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Via Mike Soron, the Galaxy as a transit map. Life is just more awesome in transit maps.
Vancouver's Canada Line Exceeding Ridership Expectations
The Canada Line has reached ridership goals three years ahead of schedule; the line has seen several days of 100,000+ riders. I’m not surprised by this news — downtown-to-airport rail service has been popular all over the US already. Minnesota’s Hiawatha line (Downtown - Mall of America - Airport) also beat ridership estimates, and Portland’s MAX line to the airport has seen strong ridership numbers. This Canada Line news should encourage transit planners in other cities contemplating airport rail lines.
Photo via Canada para Brasileiros and article via The Globe and Mail.
Vancouver residents (and lovers of its transit system), we ask you: what’s wrong with this picture?
SkyTrains — new and old out at the Edmonds depot. (Thanks for sharing, SkyTrainLady).
I haven’t previously had the chance to see the new and old trains side-by-side like this, so it’s interesting to reflect on the little differences between these trains. Not on the level of the whiz-cool awesome new features in the new ones1, but purely on the level of aesthetics2.
Those of you from out of town, here’s a bit of scene setting for you. See the colour of the sky in that picture? That’s pretty much the colour of the sky a good 40% of the time here. The rest of the time, it’s either that blessed 30% of blue sky with sunshine — very rare this time of year — or the dreaded 30% of the time that’s raining, in which the sky is slightly darker.
Now imagine yourself walking down a street, with a stiff wind turning your umbrella inside out and light rain sprinkling on you. The sidewalk is soaked with water, so it’s safe to assume it’s a dark grey. If you’re in view of the SkyTrain (which has an elevated guideway on most parts), then it’s a… mostly grey thing towering over you about 40 ft in the air. Or maybe you are on a platform, chilly in your stylish yet affordable boots, waiting for the train to come in. (And it may or may not be packed to the gills with people, depending on the time of day it is.)
Well? White with blue and yellow streaks, or charcoal with a big blue jaw? Which colour scheme in gloss conveys to you that, “Oh, my moving salvation,” feeling better?
That said, seeing how they do like to shrinkwrap those Canada Line trains with paid promotional messages, it might not matter for very long what colour our marvelous conveyances come in, since they’ll have dyed their hair blue to tell the tales of snowboarding accessories and other wondrous items and services before long.
(I do find it strange that advertisers are flocking to do it on the Canada Line particularly — after all, they’re only really noticeable on the platform, and the trains aren’t above ground except out at Marine Drive and over in Richmond. Must be that international audience at the airport they’re after.)
Anyway, I welcome our new grey and blue overlords.
1 …which will all be great once they get them all working! Maybe they waited until they all arrived to flip the switch on the backlit maps.
2 …and before anyone accuses me of it, yes, I’m aware my feelings on this might be because I’m a little bit racist. But everyone is, the Broadway musicals tell me so.
Adopt-A-Stop — a proposal for the Knight News Challenge
Your intrepid authors, one counti8 and one sillygwailo, present to you, our comrades in transit love, Adopt-a-Stop — our awesome idea for a web application to nurture community interaction around transit. Beyond just writing this blog, yo. The basic gist? Here in Vancouver, every bus stop in the system has a 5 digit ID, and now we also have geographic information for each stop thanks to TransLink’s recent release of their data in the GTFS. The long and the short of it is: We want people to be able to find and create stories with their cellphones that are associated with bus stops. And by cellphones, we mean iPhones, and those things that can send SMS and little else, and everything in between. Which, most intriguingly for us, means people can send Twitter updates with 5-digit bus stop hashtags. In other words, geo-tag your 135 characters from your dumb phone! Plus, since we have the lat-long for all the bus stops, we can also pull in geo-tagged pictures, videos, Tumblr posts, check-ins from Bright Kite, etc. And, most importantly, the view from Google Street View — so you can, say, see what the stop looks like before you get there. Our initial brainstorm at the Vancouver Data Hackathon. Bottom line: P.S. Karen writes more about some of the thinking behind Adopt-A-Stop on her blog here too.
Video of @jmv’s Super Express SkyTrain Papercraft Remixed. For the blueprints, see his Flickr set.
Our man Jason Vanderhill, whom we refer to lovingly as JMV (after his Flickr ID), has mashed up the TransLink public transit system with the Super Express train set. Click the photo for the entire set on Flickr.
Aaron Scales, a student at UK College of Design, built a bus shelter out of recycled glass bottles with non-profit volunteer organization Art in Motion.
(via psfk)
SkyTrain buskers face billing by TransLink for song royalties
The letter states that Socan — the Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada — is demanding royalties for songs being performed in stations. According to TransLink, those costs could add up to $40,000 a year and will be passed on to the artists. […] A transit busking program in Toronto underwent a similar review with Socan about five years ago, said Danny Nicholson of the Toronto Transit Commission.
Musicians and singers who are approved to perform inside the region’s SkyTrain stations were sent a letter in October from the region’s transit authority, informing them they could soon be asked to pay as much as $1,500 annually for a performance licence.
