Omega Point

Catherine’s Vancouver is growing

While hang­ing out at a Main Street cof­fee shop this after­noon, I over­heard a con­ver­sa­tion between a mom and her four-year-old.

“We can go out to the air­port,” the mom said as they were leaving.

“Oh, that’s a long drive!”

Yes. Yes it is. With the open­ing of the Canada Line now moved up to August 17th, less than two weeks away, it will actu­ally be quite a bit faster–for me, at least. The clos­est sta­tion is a 2km walk, bus, or bike ride away, but I expect door-to-door travel time to be much, much shorter than call­ing a cab.

It remains to be seen how well the exist­ing bus ser­vice will inte­grate with the new sta­tions, and if more fre­quent east-west buses will be needed to fun­nel Van­cou­ver res­i­dents into the Cam­bie Street cor­ri­dor. In any event, by open­ing early, Translink and InTran­sit BC will hope­fully have some extra time to work out many of the bugs before the old bus routes out of Rich­mond get discontinued.

I prob­a­bly won’t use the Canada Line much myself, still being closer to the Main Street bus myself. Since I tend not to go to Rich­mond or Oakridge Cen­tre much, I don’t see a lot of oppor­tu­nity to use it, but it would def­i­nitely make get­ting to Yale­town or Davie Street from my neigh­bour­hood much more convenient.

Plus, as has been pointed out to me by friends and drink­ing bud­dies alike, now that I’ll be attend­ing Lan­gara Col­lege, the 49th Avenue sta­tion makes it extremely con­ve­nient to blast down to Gas­town for a drink imme­di­ately after class. (Guys, you get that school isn’t 9–5, right?)

Still, this really does ham­mer home the point that for a pedes­trian and tran­sit user, the shape of our city really is defined by which buses go where. (Hint: they go down­town.) Per­son­ally, when I’m a pas­sen­ger in a friend’s car, I never think about tak­ing 12th Avenue to cut across town because there aren’t buses that go there.

These fas­ci­nat­ing travel-time maps of Great Britain effec­tively illus­trate what even a densely-populated coun­try like the United King­dom must con­tend with when mov­ing peo­ple and goods around.

Also inter­est­ing is the impli­ca­tion of what “cen­tral” means to dif­fer­ent peo­ple. This week, there’s been some dis­cus­sion over at the Van­cou­ver League of Dru­palers, of hav­ing some cowork­ing mee­tups to chat about Dru­pal projects we’ve been work­ing on, get some cod­ing down, and so forth. But where to actu­ally meet? The Grind at Main and King Edward? Sweet, I’m there. Waves in New West? Yeah, not as con­ve­nient. How­ever, if I lived right beside any Expo Line Sky­Train sta­tion in Van­cou­ver proper save for Sta­dium or Main Street, it would be faster to go all the way out to New West­min­ster, hands down.

For­tu­nately, hav­ing my spiffy new bike has opened up a lot of options too, par­tic­u­larly with the abil­ity to switch to tran­sit when I need it, now that all the buses have bike racks.

So far today, I’ve rid­den just under 8 kilo­me­tres to three out of four sched­uled errands. The last one will dou­ble that. I’ll spend most of it on the cross-town 10th Avenue bike route. In the end, I will have spent about the same amount of time on the road as I would have, had I dri­ven, if you fac­tor in park­ing. It’s pretty lib­er­at­ing, I have to say.

But hey, even if it isn’t some­thing that’s totally use­ful for me, a link to Rich­mond and the air­port was nec­es­sary. I wish dif­fer­ent choices had been made in con­struc­tion and plan­ning, but it’s def­i­nitely some­thing we’ll be get­ting some use out of as a city. Plus, hey, Vancouver’s the first Cana­dian city with a sub­way link to the air­port. Go us.