Some New Year’s Reading – Eric Chris’s Six Facts About Hub to Hub Transport

Eric Chris is an Australian professional engineer with a masterai??i??s degree in chemical engineering and has been living in Vancouver near UBC on the 99 B-Line route for the last 16 years.Ai?? He works in the hydrocarbon industry as a design engineer for his entire career.Ai?? His masterai??i??s thesis was on real time air dispersion […]

Lies, Damned Lies and the Vancouver Sun

So, Calgary’s Nenshi backs Gregor Robertson’s Broadway subway plans. Well not exactly, he supports better urban transit funding and all Mr. Nenshi said was “So I imagine there is a scramble right now in Ottawa precisely to figure out how to fund Vancouver’s next Skytrain expansion.” How the Vancouver sun can construe this as support […]

All Quiet on the Transit Front?

With civic elections only weeks away, there has been a lull with transit issues and stories. The city of Vancouver, which considers itself the centre of the universe, provides us with some mirth as the elections draw near. The left leaning C.O.P.E. political party is proposing that all Vancouver residents should have universal transit for […]

Four Years Since the Release of the Leewood Study and the Silence is Deafening!

It now has been four years since the historic release of the Leewood/Rail for the Valley report, yet except for sparse political support, very few people actually know that the study exists, let alone that it is “shovel ready”. The Leewood study is just too simple, too cheap, and too practical compared to other politically […]

The Federal NDP suddenly Discouver Transit

The Federal NDP have never really cared about regional transit and desperately need some sort of policy to try to show the public they care and and have a plan in time for the 2015 election. Throwing more money at transit won’t solve transportation problems and will drive up transit costs. Canadian cities need a […]

The seamless (no transfer) journey – Transit’s Holy Grail!

A repost from 2009 – updated. Route 5 (tramtrain) travels from Worth t0 Bietigheim-Bissingen, through downtown Karlsruhe. It has been long known that the seamless or no transfer journey is the ‘ticket’ to attract customers to public transit as it is well understood that one could lose upwards of 70% of ridership per transfer, even […]

Streetcars and LRT, A Quick Primer

First published in the RftV blog in 2011, it is still pertinent today. Updated to August 2014. The silly season continues in the Vancouver region, with TransLink desperately trying to persuade regional mayors to levy more taxes to mainly pay for the Evergreen SkyTrain light-metro line and a SkyTrain subway under Broadway. The following is […]

Speaking of the Arbutus Corridor…………..

A Marpole bound interurban crosses 41st. Please note trolleybus and the overhead. ……. why TransLink will never support LRT on the Arbutus and why the City of Vancouver wants the ‘Arbutus” for a glorified bike lane. Evergreen Line is said to cost no more than $1.4 billion for just over 11 km of line and […]

TransLinkai??i??s seven ai???deadly sinsai??i??

The reverberations of TransLink’s double SkyTrain fiasco continues to echo in Metro Vancouver. I think transit customers can understand system wide shutdowns, but when the captain and crew leave the passengers to fend for themselves, then very pointed questions will be asked. Jordan Bateman has become a serious thorn in the side of regional bureaucrats, […]

In Search of the Light Rail Renaissance

A little history. On April 22, 1978, the city of Edmonton heraldedAi?? a new era of what we now call light rail transit, with the opening of its first 6.9 km, LRT line. Using the now venerable Siemens U-2 vehicle, which was designed for the Frankfurt U-Bahn metro system. Edmonton’s new LRT line set the […]