its […]

A Massive Conflict of Interest

Oh, what tangled webs we weave…….. The big news today is not the forthcoming announcement by the Premier and Minister of Transportation replacing the aged and decrepit Pattullo Bridge, with a new $1.6 billion bridge, rather it is revelation that so-called due diligence panels of handpicked experts who were hired to review TransLinkai??i??s business cases. […]

SkyTrain Ka-Put Again

For a proprietary transit system that is supposed to have a remarkable operational reliability, it is breaking down an awful lot lately. Could it be that SkyTrain is not as reliable as certain people would have us think? Sadly, SkyTrain is demonstrating the perils of an aging proprietary railway. Stalled train creates SkyTrain delays during […]

How SkyTrain Zealots Want To Crush Rational Transit Thinking

Recent articles, by the SkyTrain Lobby are nothing more than the old adage; “Repeat a lie often enough and the people will come around to believing it.” What we call SkyTrain, a combination of three railways of which one is not compatible in operation with the other two, are just simply railways. To try to […]

Has Metro Vancouver Past The Point of No Return With Transit Planning?

  Metro Vancouver is approaching a critical decision on transit, but has the region already past the “point of no return” with regional transit? The Metro Vancouver region has been able to afford one light-metro line every decade; the 80’s saw the the Expo Line; the late 90’s the Millennium Line; the 2000’nds the Canada […]

Reality Can Be A Bitch – Two FastFerry Fiascos For Metro Vancouver

As of yet, there is no real cost estimate for the Broadway Subway and reality is setting in that it will be in excess of $3 billion, unless the scope of the project is reduced, as was done to the Canada line. One persistent rumour I hear is that the Millennium Line subway extension to […]