As you note with different technologies, it is important to distinguish them. Monorails and Maglevs are proven technology and have systems running in many different countries. This is especially true with monorails which have been around for more than a century and carries millions of passengers...

No, it's standard catenary but battery technology is advancing so quickly that it won't be long until average catenary trains can run a decent amount by just the batteries it already has. It's like Vancouver's trolleys can run short lengths without the catenary. Remember with new technology...

Using your Stouffville map as an example..................If RER is going to Unionville than I could see GO commuter leaving Union with one stop at Kennedy {and possible Scar as it is a RER interchange} and then express to Unionville while RER carries all the inter-city passengers. Someone from...

^^ I agree. I don't think Canada will see any true HSR in any of our life times. The political will simply isn't there and CN & CP have huge political sway in Ottawa. Service in The Corridor will certainly improve but again that says precious little as it couldn't get much worse.

When RER finally gets going and IF they bring in complete fare integration, I think you will find an increasing disparity in services between GO Commuter and GO RER. As RER is up and running I can see GO dropping all of it's Toronto commuter stops except those at subway interchanges. I can...

London will never {thank God} become like Kitchener. Unlike KWC, London will never be a Toronto commuter town and GO rail to the city would be a supreme waste of money. It will never become part of the Toronto urban blob as it is simply too far. London, unlike KWC, is also a regional centre and...

^ I do appreciate that but those are very niche situations. La Paz has being employing aerial cable car system for 6 years and has been a stellar success and now has 9 lines and covers 34 km in an extremely densely population and hilly city. It now carries nearly 350,000 passengers a day and...

Obviously the potential extensions of Finch LRT would be east to Yonge and south to the new Woodbine GO station. Eventually they will be built but the good news is that they can be built much faster and cheaper than the current line. This is due to battery technology. The extensions need not...

BINGO! RER has the ability to be the most transformative rapid transit expansion since 1970 when the subways were built. It has the potential to literally move millions of Torontonians in the future and could easily match or even succeed current subway ridership which is the case in many cities...

These trackless {also known as rubber tired trams} have inherent problems that don't come with the brochure which is why their deployment has been very limited and why Bombardier stopped producing them. Although the technology is sound, they were built to offer the the best of both worlds of LRT...

This is what happens when you have politicians that view transit as a fiefdom and not as a system.

To most non-VIA rail users, HFR will mean squat unless it comes with significantly higher speeds/shorter trip times. Winning over NEW riders will require VIA to offer a service that is truly enticing and if it doesn't then people will simply view it as more frequent slow boat to China...

I think a lot of the future forecasts of the OL & Yonge will very much depend upon the success or failure of RER. RER is a 200 km subway in the making if ML decides to create it as such which of course requires complete fare integration and high frequency.

Not only is the piecemeal approach time consuming, it is also a potential huge waste of money. What happens when Metrolinx finally has to make a decision about electrification and goes with catenary? All the lines and bridges that they have upgraded have to have the poles and infrastructure put...

YRT seems to have followed the US model of rapid transit.........................build elaborate and effective systems but once opened don't provide the frequency to make the systems rapid or even appealing.

There are also other advantages of hydrogen namely far lower maintenance costs, superior time efficiency over batteries, and more reliability. Catenary are not only expensive to build but also expensive to maintain and offer lower reliability due to the potential damage from wind/snow/ice...

I don't think we will ever see {at least for the next 50 years} any form of battery freight and battery trains will be limited to relatively short route passenger rail. Hydrogen is inherently more expensive than direct electrical supply but those costs are off set by the massive amount of...

Actually London nearly got an Underground, or at least a mini one. Part of the original rapid transit proposal was a three-quarter km LRT tunnel with 2 stations under Richmond but the blow-back was huge. It would have required the demolition of many historic buildings and would have taken ages...

Metrolinx is agonisingly slow when it comes to building railways and stations but they excel at building mega-garages at lightening speed.

The key issue is not the length of the stations at the beginning but rather if they can be expanded. The problem with the Canada Line is that they can only be expanded another 10 meters to accommodate 50 meter trains. This is quite unlike the Expo, Mill, Evergreen Lines which are built to 70...