War on Buses? Er…No, Just Very Bad Planning

Is there a war on buses in Vancouver? Sorry, no. Instead thereAi??has been an ongoingAi??war on good transit planning and those supporting bad transit planning won decades ago. The real problem is and always has beenAi??SkyTrain and the massive costs associated with the mini-metro. The taxpayer has paid about three to five times more for […]

Detroit’s “Mugger Mover” celebrates 25 years of ‘sort of’ operation

We don’t hear much about SkyTrain elsewhere and I wonder why? Well I know the answer, SkyTrain reign of operation elsewhere has not been as successful as the SkyTrain lobby would have us believe. Please take note of the serious issues regarding the Detroit’s ICTS’s guideway, as previous discussion on the RftV commnets has been […]

CancA?n tram-train feasibility study commissioned

It is so sad that just about every country in North America and Europe are looking a TramTrain (Interurban) to help solve regional transit problems, except Canada andAi??especially BC and Metro Vancouver. That the now obsolete SkyTrain mini-metro is still being planned for the lower mainland only shows how backward and irrelevant our regional transit […]

TransLink cuts half the senior executive positions from 2009. Why not just get rid of TransLink?

What most people don’t realize is that much of TransLink does, could be done easily by outside sources;Ai??the TransLinkAi??bureaucracyAi??tends toAi??duplicate what has already been done. West Coast Mountain Bus and its bureaucracy runs the buses and SeaBus and The BC Rapid Transit Company Ltd. runs the two SkyTrain lines and a private operator runs the […]

Vision(less) Vancouver May Dump the Heritage Streetcar

It seems Vision Vancouver lacks any vision at all. There is no debate that the Vancouver heritage streetcar is nothing more than a tourist line and it operates on tracks that never saw any streetcar or interurban service at all. What some within Vision VancouverAi??are afraid of is the line becoming a demonstration line for […]

New But Unused – The Yongin SkyTrain EverLine White Elephant.

The new but unused EverLine white elephant in Yongin Korea The following item from Railway Gazette International has raised Zweisystems’s eyebrows; “Following arbitration, the South Korean city of Yongin has revised the contract for Bombardier to operate the completed but unused 18Ai??5 km (11.4-mile) EverLine automated light metro. Opening is now planned for April 2013, […]

Baffle-gab from the SkyTrain Lobby.

One just has to shake one’s head at this. The SkyTrain LobbyAi??is workingAi??hard toAi??haveAi??more of the proprietary mini-metroAi??built in Surrey, now with a glitzy news release claiming that the proposed SkyTrain will only cost a little more to build to Langley than LRT, so let’s build with SkyTrain. We have heard this before. The following […]

Urgent need for light rail transit in Surrey

The following editorial by Frank Buchholz continues the myth that at-grade light rail is slow and causes accidents at intersections. I am not surprised as the SkyTrain Lobby’s mouthpiece, the SkyTrain for Surrey blog is given prominence in the piece. From what I have read, SkyTrain for Surrey rehashes the same old myths about LRT, […]

The SkyTrain Lobby – And The fine Art of Deception

The deliriously pro SkyTrain blog, SkyTrain for Surrey (SfS), continues its campaign of deception and misinformation in an attack against American transit expert Gerald Fox. I don’t normally follow the nonsenseAi??spouted byAi??the SkyTrain lobby because they live in a world of their own, where the rules are simple; SkyTrain good, light rail bad. The recent […]

It is interesting how TransLink has used this cunning method of manipulating analysis to justify SkyTrain in corridor after corridor, and has thus succeeded in keeping its proprietary rail system expanding.

The Great transit philosopher’s stone, the Evergreen Line saga continues and it is once again time for Rail for the Valley how suspect TransLink’s business case for the (N)Evergreen Line was. In, 2008 Gerald Fox, a well known American transit and transportation expert shredded TransLink’s Evergreen Line business case and found it grossly biased in […]