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 […]

Road Pricing Farce

From Bob Mackin and the Breaker. From July 2017 Zwei has studied “Road Pricing” and “Congestion Charging” for over 20 years and……………… the very first rule for a successful road pricing scheme is that the region have a user friendly and affordable public transit alternative. With TransLink we don’t…….. not even close and TransLink is […]

Perils of a Proprietary Railway – The End of SkyTrain

Zwei has often warned of the perils of a proprietary railway. Our friend Mr. Cow has warned of the perils of a proprietary railway. And now, Bombardier’s current fiasco supplying 21st century trams of a proven European model, may be the final straw in the collapse of Bombardier’s rail division. If and when the production […]

The Pursuit Of European Ideals In Toronto

As expected, upgrade a heritage streetcar line to a light rail standard and ridership increases dramatically. By making King St. an exclusive route for trams, increased both commercial speed and ridership, so much so, it overwhelmed the servcie. This is old news as our European friends knew his decades ago and the question must be […]

“We do not have to watch reruns of Monty Python for our amusement, we just have to tune in to Vancouver’s transit planning for our entertainment”

It is now 2017 and the transit year is off with a dull thud. The title comes courtesy of an old transit acquaintance from the UK who was badly burned by his Canada Line experience. With the planned Pattullo Bridge replacement bridge having only 4 traffic lanes; the Surrey Hawthorne Park road debacle (where a […]

The Return Of The Tram!

One of the recurring themes for the SkyTrain types is that big cities have subways and little cities have trams. Well Berlin, the Capital of Germany with a population 3.7 million, is now investing in trams in the former “West” portion of the city as the old Communist “East” section retained the pre-war tramways. This […]