Just a reminder that this is about the same per/km cost as the Finch W LRT.

On 1 July 2026, Hefei Metro Line 7 Phase I opened. The fully underground southern tangential line is 18.9km with 14 stations. The line uses fully automated 6 car Type B trains and costs 240 million INT$/km to construct. The 9 year old Hefei Metro is now 276km long.

Yonge Street regularly has over 10x more pedestrians than cars, even in the rain. Yet cars get 2x more space. This video faces west at Yonge/Edward, and only captures the west sidewalk, and peds still out number cars. YongeTOmorrow with wider sidewalks & more dedicated pedestrian space is overdue.

This is an interesting example of design trade-offs and of the concept of "future proofing". Signaling-wise, Rennes's VAL could theoretically already get to 60 sec, but it was limited by the fact that, to save money, the JFK terminus was scaled diwn to built single-track back in the 1990s.

Montreals embarrassing Blue line extension, which officials has said costs a normal amount (in reality its ~10x the global median) portends a country which cannot build the transit it needs. See my new blog for more. www.thetransitbrief.net/p/everything...

There is really something in the "design-by-comment-on-spreadsheet" culture of Canada and the US that makes imitating Metro Madrid's model culturally impossible

I just watched Hoog's video on Madrid vs NYC SAS, and my favourite bit is about Metro Madrid's engineers keeping the discussion going over beers and tapas I can't imagine this in the Canadian context, where being passionate is highly discouraged in the public sector www.youtube.com/watch?v=utt-...

I had a great time hanging out with three amazing transportation advocates / designers: @fernkhahn.com, @auguststreet.ca, and @jedwinmok.com

Transit construction costs are the “price of living in a democracy today, as opposed to an autocracy”? Maybe versus the 1960s (poetically). But we were even building much more cheaply in 2007! Are France, Spain, and Korea (lower cost countries today) dictatorships?

eating bubble waffle and reminiscing about the brutal autocratic dictatorship that built us the canada line for $100m/km back in late 2000s canada 🫩😔

I wrote this article 12 years ago. Nothing has changed. Horodniceanu and Prendergast are gone, but new transit leaders across the US and Canada are still playing dumb (or actually are??) about this. It’s very depressing if you care about transit! nextcity.org/urbanist-new...

New things, when proposed, feel scary. Once they exist, they usually seem much less scary. Pedestrian streets, bike lanes, new housing developments.

I'm always quite amazed by the capacity of RFI designers to find non orthodox solutions when upgrading platform height from 30 to 55 cm.

It's not new that North American has an extreme cost problem when it comes to building transit. What is always shocking to me is just how in denial decision makers are about it. I can't tell if this person is lying to glaze the project, or simply doesn't care to know if what they're saying is true.

Canada has some of the highest per-capita GHG emissions on earth, higher than even the US and Russia, but their soooo strict environmental norms are the reason they have to build so little new transit for their money and pour so much embodied carbon into the stations. Checks out.

Montreal’s Blue Line Extension believes they are building at “competitive” costs. The project is over $1B/km… Italy, Spain, and South Korea (democracies with environmental laws!) are building underground metros for ~$150M/km. The global average is ~ $300M/km! montrealgazette.com/news/costs-o...

It’s surreal seeing it come full circle. The people stuck in the crowded Church Street sidewalk are now free to roam the streets! (At least during the 2 month pedestrianization pilot) Streets are for the people!

Metrolinx will soon “set up a procurement to think through how to best procure 1400 rail cars - specifically EMUs” Disappointed that we need a procurement for the procurement for a world-standard technology, but 11 years after GO RER, a decision has been made. baby steps, baby steps…

Mort d’auteur but I don’t think Henry George would agree with Patrick Condon that we should tax housing development instead of land rents to address housing affordability.

Not RMTransit, but a podcast-video thing from me and Jonathan English! This time on the Eglinton Crosstown. youtu.be/wgAlgu7BCoI?...

It took an indigenous nation--and land not ruled by municipal zoning--to provide the housing that Vancouver desperately needs near downtown. Free link to story with wise words from @khelsilem.bsky.social : www.nytimes.com/2026/06/15/o...

What We Can Learn from French Trams

Got buried on Friday, but these are pretty extraordinary lengths to go to avoid just putting in catenary. For context, Caltrain Mod was $2.5b and that was for 50 route miles of wire and a new fleet that’s ~5x larger (that will likely outperform the battery trains because batteries are heavy).

The transit cost problem feels so hard to advocate for. It’s easy to say “fund transit more”. Much harder: “so, Italy and Korea and others build transit more cheaply. Yes, that much cheaper. It’s because of consultants and risk management and standardization and overbuilt stations…”

In defence of the Toronto street festival. It’s simple supply & demand. Their popularity proves we need more pedestrianized streets, yet Toronto makes it so hard. A city where the ethos is people in public space is a problem while Montreal’s is that’s where people belong. My @thestar.com column.

My coauthor pulled their name because they couldn't risk losing funding from the project delivery industry. That is politics, but it should also raise big red flags. We need to start saying the quiet part out loud and we should be able to say it without fear www.seattletimes.com/opinion/soun...

Unserious, particularly amid a fuel crisis. We need: - A design standards initiative to control first-order system costs (tunnels, grade seps, stations) - Generous support for projects that comply (80/20) - Steady and increased planning funding to develop proposals under these criteria

@joshmatlow.bsky.social and @chrismoise.ca bring forward a motion for a Pedestrian Streets Program for Toronto!

The way Saint-Étienne modernized it's tram in the 1970s-2000s is a great lesson for cities like Toronto, Boston, Philly, San Francisco etc. It's all there: circulation planning, new dedicated RoW, priority route with systematic descoping of lateral streets (RI-RO) etc.

Anglo neoliberalism, 1980s:"Ahah look at those silly communists and their planned economy, making five-year plans like they can really see the direction the wild forces of the economy will take us!" Anglosphere planning, 2020s: "Here is my 60-year plan, that will be built by my Thousand-Year Reich"

In the case of both Ontario and Alberta, Canadian conservative provincial governments like trains but hate bike lanes and speed cameras. It’s an interesting contrast.

Towers near transit — great. Now give me European-style mid-rises everywhere else.

The councillors blaming the province every time a development gets approved (in this case Bravo) need to have some self respect. No one made you designate the Downtown growth area. Acknowledge that growth needs to happen somewhere, there are trade offs and this is what you picked. Be adults.

The way SFCTA Geary/19th planners are using “integrated part of the region’s rail network” here indicates they seem to believe that a one seat ride is the only way to integrate transit trips. www.sfcta.org/sites/defaul...

Prague's Holešovice neighborhood circulation plan is a good example of how the "Divert Through Traffic" strategy is all about disentangling the main transit and traffic corridors Red: transit routes, mostly in mixed traffic but only local Yellow: main car thoroughfares. The do not overlap.

Zermatt is an interesting place. Here’s the Gornergrat up to the mountain departing over a parade of these little battery powered vans and utility vehicles. There are no private cars up here, but plenty of heavy construction equipment since it’s off-season. Oh, and the Matterhorn.

so uhh..I'd much rather those $20 million be thrown to installing real and effective PEDs, not fences. if our costs were normal, they'd fund TMU and a couple stations. if our costs were bad it'd fund just TMU. still a good proof of concept. but we're not "affording" even a single station, are we?

some have complained loudly about the red paint (the sight of the colour, but even some conspiracy-brained fearmongering about toxic fumes) but they've been oh-so important in making it clear that these lanes are for transit and not cars, and enough comply to render them effective. red lanes work!

Toronto’s transit cost disease has hit… metal fences. Just a reminder that $2M CAD is about the cost of half height PSGs for one platform in Hong Kong. Then we use NYC to justify our wild cost estimates for actual screen doors. The incuriosity and Anglo echo-chamber here is astounding.

no greater relief and bout of envy than seeing someone expertly write on a topic you were mulling over as a future writing topic. this is excellent, and I humbly would like to suggest my versement transport piece as a complementary read : www.substack-bahn.net/p/how-france...

Here is an inspiration for Toronto on how to manage left turns with center-running tram lanes. Cars wait in the rightmost lane instead of occupying the tram lane and yield to trams. It seems to work pretty fine in a very busy unsignalized intersection.

An excellent paper that fails to consider one key fact: In New York, there are no telephones. We can only communicate with New Jersey via parlays and duels arranged in Weehawken from which survival is not guaranteed.

“Once the agencies decided that they wanted to cooperate, the technical obstacles were all surmountable.”

Paris’ RER is a perfect example of solving phone call problems. Instead of duplicating infrastructure because different agencies controlled it, Paris made sharing work. It saved a fortune and created Europe’s most impressive regional rail network. open.substack.com/pub/infrasto...

A familiar story for Californians and Washingtonians, and elsewhere in the US: An agency takes a crayon at 5% design - when scope, schedule, budget and risks are largely undefined - to the voters for money to advance preliminary designs AND construction for FTA local match.

Bzzzt, sorry, wrong attitude! Make it cheaper.

The entire TTC bus network is designed to do exactly this!

Hahahahahaha. We compared to the transit agency with the worst costs on the planet and found that our numbers were in the same ballpark so it's ok.

In honour of the opening of the new Anse-à-l'Orme (A3) branch, here is the REM overlaid other Canadian cities. I tried to roughly centre Gare Centrale with the centre of the city to convey just how much high-quality, automated rail has been built in such a relatively short period of time!!