Vancouver – Corey Burger

An Olympic experience

Courtesy of a good friend, a bunch of us went over on the weekend to see Canada’s Women Hockey Team play Slovakia. It was the game where the poor Slovakians lost 18-0 and were outshot 67-9.

At the end, handshakes. Photo credit: Joanna Sanders Boblash

To start off, I have to give massive credit to the Slovakian goalie, who really did try. She made some amazing saves but in the end it just wasn’t enough. At one point they had literally just finished announcing who had scored the last goal when the next one went in. The Slovakians also had some good chances, mostly because the Canadians were incredibly sloppy while passing in their own end. The crowd was pretty amazing, applauding the Slovakian goalie every time she made a great save (she made a lot of those) and at the end of the game giving the entire Slovakian team a standing ovation. The Canadian team was also gracious enough to simply skate off at the end, without receiving the same.

But before we even sat down for the game, we already had a bit of fun with venues. The website listed both Thunderbird Stadium at UBC and Canada Hockey Place (ex-GM Place) as the venue, so when we arrived at Thunderbird Stadium for the game we were rather rudely surprised to learn we had gone to the wrong place. Amazingly, there is no direct bus connection between the UBC and Hockey Place. So off on a quest we went, one bus and two Skytrain rides later, arriving shortly before the 5pm start. Or was it the 4:30pm start. The website and our tickets disagreed on that too.

Which brings us to security. The reason we were two hours early in getting to UBC was for the expected security, a saving grace and it turned out. Processing 18,000 fans into a stadium in a short period of time is hard but it ran fairly smoothly, even if it took the better part of 45 minutes standing in the concrete jungle that is the Georgia/Dunsmuir Viaducts and Skytrain line. After the game we set off to see the Olympic torch, which was by that point very neatly blocked off with an elegantly-designed barrier of 10′ of chain-link fence and concrete. Gulag chic was definitely in.

Transit was one of the bright spots of the whole day. The bus was busy, but not overly so. Of the many Skytrain trips we took, on all three lines, there were usually seats. I shudder to think what it would have been like without trains running on 90 sec headways and all those new cars that Translink purchased recently for the Expo/Millenium Lines. However, I really wonder just how much VANOC paid Translink for all the extra service. Too bad VANOC is beyond FOI reach. They claim they are going to release their budget after the games, so we will know eventually.

Olympic Line streetcar. Photo credit: Flickr user tc_terencec

Aside from seeing the game, I also wanted a chance to ride the Brussels- and Bombardier-supplied streetcar running on the new track between the Olympic Village Canada Line station and Granville Island. Thanks to the good transit connections, I managed it. It was smooth, clean, and quite busy even at nearly 9pm when we rode it. Apparently earlier in the day it had been packed. The car also had a pleasant odour of brand-new leather, coming from the hanging straps. Made a nice difference from the usual smells you can run into on older transit buses and trains.

We were fortunate enough to have a relative of one of my friends to stay with in Vancouver, so we didn’t have to find some of the very scarce hotel space available. They also lived in a decent place for transit, so we could get to and from their place without too much difficultly. Attempting to drive down would have been insane and impossible and there are few park-and-rides anywhere on the Skytrain system.

I am glad I had a chance to go and see the Olympics and all the effects it has had on Vancouver. I really hope that the City of Vancouver finds some way to keep the Olympic Line running, although they will need to find new vehicles. Not reopening the Georgia and Dunsmuir viaducts would also go a long way to making the downtown a better place. As for the rest of the legacy of the games, that remains to be seen.

Canada Line thoughts

Canada Line train on bridge over Fraser River

This is a bit belated, but I did managed to get over to Vancouver for the opening of the Canada Line, the newest addition to the SkyTrain network. First, a little bit of history. The Canada Line is a Public-Private Partnership, something that the BC Gov forced onto Translink as a condition of provincial funding. This means that it is actually operated by ProTrans BC and was built by InTransitBC, both largely owned by SNC Lavelin out of Montreal. The federal government demanding Translink call it the Canada Line as a condition of their funding.

That being said, Vancouver is the first Canadian city to have a direct rail link to the airport, something common in Europe as well as a few US cities like Portland.

Given I was coming from across the pond, I ended up starting at the Marine Drive station, just north of the Fraser. This turned out to be a good decision, because lines for northbound (Waterfront Station-bound) trains were fairly quiet, at least in the morning.

The Marine Drive station is pretty indicative of the elevated stations on the line. Lots of wood and glass. They were attractive, but the platforms were short, as can be seen in the second photo down, coming into one of the underground stations.

The stations also seriously lacked amenities. There were no bathrooms and few chairs in most of the stations. The stairs were narrow, with only escalators going up. Overall, the stations felt quickly built and cheap, as attractive as some of them were.

The cars themselves were fairly spacious, wider than the newer Mark II cars on the Skytrain. The had a single space for a bicycle and another for wheelchairs, both in one of the two cars.

The ride was smooth and fairly fast, especially compared to the old 98 B-line “bus rapid transit” or the even older Expo Line. The Expo Line now has some sections of track cause a lot of noise and sway, especially with the older Mark I SkyTrain cars.

One of the challenges with connections was that the bus lines haven’t yet been adjusted, something is coming with Labour Day. Both the 98 B-line and the 424 to the Airport are going away, while the 620 from Tsawwassen will be routed into Bridgeport Station. This is just some of the large number of bus changes coming, some of which are not making people very happy. Many people are now going to have to take both a bus and the Canada Line to downtown, as opposed to a single seat bus ride.

As can be expected for the opening of a major new transit line, the lines were crazy all day. Waterfront Station was especially bad, with waits running past an hour, from what I understand.

Overall, I am glad the Canada Line exists, but I think there are going to be serious capacity issues in the future. With the short platforms leading to inability to run larger trains, unlike the Skytrain system, expect crush capacity cars of 400 people very shortly. The real test will come this fall, so it should be interesting to see those numbers. To see more pictures, see my Flickr set.

Vancouver demos an electric car

Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson in MiEV (Image: Vancouver Sun) — Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson in MiEV

I managed to miss this last month, but the province, BC Hydro and the City of Vancouver signed a deal with Mitshubishi to test a production-ready electric car, the MiEV. Unlikely the low-speed electric cars Oak Bay recently let on their 50 km/h streets, this is a highway capable vehicle, like the ill-fated GM EV1 and the sort-of-already-here Tesla Roadster.

One of the great myths running around is that if we only switch all our vehicles to electric, hydrogen or another hypothetical cleaner fuel, all will be good. Aside from the major issues with the creation of the fuel for these vehicles, they ignore the reality that building auto-centric infrastructure is damaging our health, our communities and is ultimately financially unsustainable. Thankfully, Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson gets it (emphasis mine):

“We want to make Vancouver the greenest city in the world, and supporting this early adoption of plug-in electric cars is one way that Vancouver is becoming a leader in green technology. Electric vehicles are an important way to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions when combined with improvements to transit, biking and walking.”

By this time next year, we should have quite a few production electric vehicles on the road, including this MiEV, the Telsa Roadster (although small quantities are available now) and the Chevy Volt. We do live in interesting times.

Vancouver embraces open standards, data and open source

City of Vancouver emblem

A few days ago Vancouver was considering becoming an open city, embracing open source, open standards and open data. This week, that idea became a reality as Vancouver City Council adopted Andrea Reimer’s proposal.

What does this mean in the short term? Likely not much. We are in the middle of a recession, which means there is probably little software aquisition going on and thus little new open source software. As open standards usually follow the software that uses them, little is likely to change on that front either.

Which brings us to open data, where we will likely see the most immediate change. Much of the data that the City of Vancouver could release they have already collected, such as geospatial or demographic data. To get a good idea of the vast amount of information that becomes avaiable when a government takes the leap, take a look at this list about data.gov, the new US Federal government website dedicated to releasing as much data as possibly freely.

In my own little part of the world, we in the OpenStreetMap community here in Canada have been collaborating with the federal government’s Geobase project to get their data imported into OSM. Sadly, much of the information there is second class, as provinces and municipalities keep their latest and greatest to themselves.

Hopefully this decision, and the City of Toronto possibly following suit, will encourage more and more municipalities across Canada to realize that the value they will get from freeing their data and adhering to open standards far eclipses the lost revenue they might have gotten otherwise.