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Without a Future Train Element built into the engineering this is another VanCity Project that will fall short.

Another great video. I'd love to see this happen. Sadly you're probably right for the Tsawwassen Line but as Victoria continues to grow, that ferry terminal will only increase as a necessary destination to include. Vancouver to Abbotsford/Chilliwack and Vancouver to Whistler should be the priority for now.

The west coast express doesn't start early enough for early morning workers, it sucks

I remember hearing a while back that this change resulted in reduced foot traffic overall and less business activity for businesses on that street. Would be curious to know if the impact was transient or perhaps event localized to certain kinds of businesses or business hours.

I’m a huge fan and love your videos. Keep up the good work! By any chance can you do a video on BC ferries and what the province can do to improve this system? TY!! 🇨🇦❤️

I know folks who work on the Surrey-Langley skytrain project. Let me know when this "MBX" company finds lunch, bc those numbers are laughable with today's construction costs.

Next they will need to expand the Oak St Bridge( 6 Lanes) and to make it easy, the the far lane in each can be for the Marine drive for the north and ( forget the street for Richmond)

Don't waste taxpayers money, we need a bridge

There should be bridge, replacing massey tunnel

Let me know if you want help working on the E&N video! I've been mentally invested in the rail here (including the now extinct Englewood railway) for over a decade!

Bit unfortunate that a video titled "Is Regional Rail the Future of British Columbia?" only refers to the lower mainland and not the island or the interior but otherwise a good video.

Interesting facts, port mann bridge is the widest bridge in the world, also the pitt river just down the way, is the world's largest tidal river/lake!

This is great. I am a SFU Alum who graduated in 2015 with a BA in Geography and Econ (ext. minor), and also a Advanced Diploma in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) (modern day cartography) at BCIT (after I grad from SFU). And now do GIS full time. Now the first time I discovered GIS was at SFU and my first major project was a Network Analysis of how the Gondola would improve travel to SFU Burnaby and UniverCity (still groaning at that name) and the rest of the network. I only analyzed the production way gondola (the one you discuss), and I do take a more whole network approach including the SkyTrain network which has since grown and is growing. And with the network increasing the benefits there are just better from that respect from when I did my analysis in 2013-2014ish. And as a geography student I studied urban planning and policy specializing in transportation planning and transit oriented developments. A lot of the older sources you used, I also used. And we cover a lot of the same points (though you covered a couple of points I did not). I also have networked with David Agar (90 percent sure it was him) while he was at TransLink and even showed him my analysis with maps. I took transit from Langley to Burnaby mountain several days a week, which spurred on the project (it was a lot). Good job keeping the dream the alive. Hmu Greater Discussions. I will even dig out the maps!

Regional Rail sounds amazing! If only there were more times offered.

I'll believe the new tunnel when I see it and drive it. This project is way overdue and gets changed and cancelled every time a new provincial government is elected. Am I a bitter old man? Maybe,

*We need more roads* Our road infrastructure is 30+ years behind. The future is trains along major corridors and private and shared vehicles everywhere else.

Glad to know someone has spoken up about running a hard rail line down No.1 hwy to Abbotsford (Chilliwack future extension). It can start at Abbotsford airport and run along Hwy 1 median. No land acquisition required, after crossing Port Mann Bridge, it can hook up to the existing West Coast Express rail line through Burnaby Lake northside until it reaches Broadway Station Hub. Ikea size elevators can bring all the passengers up to level 3 platform and continue onward to downtown. Other passengers can take UBC line/Bus 99. Or local buses to their final destination. For those who's final destination is downtown, no back tracking from Waterfront station to CBD downtown stations required. Basically the transition from Rail service to Skytrain is faster than currently driving rail train thru east van. Translink can set up dedicated empty trains on standby for these passengers. The only station you need is Langley 200st where there's already a parking lot set up. I estimate Abbotsford to Broadway Station will take only 30 mins with one stop Langley. The existing West Coast will be cancelled. Leaving Mission, Maple Ridge and Pitt Meadows with shuttle buses to get from closed WC stations to Langley Station via Golden Ears Bridge and Abbotsford Station via No.11 bridge. These three municipalities population dwarfs Langley, Abbotsford population so it makes sense to essentially move the rail line from north side Fraser River to South side. There will lie another parallel with Fraser Hwy Skytrain line. Which can continue to run as Rapid Bus using the abandoned Skytrain lane. It'll be even faster than any of the current Rapid bus and no need for another very expensive SkyTrain line. So a blessing.

Waste of money it is only good for those who go to school and that’s it when school is out then nothing

Any plans on addressing Victoria’s desperate need for light rail? Already mentioned but I second.

They should run a train line down the middle of the HWY 1. The median goes quite the way out that way and is quite wide.

Thanks for the overview of the tunnel project. One hopes it will be too far ahead to change if another party is government.

One of the reasons or objectives of building a bridge and getting rid of the tunnel was to deepen the Fraser River channel so larger bulk cargo ships (Panamax) could travel up the river to the Fraser River docks. One of the objectives of the Fraser Surrey Docks was to develop another coal terminal, however, the tunnel and the ballast on top prevented coal (bulk cargo) ships from leaving the port loaded due to the ship's draft. Older Panama draft while loaded is 12.4 meters and newer Panamax ship's have a draft of 15 meters. The natural depth of the river is 5 metres. The river is now dredged to a depth of 11.5 metres. Here's something from Richmond News in 2017: "Port Metro Vancouver and Fraser Surrey Docks have expressed the desire to dredge to about 13.2 metres in depth, while the Richmond Chamber of Commerce has noted ships may require 18 metres in the future.” The conclusion, the bridge idea wasn't just for motorists it was also to deepen the channel so as to increase the ability of shipping US thermal coal out of Metro Vancouver ports since Washington and Oregon nixed having coal terminals in their states.

Why can't we just use ferries on the Fraser River? We have hundreds of kilometers of a natural, zero maintenance Highway sitting right there. The costs would be a fraction of spending billions and decades on rail transit.

North America in general is so behind in terms of public transportation, why don't we just copy what works in Europe?

1:55 and would have defeated the prepose of making this video.

Bus demand is not a perfect metric for future rail demand, busses sit in traffic, and highlighted in the case of the Massey crossing, people will literally have completely different travel patterns compared to if there was a reliable option that bypassed the bottlenecks on the roads.

Yeah Lee Haber! Go MVX!

A regional rail network for the Lower Mainland will be vitally necessary one day, so yes! This is right on. Let's get moving on it. Good film. Well thought through as a film and as a project. Applause to all those pushing for it !! 😃😃😃

I dream of a conservative green coalition in which the conservative love of infrastructure projects and the green love of the environment develops a bazillion nuclear powered trains. (BC Cons are the only party with pro-nuclear talking points this election cycle which is real weird to me)

7:00 MVX guy is just telling blatant lies, the whole project would not cost anything under 50 billion dollars. And probably even way higher than that

Interviewee can't pronounce Fraser, and proposes duplicating what the BCER interurban and VV&E failed to find a market for decades ago. Brilliant!

This tunnel or bridge upgrade is 30 YEARS overdue. Lets not forget that the constant "back and forth" between a bridge and tunnel was created by politicians replacing politicians. The Bridge option was axed by an incoming govt and if the election in one week changes govt...the tunnel will be axed and we will be back to a bridge. The tunnel also has not cleared an environmental review. The Feds have to give the ok to dig in the Fraser River. That review could take years. As mentioned the bottleneck will just just move to Vancouver's bridges. Time to build a 3rd Vancouver bridge at Boundary road over the North Fraser? Get traffic flowing into Richmond at #8 road? The road is already there and its mostly farmland. Run a highway south on #8 road all the way to Hwy 99 with a bridge over the South Fraser? Its inevitable to relieve the truck traffic from the Oak and Knight St bridges. Stop talking about building things....start building them.

Excellent video. We have bus service from Squamish to Vancouver & YVR which I used this month but it needs to double its frequency. I had to add 3 hours both ways due to the times not meshing with by flight times. What was especially grating was that I just returned from Scotland and traveled around exclusively on trains. I had All Day tickets so if I missed a train I could just catch the next one and it often arrived 15 MINUTES later!!!!! In my dreams.

Unfortunately almost no improvement will ever happen to the West Coast express without Translink ever being able to buy the ROW (very unlikely) or building one (impossible without NIMBY's torpedoing it.) This unfortunately is a consequence of how Vancouver was developed, it was literately built as CP Rail's terminus. Just about every proposal for commuter rail fails because they keep wanting to use the former BC Rail ROW which goes nowhere to nowhere. South Fraser? Not happening, ever. North Fraser, unlikely to ever happen. Tsawwassen, also impossible. The only two routes that are viable are Extending Amtrak Cascades and the Sea-to-Sky (Rocky Mountaineer) because those routes already exist, just the Rail ROW was left to rot by BNSF and CN respectively and aren't suitable for passenger rail at any reasonable speed (Cascades literately runs at like 30-50km/h on the Canadian side of the border because of how poor the rails are.) Basically just ask the question of "who is willing to buy the land to build a new ROW" and if the answer is "nobody" then nothing will happen. Only the Cascades HSR ever has any spec of possibility of happening and it would require building tunnels on the BC side because HSR needs straight ROW's, and the existing Amtrak Cascades BNSF ROW is not. The freight companies are not going to give up their ROW's or the land their existing ROW's sit on.

Have to like the MVX ambition but the guys are out to lunch on costs and methods. Seem like snake oil salesmen. Having actually met that board member previously, doesn't lend any further confidence too. More rail would be great though.

Great ideas. I’m curious why nothing was said about the North Shore? It badly needs rapid transit.

Never get why they didn't add passenger rail into the new massey tunnel plan for possible future expansion of Canada Line to Ladner and Tsawwassen, I mean it is perfect time to do it now instead of building a bridge in the future, but that's if there is a plan to expand it.

The tunnel was too small by 1980!

It’s good to see such a good and passionate channel grow

Stadler is making some lovely rolling stock just saying

I learned the hard way that the West Coast Express doesn’t go back to Vancouver in the evening. I thought it had the same hours as the sky train. I slept outside for 12hrs that day.

Regional line to the Okanagan too please

Why not a bridge and why not rapid transit on the existing rail line.

Meanwhile over here I'm team funicular

As an old dude, I'm very happy to see young people being interested in "boring" things like transit. We really need this sort of grassroots demand for better rail (metro and regional) if our governments are going to be motivated to build it.

TransLink is going bankrupt. fix that first

Did you see the robotaxi event yesterday (oct 10) they have a 16 passenger robovan planned that will provide transportation for 5-10 cents per mile. In other words, it will be cheaper than a 2;or 3 zone fare, quicker and much more convenient. And I really do believe that self driving vehicles will be here long before any new rail lines can be planned and built. So for now, I would say use regular buses to fill the need until the robovans and taxis come in 2-4 years.

Nice video!

Call me crazy but we shouldn't be encouraging commuting (for work) over such distances. Even with relatively efficient transportation, it's still a colossal waste of time and resources. Fix the affordability and walkability of our city centres so people don't need to live in Abbotsford and work in Vancouver.

Fool ! Westcoast Express costs the Taxpayer 34$ for EACH passenger trip. Frankly I DON"T want to subsidize (from MY tax $$) some twit who chooses to Save "slightly" on their housing costs @ 70$ a day.