Category Archives: Transit, Skytrain, LRT

TransLink mayors speak with one voice, mostly

July 13, 2014 By in Metro Vancouver, Transit, Skytrain, LRT Tags: , 2 Comments

Lougheed at Madison croppedAbout a month ago, Metro Vancouver’s mayors broke with previous form and achieved near-consensus on a 10-year plan for transit investment.

Media coverage of this event has been limited, focusing on the projected cost of the plan rather than the promised improvements. The region’s trains and buses carry more than 800,000 passengers per day, and this should be enough to sustain a conversation on transit funding; but the transportation authority’s governance structure is convoluted, and its financial woes never-ending. Public interest, for now, remains at its normal lukewarm level. Continue reading →

The Metro transit referendum and the mayors

February 9, 2014 By in Metro Vancouver, Transit, Skytrain, LRT Tags: 2 Comments
LRT car of the future, from the City of Surrey website

LRT car of the future, from the City of Surrey website

Over the past month, we’ve seen intense political bickering and positioning around public transit in Metro Vancouver.

Events are moving quickly, and I hesitate to offer conclusions — except to suggest that the struggle between the B.C. Government and local mayors threatens to overshadow the question of how to build a better transit system. Continue reading →

Another year, another TransLink funding proposal

February 10, 2013 By in Transit, Skytrain, LRT Tags: Leave a comment

Skytrain, BurnabyIn its most recently posted quarterly report,  Metro Vancouver’s transit authority forecast that it would provide 370 million passenger trips  during 2012. In the nine months ending September 30, traffic was up 5.5 per cent from the previous year.

TransLink is struggling to expand its system to serve more passengers, notably with the current construction of the Evergreen rapid transit line in the northeast sector. A growing transit system provides numerous benefits, including labour mobility, increased educational opportunity, and a better quality of life for seniors, kids and many other people who don’t drive. Continue reading →

The Evergreen Line and the future of Skytrain

April 30, 2012 By in Planning and Development, Transit, Skytrain, LRT, Tricities Tags: , 10 Comments

During the recent panic around transportation funding in Metro Vancouver, the authorities assured us that construction of the long-awaited Evergreen rapid transit line will proceed.  Preliminary work — street widenings, electrical ducts — is now underway, and a contractor is to be selected soon for principal construction,  scheduled to begin in autumn 2012.

But while the 11-kilometre line appears to have achieved untouchable status in the  balance of regional politics, there are persistent voices in the blogosphere who say the project is wrong, wrong, wrong, because it’s based on Skytrain — the obtrusive technology previously used in three other Vancouver-area projects, and hardly anywhere else in the world.  In deliberations over the Evergreen Line around 2006, local mayors seemed to be leaning toward light rail transit, until the provincial government declared force majeure and imposed Skytrain.  The same dynamic had played out, less dramatically, with the Millenium and Canada lines earlier on. Continue reading →