Photo: The Mountain and the Beach

Even from north of the Fraser, Mount Baker dominates the horizon when clouds or haze don't get in the way, and when you're high enough for its reaches to be lifted over the treeline. Further south, in White Rock, it doesn't so much dominate the view as it conquers it and makes it its own. Here Mount Baker towers over East Beach in White Rock, snowcapped and clear as day.


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Photo: From Kite to Waves

There's not much that I can say about this one that isn't immediately apparent. I don't have any real experience with water sports or kitesurfing or anything like that. So instead, here's a shot I took of a kitesurfer taking advantage of a good wind over Semiahmoo Bay just off White Rock, on the sort of blue sky day that brings everyone down to the beach.

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Photo: Pier to the Breakwater

One pier, built nearly a hundred years ago, anchors the waterfront drag of White Rock. It's easy to miss even if you head over to West Beach; the first time I was there I missed it entirely. It's far more low-key than other piers you might think of, but that's part of its charm. There's no amusement park or midway-by-the-sea here, just people walking back and forth and diving into the cool Pacific just short of the rocky breakwater.


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Photo: The People on the Seashore

If the right sort of beach is around, a trip down there can put some things into perspective--Semiahmoo Bay, on the shore of which you'll find White Rock, is one I've found that's good for that. For me, the distant profiles of Point Roberts and the Gulf Islands help reinforce the sense of scale and quiet emptiness that you can't find in a city. In places like this, people are people and nature is everything.


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Photo: It's White and Rocky

White Rock, British Columbia is as close to California as the Lower Mainland gets, geographically and atmospherically. There is one thing that it has that California doesn't, however--the white rock, the glacial erratic that gave the city its name. I took this shot from the pier at West Beach, and really... that's one hell of a white rock, no question.


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Photo: The Reeds and Stainless Water

When I landed in Vancouver back in 2010, public art was everywhere as part of the Vancouver Biennale project. Now, though, that project has run its course and aside from the incredibly creepy laughing statues over at Denman and Davie, most of them have been removed--but there are still a few, here and there. A little while ago in Richmond I encountered the stainless steel sculpture "Water #10" by Jun Ren, one I'd never encountered before. It's only a block from Aberdeen Station, but might as well be in its own world.


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Photo: Late Spring, High Snow

The skiing runs at Grouse Mountain are easily visible from much of the Vancouver area--at night they're a chain of artificial constellations midway up the vault of the sky, and on clear days you can see where the trees give way to the snow and where the Eye of the Wind turbine spins away. I took this photo back in May from North Vancouver, when there was still plenty of snow on the slopes; even with a 4000-foot elevation, I don't imagine much snow would still be around now.


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Photo: In Flight Above the City Fields

You might not know it from just looking at it, but this picture was taken in the literal middle of Surrey, a city of nearly five hundred thousand people. That's what the Agricultural Land Reserve gets you; the land around the Serpentine and Nicomekl Rivers might as well be the countryside, a hundred kilometers from the nearest city. It certainly gives more character than an endless parade of cookie-cutter subdivisions and strip malls.

There are a lot of cities that would be a lot better off today if they'd left room for land like this.


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Photo: A Sign of the Times

Like everything else, signage evolves. It has to. The memetic environment has grown consistently fiercer over the last hundred years, with arrays of things all vying for the strictly limited attention of passers-by. Eighty years ago people used hand-painted signs on the sides of buildings, after the war Vancouver became one of the world capitals of neon signage, and today you'll find signs that are mostly clear, bold, and simple.

Still, there are some survivors from old times - and far from being out of style, their very uniqueness and out-of-step nature makes them more successful in drawing attention. Take the Safeway at Lonsdale and 13th in North Vancouver; unlike the streamlined, boxes of today, it hearkens back to the Googie architectural sensibilities of the 1950s and early 1960s.I took a picture of the sign when I was through there last weekend; a piece of a different world that managed to survive into this one.


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Photo: The Developing Developments

All jokes aside, since coming out west I've found that it's difficult to get a bead on the city of Surrey. Depending on what I'm talking about at the time, it's easy to think of it as the Mississauga of the West or Vancouver's Scarborough or just the red-headed stepchild of the Lower Mainland, but it doesn't really fit into any convenient category; the juxtaposition of low-density suburbs, the wide-open countryside between the rivers, and its work-in-progress downtown come together to make a whole that isn't commonly encountered back east.

The Central City Tower - that bluish, sharp-roofed skyscraper in the photo down there - is, for the moment, one of the most obvious signs of this juxtaposition: the tallest building in Surrey, clearly visible poking above the treeline from New West, and yet surrounded by townhouses and apartment blocks and open fields awaiting redevelopment. With the recent completion of Surrey's new central library and the new city hall under construction on the former site of a strip mall, the place will no doubt look a lot different in ten or twenty years. For now, though, it seems almost awkwardly paused between the past and the future.


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By the Light of the Rails

The advantage of being several thousand kilometers from Toronto is that aside from freaks out here like me who read the Toronto Star, only the news that's of significant importance and affect makes it this far. Thankfully the light rail antics of hizzoner da mayor don't fall into that, since whether or not Toronto builds any of those lines will have no real impact anywhere west of Thunder Bay. Given that, it's actually rather comforting to see municipal leaders on this end of the country giving an honest look at light rail, rather than hooking the pantograph to an ideological lightning rod to score some cheap political points.

Earlier this week, Surrey mayor Dianne Watts used her state-of-the-city address to reiterate her calls for the installation of a comprehensive light rail network in British Columbia's second-largest city, a city which remains firmly rooted in the twentieth century in terms of higher-order transit. That something needs to be done is undeniable - over the next few decades, estimates have Surrey's population outstripping Vancouver's, and Surrey barely has the road capacity to serve its current population. What's more, building purely with a focus to the automobile, catering to the driver above all else, only sets up Surrey for a long and painful fall should that mode end up losing the primacy it has commanded for decades now.

Personally, I'd like to see light rail go in the ground down in Surrey. Without a higher-order transit system to tie it together and offer a transportation alternative that's more reliable than buses, Surrey will remain a place of low-density sprawl, spread out and disconnected from itself. It's not as if Surrey would be going it alone, either. When you look at all those cities in the United States and Canada west of the Mississippi, Vancouver is one of two that doesn't rely on light rail exclusively. Los Angeles is the other one, and even it has invested far more in the expansion of its light rail network than its subways; it's even got its own Expo Line set to open this year. Unlike in Toronto, where it's easy for people who aren't deeply familiar with the situation to equate light rail with streetcars, Metro Vancouver is surrounded by examples of the alternative.

And yet...

One of the Muni Metro's hybrid heavy streetcar/light rail trains moves folks through San Francisco.

Light rail isn't politicized out here yet, and right now there's no worry that it will be; in a manner befitting the Mississauga of the West, Mayor Dianne Watts crushed her opponents last year with a commanding eighty-one percent of the vote; Rob Ford may talk about mandates from here to Siberia, but eight out of every ten is one hell of a mandate. Sure, there's always the chance that some challenger will rise up between now and 2014 and attempt to use light rail as a wedge issue, but without local, concrete examples to distort like the so-called "St. Clair disaster" in Toronto, it's doubtful someone would go particularly far with that.

If someone did, though, I already know who'd be lining up behind them. The folks at SkyTrain for Surrey are still up to their old tricks, still describing light rail as "cataclysmic" with a straight face, still steadfast in their conviction that Surrey will not be property served by anything less than SkyTrain. In this, I see early parallels to what's going on now in Toronto - the only difference is in the different prestige modes. In Toronto it's the subway that's sexy, so Scarborough wants a subway. Here it's the SkyTrain that's the most important part of the system, and so it's what everyone wants. These attitudes have already had influence on the Metro Vancouver transit network - the original plan for the Evergreen Line had it using LRT rather than SkyTrain technology - but thankfully they were dealt with in a manner befitting calm, responsible adults, and the well here is still free of poison.

Surrey needs transit, yes. But is an expensive series of SkyTrain extensions the best way to deliver it? Personally, I think Surrey would be better served by a comprehensive light rail network capable not only of delivering riders to the SkyTrain but speeding people through Surrey as well. The money that would have otherwise gone to stringing more elevated tracks along King George Highway would, I think, be better spent on system upgrades, like extending Expo Line stations so that they can accommodate even bigger trains. I mean, when it's standing room only on a train to Surrey at 10 o'clock at night in Columbia Station, I have to wonder how far away we are from hitting capacity ceilings.

Standing Room Only

I've been a regular SkyTrain rider for long enough now, I think, to start picking up on some patterns. Enough that I can tell there seems to have been a definite upswing in ridership since late 2010, in keeping with that massive wall ad in Granville Station that crows about how Metro has experienced a 9% increase in transit usage since the Olympics. (Incidentally, I think the Olympics might be a good "year zero" for a Vancouver-specific calendar, "Before the Olympics" and "After the Olympics," much like a civilization arising after a nuclear war might divide their calendar into "Before the Apocalypse" and "After the Apocalypse.") One thing I've noticed in particular is that when I'm travelling during the week, it's becoming more and more difficult to avoid trains that are already packed to the rafters - even when you're boarding at Granville.

It happens to me fairly regularly on my usual trips into and away from downtown Vancouver, partially because I seem to have a particular knack for arriving on the platform when the next train is an Expo Line train to Surrey. Though the lines aren't signed when trains are westbound, it's always blindingly obvious when an Expo Line train pulls into Columbia Station; it's the one that's already full. Presumably it had been full ever since pulling out of Surrey Central Station, where more than twenty bus routes pulling in riders from across the southland converge. By the same token, when I arrive on the Granville platform shortly after my 9:30 clockout, not only is the platform packed once the train arrives, but it's almost always an Expo Line train that's packed as well. Nine times out of ten, it seems to be a Mark I train on top of that, which only makes the ensuing ride even more fun. Even if it's not crammed then, if it's a game day, there'll be a hundred or so people shoving aboard at Stadium/Chinatown.

On the whole, if you considered the ridership figures of the SkyTrain in conjunction with the capacity of its rolling stock, I wouldn't be surprised if in that respect it proved to be busier than the Toronto subway. Outside of rush hours, I don't remember ever encountering crowds like I do here - but it feels like you could fit an entire SkyTrain inside a Toronto subway train and have room left over.

Don't misunderstand me - I'm not trying to complain about the room. I sit down at work, it's nice to be able to stand up for a while, all I'm looking for in that circumstance is something to lean on that isn't a door that could theoretically open between stations and send me tumbling to the ground. I'm used to such conditions, and the only real annoyance I have is the way my arm starts to get tired when I'm holding on to one of the poles. No, what I'm trying to consider is the view of someone who's new to transit, or only an occasional user of transit - how welcoming is a train going to be when some people have to get off just to allow riders to alight?

It looks a lot smaller than it really is from this perspective.

I ran the numbers to see if it was cost-effective for me to use transit, but that was only because of my curiosity; I have no intention of trading my FareCard for an ignition key. However, I'm not the sort of person that TransLink really needs to consider; most people wouldn't run those numbers. The important people in this consideration are, I think, the occasional riders - the riders by choice. Many of them would look at the packed conditions, at the cars where there's not much chance of hurting yourself in the event of a sudden braking maneuver because you've got a dozen people around you to cushion your fall, and ask themselves why they weren't just driving. At least when you're behind the wheel of a car you don't have strangers pressing in on you from every direction.

I'm not sure what TransLink's loading standards are. Still, if Surrey's population continues growing without a concomitant expansion of the employment sector in the southland, trains connecting Surrey and Vancouver are only going to become more crowded. It's something that won't be solved easily, but there are a lot of ways to go about it - additional trains, lower headways, the exclusive use of bigger Mark II trains on the Expo Line, and more long-term concepts like the extension of West Coast Express service across the Fraser to provide another route to Vancouver. Hell, maybe we could convince some other city to build an ICTS network just so there'd be someone to unload the old trains onto.

The only thing that can't be done, if Metro's transit network is to gain greater relevance in the future, is nothing.

Photo: A Bump in the Canada Line

There are very few places where it's possible to take an overhead shot of a Canada Line train, considering that it's underground through Vancouver and elevated across much of Richmond. The only point at which the line is mostly surface-level is on Sea Island, near Vancouver International Airport - this photograph was taken from an overhead walkway leading to Sea Island Centre Station. The train honestly looks a bit strange to me, seen from this angle.

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Photo: Industry, Nature and the Setting Sun

Befitting its nature as an aggregate of silt, Lulu Island is a rather level place. Pretty much anywhere in its eastern half, its horizon is dominated by the main tower at the Lafarge cement plant in the southeast. It's visible equally well from parts of Delta and New Westminster. This photo was taken at maximum zoom from the intersection of Eighth Street and Queens Avenue in New Westminster, the absence of any other buildings notwithstanding, and I like the contrast between industry and nature here.

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Photo: Bridging Again the Waters

Construction on the new Port Mann Bridge, providing a more effective link between Surrey and Coquitlam, is proceeding apace and it's looking more and more like the SkyBridge every day. Particularly when you consider the degree to which the old Port Mann Bridge resembles the Patullo Bridge, it's practically as if the planners over there said "yeah, New Westminster is awesome, so let's just copy their style."


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Why Blocking Bunny Rides the SkyTrain

I don't have much cause to complain about the SkyTrain. That was one of the biggest things I had to get used to on moving here from Toronto, where complaining about the failings of public transit is something akin to a sport. For more than a year now, the SkyTrain has got me where I needed to go and back again with only a couple of hiccups along the way.

Nevertheless, it's not perfect. I noticed one aspect of this immediately upon moving here - specifically, the way people waiting on the platform deal with the doors. There is a strange but consistent tendency among Vancouver transit riders to crowd around the doors of a train before they even open, as if they don't expect anyone already riding to alight at that station. Sometimes it feels like a contest of wills; the doors clunk open and people on the platform have already started closing in, and there's nothing to it but for you to move forward and make them make a space for you to pass through by force of presence. It's something that doesn't happen nearly as often on the Toronto subway; there, in my experience, people on the platform will allow passengers to alight before boarding themselves.

Recently TransLink ran the Transit Pet Peeve Battle, a voting contest to determine which of a number of options was the biggest breach of transit etiquette. Ultimately the voting came down to two - Funky Ferret, "known for wearing one splash of perfume or cologne too many or exuding excessive body odour (especially during the summer months)," and Blocking Bunny, who "likes to stand as close to the SkyTrain doors as possible while standing on the platform." Ultimately Funky Ferret won, but Blocking Bunny isn't going to go away very soon either.

I've been trying to figure this out for a while, and I've come to the conclusion that there's about twenty-five years worth of reasons why.

Not the biggest doors in the world on a Mark I train, for starters.

Not many cities run transit systems like Vancouver does. The SkyTrain uses what was originally called ICTS or Intermediate Capacity Transit System, something that should be blindingly obvious to anyone attempting to board an Expo Line train at Stadium-Chinatown after a game. Vancouver was effectively the launch customer for this technology - the Scarborough RT in Toronto, which uses the same equipment, is so short that it's basically a proof-of-concept shuttle between the subway and a mall - but it didn't spread much beyond that; the only other city that uses ICTS, as contrasted to the updated Advanced Rapid Transit available now, is Detroit.

Since the SkyTrain is an intermediate capacity system, some tradeoffs were necessary. Compared to the subway trains of Montreal, Toronto, or Los Angeles, the cars themselves aren't very big. This is a particular issue on the Mark I cars, the boxy rolling stock that came with the SkyTrain back in 1985. There just isn't all that much room on them... particularly not when you're standing rather than sitting. The new Mark II trains are a lot better in this regard; they're roomier in general, and the articulated points in the middle of the cars are great places for standers to hang out with minimal impact to passenger flow. It's too bad that sometimes Mark II trains seem to be rarer than hen's teeth.

Here's how it goes, the way I see it - the SkyTrain starts up in 1985 with the original Mark I trains. It doesn't take long for people to figure out the best places to stand in these trains: the doors. You can brace yourself against one of the dividers and have a smooth ride. When I find myself on a Mark I with room to maneuver this is generally my tactic, switching between sets of doors as the train passes from center-platform to side-platform stations - of course, not everyone does this. For seventeen years, this was all there was; the first Mark II trains didn't arrive until the opening of the Millennium Line in 2002. What this long dominance of the system resulted in, I think, was the inculcation of the idea that just because someone is standing next to the doors, it doesn't mean they're getting off at the next station. In Toronto, this isn't really an issue; the doors are big enough that people can be leaning against both dividers and still leave enough room for alighting and boarding.

Blocking Bunny's actions can also be explained by the nature of the system as a whole - namely, the fact that it's automated. Stations are simple matters for SkyTrains; they arrive, hold their doors open for thirty seconds, then close them and depart, so long as no one tries to hold closing doors open for too long. They stay open for thirty seconds regardless of whether the platform is empty or busier than a Beatles concert in 1964. This can be a definite problem sometimes - on one particularly packed Expo Line train heading east after a game had just let out, the doors started trying to close before people had finished alighting, let alone boarding. Toronto trains don't have this trouble - the crew of each includes a guard, who sits in the middle car and manually opens and closes the doors. I've heard of Toronto trains taking upwards of two minutes to load and unload in busy stations at busy times.

So that, I think, is why Blocking Bunny rides the SkyTrain; because the nature of the system itself magnifies the perceived need for some riders to exhibit those traits. We may not like it, but we're stuck with it for the indefinite future.

Who's Condoning All These Condominiums?

One of the reasons I live in New Westminster, as opposed to Vancouver itself, is affordability - namely, while I can afford to live in New West with the lifestyle that I want, that being proximity to a SkyTrain station and services available within walking distance, I found it considerably more difficult to find such a place in Vancouver. Even with a recent rent increase, I still pay less than the Metro Vancouver average monthly rent of $864, as per Spacing Vancouver. According to the City of Vancouver, the average rent for a purpose-built one-bedroom apartment there was $1,041 a month in 2009; not necessarily unaffordable, but it doesn't exactly leave all that much leeway for things like food and transportation and entertainment and savings. Here in New Westminster I'm able to live fairly comfortably, and that's all I'm really looking for.

Even so, as a renter I can't help but look with jaundiced eyes at the nature of the residential projects I see sprouting up across Metro, and New West is no exception. While the transformed skyline created by the condo towers of Plaza 88 was already there when I moved here, similar projects are just starting to get off the ground. Earlier this week, the New Westminster News Leader reported on the presentation for a proposal to build a six-story, 118-unit condo structure on Royal Avenue, on the site of what is now rental apartments.

So it goes; it's nothing new. Most likely the biggest effect it will have on me will be through the noise of construction. At the same time, I can't help but feel vaguely threatened by the prospect.

Apartments along Royal Avenue in New Westminster, across the street from City Hall and on the site of the proposed new condo.

Renters occupy a particular place in North American society, where the general expectation is that everyone is striving to own their own home... a goal that has become much more difficult thanks to the fallout of the economic crisis, but culture takes longer to respond to stimuli than the money markets. Opinions vary from place to place; it's not unusual to be a university student or twentysomething renting your own pad, but there are those like teabagger Judson Phillips who last year suggested that renters should not be allowed to vote. Renters aren't second-class citizens - at the same time, though, governments don't exactly pay particularly fine attention to the situations renters can find themselves in.

For some, ownership just isn't an option. Before I made the decision to move out west, I was looking at the prospect of buying a condo in Toronto - a prospect that the state of my paystub kiboshed almost immediately; aside from a few units up in Crescent Town, the sort of sensible mortgage that I could get wouldn't have got me anything in the city, and even then I didn't much like the prospect of almost totally draining my savings to make the down payment. Here in Metro, of course, the price situation is even worse.

So it's no real surprise that developers are building condos; that's where the money is. With that focus on the money, though, renters are losing out. Sure, rental accommodations are being built, but it's just a fraction - fewer than one in five of all apartments built in Vancouver between 1990 and 2009 were rentals. I'm not sure what the numbers for New Westminster are, but I wouldn't be surprised if the ratio was broadly similar. Still, this focus on condos, if permitted to keep on chugging to its logical conclusion, portends a serious housing problem in Metro Vancouver - simply that there aren't enough housing spaces for people wanting to live there, and the housing spaces that are there are so expensive that the residents are perched on the rim of poverty.

The cities of Metro Vancouver want to build better futures for themselves - that's always the case, after all. Still, in the wake of this weekend's elections, it behooves them to take actions to ensure those better futures, to ensure that there's space for renters and not just homeowners within them.

What Is Your Major Malfunction, SkyTrain?

Maybe it's the wintry weather that's doing it. Whatever the cause, it hasn't even been a week since the last major SkyTrain delay that I'm aware of; this morning, as I write this, the entire Expo Line from Waterfront to King George is totally non-functional, with service maintained only through bus bridges and transfers along the Millennium Line. Until things get fixed, those rails aren't exactly where I'd want to be - visiting SkyTrain stations during system delays just reinforces how important the system is to Metro Vancouver, through the sheer number of people that get marooned on the platforms. It's a good thing this didn't happen on a weekday, or the chaos would be total - the system just doesn't have that much flex in it.

Information on what the problem actually is is spotty - News1130's tweet just speaks of "major delays," and while TransLink has announced through its Twitter feed that they're working on fixing it, they don't have any estimated time of repair for... whatever it is. And that's just it - the nature of the problem is purely a matter for speculation. I don't know, and TransLink doesn't really tell. I mean, at least earlier in the week they mentioned that the problem had to do with a busted switch, presumably one of the ones governing the junctions around Columbia Station - yet that only delayed service until SkyTrain Control organized the short turns at New Westminster.

What kind of problem could be bad enough to shut down the entire line?

A Mark I SkyTrain after crossing the SkyBridge, on a day when the Expo Line was actually running.

Information is power, and that applies equally to transit riders as it does to transit operators. Knowing where you're going is important, yes - but knowing why things break has relevance too. It irks me when I hear SkyTrain Control come on the loudspeakers about system delays or timed-out trains or whatever, but when the situation's all resolved, we hear no more about it. That's missing the most important points: namely, why did the delay occur to begin with, and what is TransLink doing to ensure, to the best of its abilities, that it doesn't happen again?

I mean, if you were a motorist and your car suddenly started making loud grinding noises with smoke rising from underneath the hood, you'd want to take it to a mechanic pretty quick, wouldn't you? And once everything was fixed, would you be satisfied with the mechanic only telling you just that - that everything was fixed? Isn't it even more important to know what the problem is, so that it can be avoided in the future?

Things are a bit different for SkyTrain passengers, yes - maintenance of the trackage and the rolling stock is not our responsibility. Nevertheless, the SkyTrain is how hundreds of thousands of people get around every day. Personally, I want for TransLink to publicly acknowledge and take stock of its problems, and demonstrate what it's doing to fix them. That's the mark of a good transit operator - otherwise, there's the risk of falling into a situation like the Toronto Transit Commission, where massive and unexplained delays are a simple fact of life.

Scheduled Track Chaos

It's a fact - rails get weathered, rails get old, rails need to be replaced. The SkyTrain, for all of its skyness, is still a train and thus is not immune to the necessity of maintenance. Generally speaking, though, in the year that I've been living here it's something that I didn't need to consider - presumably, the track got polished when it needed to, and the details were none of my concern.

Now, TransLink has gone and made it my concern - mine, and everyone in Metro Vancouver who uses the Expo Line. For this entire weekend, TransLink is undertaking what appears to be a substantial maintenance program between Edmonds Station and Metrotown Station. Through that portion of the system, eastbound and westbound trains are obligated to use a single track, and because head-on collisions would not reflect well on its transit boosting, the train frequency on the tracks between Waterfront and Columbia has been dialed down substantially - by about a factor of four - to accomodate the work. But throughout a Saturday?

"They are replacing rails. They cannot possibly do the work in a few hours." That's what TransLink representatives have been posting on the organization's Twitter feed again and again, but it only explains the question - it doesn't answer it, and poses more. For example, why couldn't the work be staggered over a longer period of time, focusing on individually shorter segments of track, with train frequencies being reduced in the evening and early morning but left as normal during the height of the day, and with shuttle buses helping to pick up the slack? This is how Toronto handles its tunnel maintenance - the extremes of the lines close a few hours earlier than usual, with buses substituted over the inactive portion. Is it that the ICTS design that was picked for SkyTrain back in the 80s can't be compartmentalized like this?

I understand the need to do the work; over the last twenty-five years, the SkyTrain has become an essential part of Metro Vancouver's transit infrastructure. It's critical that it remains able to handle the passenger loads placed on it without breaking, since that would be bad. What's also critical, however, is for TransLink to effectively communicate projects that disrupt such a massive swath of the network. In my opinion, it's really dropped the ball on this one.

Passengers wait for a westbound train at New Westminster Station on Saturday, October 15.

For a public transit operator, communication is essential. I'll grant that TransLink did do a good job keeping people informed about the delays... when they were already in the middle of them. What it didn't do was adequately inform people about what they were going to face in the weeks and days leading up to it. I mean, it's not as if this came out of nowhere. There are already notifications on the station update boards about how service will be running a Sunday schedule on Remembrance Day, but notifications of rail replacement? I didn't see so much as one. They did have the boards out yesterday that helpfully suggested adding ten or fifteen minutes to your regular commute time - which is laughably optimistic; when I was attempting to get to Vancouver yesterday my train was held up at 22nd Street Station for ten minutes alone.

"The signage [informing passengers of upcoming maintenance] has been up at all stations for a few weeks. There was the same maintenance last weekend too," dixitque TransLink. I remember that maintenance - I wouldn't exactly call it the same, not when it's out past Columbia in the Surrey bottleneck; with Columbia still able to act as a line terminus, last week's maintenance only effected Expo trains on their legs south of the Fraser. What's more, I ride the SkyTrain every day, and I don't remember any such signage - the first times I encountered any notification of last week's or this week's track maintenance were when I made it to the platforms of Columbia and New Westminster, respectively.

The platforms themselves are barely restrained chaos that underscore just how many people use the system. On an ordinary Saturday, you've got alternating Expo and Millennium Line trains passing through about once every two or three minutes, and that's enough to handle the passenger loads. The abbreviated Expo-only service isn't - and the station dwell times, for some damn reason, have not been adjusted in recognition of that fact. When my eastbound train passed through 22nd Street Station, passengers weren't able to finish alighting before the doors started chiming to close. Boarding? Forget it! We were just lucky the doors weren't pushed open enough times to trigger a train shutdown.

To me, this weekend's experiences with SkyTrain delays illustrates how vital it is to the region through all the people that rely on it to get where they're going... it also suggests that it wasn't necessarily designed with a great eye toward the future. I've said it before and I will say it again - the system is full of bottlenecks; the Surrey leg of the Expo Line is only the most visible. I have to wonder how many riders had yesterday as their first experience with the SkyTrain, and how many potential riders would be soured on it as a result.

The best part, though... the best part is that, for the track work scheduled for next weekend - this time, between Edmonds and Columbia Stations - is classed as being of "minor" severity. Because, you know, cascading delays throughout the system is just one of those things. Good one, TransLink - you should take that to Lafflines or something.

Keep Metro Vancouver's Cities Free

It's simple: people like building things. Creation is one of the central drives of humanity, and it's a good thing too, because otherwise nothing would ever get built. We take sand and rocks and wood and we build cities. The problem arises when people put those acts of creation on a pedestal; when the creation becomes the most important thing, without sparing a thought for the consequences of that creation - whether or not the thing would have been better left unbuilt.

These days, we don't see many new cities rising up out of nothing; where "new" cities appear, it's usually through old ones. The pattern stretches back centuries; Vancouver didn't always have its modern borders, after all. Yet for the past ten years, Metro Vancouver has been the largest metropolitan area in Canada that has not experienced - or, more to the point, been forced into - municipal amalgamation. Yesterday, through Tenth to the Fraser, I found a week-old but still disturbing article on Vancity Buzz proposing the "consolidation" of Metro Vancouver - that is, the awkward shoving-together of the independent cities of this part of the Lower Mainland in the name of "efficiency," or to create more pleasing maps.

"When tourists fly into Vancouver, the first ground they touch is Richmond, not Vancouver. And when tourists want to experience the beautiful outdoors they visit the North Shore, not Vancouver," writes Vancity Buzz's Token White Guy. "Consolidate interconnected municipalities and redraw boundaries. Such reorganization will allow for more use of shared resources and reduce the inefficiency of having so many municipal governments."

I had no idea that it was so hard on tourists to cross so many invisible municipal borders. Please, won't someone think of the tourists? While we're at it, who needs independent municipalities capable of paying close attention to their citizens and dealing with local problems when we could run the whole show from Cambie and Broadway?

Even better - amalgamation would simplify transportation... transportation that's handled by the same regional entity anyway, but let's not think about that for a second! New Westminster would have its not-elaborated-upon "transit issues" resolved by amalgamating with Vancouver and Burnaby - perhaps this is meant to mean the shelved United Boulevard extension that New Westminster didn't want anyway - while Burnaby "will benefit by gaining downtown New Westminster and gain a promising tourist face." Because why should Burnaby develop its own downtown or tourist face when it can just piggyback off a city that did?

Am I in favor of this? Short answer: no. Long answer: nooooooooooooooooooo!

This is where New West starts, and don't you be forgetting it.

Let me just say that I can understand some Vancouverites, specifically long-term Vancouverites who haven't lived in another major city, talking seriously about amalgamation. It's an intellectual exercise to them; they've never lived through it. They only know about it on paper. Me, though, I'm from Toronto. Even if I wasn't living within its borders on January 1, 1998, I am well aware of what it was like when the six cities of Metropolitan Toronto were dismantled - despite a non-binding referendum in which 70% came down against amalgamation - to form the present megacity, and what happened afterward. Witness also the example of Montreal, where the twenty-seven cities of Montreal Island were forcibly amalgamated by provincial fiat; when the Quebec Liberals came to power in 2003, they gave those former cities the chance to hold de-amalgamation referenda; of the twenty-two that did, fifteen bolted and are now independent once again.

I have no reason to suspect that the experience would be much different in Metro Vancouver. Different cities need different things, and people in different places have different priorities. I'm pretty sure that an amalgamation into Vancouver would be seen by many people in the outer cities as a way for Vancouver's "downtown elites" to impose their bike lanes and their ways of thinking onto their communities; it's arguable that this sort of thought, and the pushback against it, was one of the factors that allowed Rob Ford to win the mayoralty of Toronto last year on a solid base of ex-suburban support. Had Metropolitan Toronto endured, Rob Ford might have made a fine mayor of Etobicoke - but he also would not have been in the position to demolish the planned Transit City LRT network, or work on closing libraries from one end of Metro to the other, and so on.

The experience of Toronto, particularly over the last year, demonstrates that the more authority is consolidated and concentrated, the more power an individual has to reshape the subject of that authority. Independent municipalities are a natural bulwark against that. The city government of New Westminster can work toward what it considers to be good for New Westminster; but if it isn't, at least the spillover effects are minimal beyond New Westminster. Checks and balances are important in government - in my mind, it should be an extraordinary situation if we're thinking about removing them.

Practically as an afterthought, the writer suggests that another option is expanding Metro Vancouver's power by giving it control of things like policing and transit operations... which would, effectively, make it into what Metropolitan Toronto was before the amalgamation. This would make a lot more sense. We already have a regional transit provider in the form of TransLink; I wouldn't be surprised to see a Metropolitan Vancouver Police Department in some future time. Things like policing and transit, these are issues that transcend city boundaries, and in a highly-urbanized area like Metro Vancouver, it makes sense for them to be dealt with in a regional way.

That doesn't mean we should only focus on regional matters. There are very good reasons to think locally, to govern locally. A local government is far more responsive to local issues; a single government, especially when perceived as being geographically or culturally remote, leads to social friction.

Municipal amalgamation is a subject that should be approached very carefully. In an ideal world, no amalgamation would go ahead without the citizens of the cities involved voting in favor, preferably strongly in favor. However, if a future amalgamation of Vancouver presents itself in the same manner as in Toronto and Montreal, it won't matter what we think. In both circumstances, the amalgamations were pushed through by the respective provincial governments without regard for the opinions of the people affected by the reorganization.

People pushing amalgamations often say they're chasing efficiencies. Yet life is more than just a well-oiled machine.