The Reserved Rights-of-Way – The Genesis Of LRT

After listening to an very ill informed person on the radio, pontificating on all the ills of light rail, he made one last grand statement, about ” LRT would always get stuck in traffic”. Of course the person in question was talking about streetcars, or trams that operate on-street in mixed traffic, but that is […]

A Year Later And TransLink Has Not Learned – Desmond Must Be Fired

A year ago, the Canada line went ka-put in a snow storm and thousands of customers were stranded North of the Fraser River and all TransLink can do is advise people to walk a snow bound rail bridge, in a snow storm to get to Richmond. This is unacceptable; in Europe this would have been […]

“It’s Kind Of Like Building A Subway Station On King For A Fraction Of The Cost.”

As Toronto’s Kings street streetcar reinvents itself as LRT, good things happen. But, as always with something new, people will complain, especially some restaurant owners who no longer can park their cars in front of their places of business. If public transit is to work, it must be given priority over other transportation modes and […]

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. […]

Metro Madness – Does TransLink Understand The Issue Of Subway Maintenance?

Subway maintenance costs are an issue that TransLink and the regional mayors have not even considered. As subways age, they cost a lot to maintain. The TTC has put the cost just to operate and maintain 5 km of subway, at $40 million annually and just gives a hint of maintenance costs to come for […]

Civic Maturity Comes With Light Rail

Light Rail, brings with it, civic maturity. This civic maturity puts the transit customers before political friends; it puts financial reality ahead of political prestige; it puts the public interest as a whole, ahead of car drivers and even business owners. Light rail focuses on good transit and good planning, which in the future will […]

Election Season Is Near – Abbotsford Mayor Proposes LRT For The Fraser Valley

In BC, when election time nears, politicians are looking for issues to garner votes. In the Fraser Valley, traffic chaos grows with population, with the obvious results – gridlock. Rail for the Valley has an affordable plan, yet it fell on deaf ears and still does. The key word is “affordable” because if a plan […]

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 […]