Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Light Rail Demonstration Line

So, I was reading in one of the transit newspapers today that Vancouver will be getting a streetcar for the first quarter of 2010 running on the tracks between the Canada Line station at 2nd Ave and Granville Island. The 1.8km section of track cost $8.5 million or $4.7 million/km. Bombardier Transportation will be loaning Vancouver two Flexity Outlook streetcars from Brussels. Bombardier will also be operating the system.

I bring this up because last Monday, Peter Holt, on behalf of Mayor Rick Green, Lee Lockwood, Roy Mufford, and Terry Lyster, made a presentation to Township Council about setting up a task force of councillors from South Fraser communities to lobby senior levels of government to fund a light rail demonstration on the Interurban route. Township Council appointed Councillor Jordan Bateman and Councillor Steve Ferguson to the task force. I was doing some digging online at the Township of Langley’s website and found that an Interurban demonstration line has been supported by the Township of Langley since 1997. In fact Terry Lyster (who was the Director of Planning and Development in the Township at the time) had his name attached to the Interurban Initiative.

I hope it won’t take another 11 years for the South Fraser to get its fair share of transit. If Vancouver can get a demonstration line, why can’t the South Fraser?

1 comment:

Robert W. White said...

Also consider that the first phase of the Vancouver demonstration line was following the same alignment as existing tracks, which had been maintained by volunteers (and operating an heritage railway service between science world and granville island each summer for the past 10 years or so), and were pulled up and redone this past year for the Olympic demo.