Canada

Jokes based on the band REM's hit songs aside, this is yet another exciting failure from a public-private partnership. On the west coast, we're delighted to be learning from the example played out daily by our BCFerries service, tasked with ferrying cars and passengers between our financial hub and our capital city.

Initially it resembled a good partnership, a reliable and reasonably-fast service. But as the old staff cycled out and the partnership was left to stand on its own, it's begun failing repeatedly. Its most blatant recent gaffe was choosing to deploy its relief equipment (spares), normally kept in ready to allow for repairs and business continuity in the face of disasters and surprises, into regular service. Now the smallest upset or failure due to delayed/skipped maintenance can result in 9-12 hours of travel delays. It's so great.

With the degredation of regional rail in Canada. Many people have poor opinions on it as they don't know that it could be significantly better. It is not uncommon for driving to be faster than the train between urban centers. This has contributed to a NIMBYism approach to a lot of rail projects. Even the REM faced pushback for elevated tracks in some downtown areas and that portion of the plan is still being reworked, with more expensive tunneling being pushed as a better solution. They claimed the elevated rail would be too noisy and ugly (but a 6 lane road packed with traffic is fine).

Theres also the issues that our developers and zoning laws prioritize building car centric suburbs and strip malls, which are nearly impossible to service with local transit and degrades the quality of regional connections to those areas. If we want good rail transit, we'll have too approach it from a wider perspective than just building the tracks.

Did you read the article? This was a service disruption, which can be expected on the opening day of a new service. What does investments in track km have to do with first day operations?