I will admit straight up that I don’t fully understand the negotiations going on between the province and cities over how they will come up with their $370 million to match the $370 million the feds are willing to put into transit locally from this year’s budget. I had a long interview with Minister Peter […]

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A nice visual look at transit use in Vancouver, compliments of a group called the 10 and 3, who sent this to me. A Heat Map of Public Transit Use in Vancouver A Heat Map of Public Transit Use in Vancouver By Arik Motskin and Zack Gallinger Vancouver Skytrain Vancouver was relatively late to the […]

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I asked to interview TransLink’s new board chair, Don Rose, recently to get a sense of what course corrections the agency is making these days. A couple of days after I talked to him, former interim CEO Doug Allen’s confidential report on what’s right and wrong at TransLink got released through Freedom of Information.

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In the aftermath of the resounding no in the transit plebiscite, yes, it’s a mess out there. Mayors are looking at self-financing their big projects in Surrey and Vancouver. (And even Delta is considering using its own money to run some needed buses.) Senior execs are being fired at TransLink, and there are calls for […]

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News seeping out this afternoon that TransLink called staff to a meeting to say that two top TransLink planners were gone. Both were very experienced people at the top of the heap and doing the actual planning. One, Brian Mills, was director of systems planning and research. The other, Tamim Raad, director of strategic planning […]

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Transit smart cards are the in thing these days, I’ve discovered. Everyone wants them, in order to keep tabs on how transit is getting used and to give customers all the options they want for paying things these days. Even systems that installed earlier versions, like Washington and Chicago, are upgrading their systems so they […]

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So the mayors headed out on to transit this morning to sell the Yes side. And then there’s this, tonight. No info in the news release from City of Vancouver on how people can join in, but perhaps 3-1-1 has the answer As part of ongoing efforts to raise awareness about the upcoming transit and […]

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Made the trek to Langley (75 minutes there, 40 minutes back) to hear Canadian Taxpayers Federation’s Jordan Bateman and pro-Yes campaigner Bill Tieleman face off, to get a sense of the main messages we’ll be hearing for several months. My Globe story is here but to add a few observations to what is in the […]

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Much hay was being made a week or so ago about the fact that NDP MLA Andrew Weaver wasn’t gung-ho supporting a Yes vote in the transit plebiscite. But the local Green Party rep, Adriane Carr, said she plans to support it in a motion coming to council next week from NPA Councillor George Affleck. […]

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We’ll be hearing any hour now what the final wording and funding choice is for the regional mayors, as they head into the referendum. But all indications I’ve had the past two weeks is that it’s the sales tax only, as I wrote in my Globe story. Fuel tax is seen as a losing proposition […]

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