For those of you keen on the next era of transportation, one more seemingly small but notable shift just happened. And it didn’t start on a city street but in a change in mindset. Canadian Transit Forum, the respectable and somewhat traditional journal of the Canadian Urban Transit Association (CUTA), just relaunched itself. With the Spring 2017 issue just released,… Read more »
From the Vault: The following post was originally published on June 28, 2015. It was one of the first things I ever wrote here at Connecting Dots, and for good reason. The people and transit systems of northwest BC taught me much since I first started working with their region as a newly-minted transit planner in 1999. And in particular–as… Read more »
The Canadian Urban Transit Association (CUTA) recently held its annual conference and giant transit trade show from November 5-9, 2016 in Vancouver, B.C. Billed under the title “Inspiring Sustainable Change,” the conference focussed on changing technology, climate, demographics and customer expectations when it comes to cities and how they move. I had an opportunity to attend part of the conference… Read more »
The 2016 Pro Walk Pro Bike Pro Place conference happened in Vancouver, BC from September 12 to 15 and I thought it might be interesting to pass on a few highlights. With an event program the size of a heftier magazine and held in conjunction with the Project for Public Spaces and Placemaking Week, the conference felt somewhat like the… Read more »
Our daily lives are increasingly multimodal when it comes to how we get around. How might we shape our Census to better track how we are mixing and matching our transportation choices? This past weekend I sat down at our kitchen table and discovered that I had come out ahead in two uniquely Canadian games of chance*: Against all odds,… Read more »
This post started out as a reserved and detailed analysis of the 2016 Canadian federal budget through the lenses of mobility and place. And then I took a break from writing and went out with my five-year-old son to practice riding his bike. And that’s when this post changed. On the fringe of downtown, our relatively quiet neighbourhood exists as… Read more »
I was interested to see TransLink’s announcement last week that the organization has hired a new CEO, Kevin Desmond. Currently the General Manager for Seattle’s King County Metro Transit, Kevin is set to take on the Vancouver area’s top transportation job on March 21, 2016. The announcement of Kevin’s hiring got me thinking about what I would tell him if… Read more »
The results of today’s vote are in. Residents and property owners on Gabriola, Mudge and De Courcey Islands have said a resounding “Yes!” to their community bus GERTIE and transit in their community. As reported previously in the post Taking GERTIE to the Polls, Islanders were voting today on whether to fund Gabriola’s pilot community bus system on an ongoing… Read more »
We all know what happened with that rather unfortunate (insert additional adjectives of your choice here) transit referendum that occurred last spring in Metro Vancouver. What you may not be aware of is that there’s another transit referendum happening right now on Gabriola Island, BC, a 20 minute ferry ride from downtown Nanaimo in BC’s Gulf Islands archipelago. Between now… Read more »
Think quick! What are the most important elements of a really great transit system?! Chances are if you just answered that in your head right now, you might have said things like: frequency, directness, reliability, easy fare payment, easy to use and understand information, consistency, comfort or safety. Some of you might have answered “convenience,” which I would then have… Read more »
Working as I do in the field of transit, it’s been an interesting few weeks since Justin Trudeau won the Canadian national election to become the leader of our country. Transit and spending on civic infrastructure that could help sustainable transportation of all kinds were two big themes of his campaign, and a bus was also part of his first… Read more »