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 »
Some work I’ve been undertaking over the past couple weeks related to a prairie community got me thinking about what the “laws” or principles of transit planning might be. By this I don’t mean the principles of good transit service design: the best practices for designing route networks, schedules, infrastructure, their accompanying plans and so on. Instead, I’m talking about… Read more »
This past Friday I left my role as BC Transit’s Manager of Planning to take on new opportunities as a Senior Transportation Planner & Transit Lead with Calgary-based Watt Consulting Group. Understandably, this change has occupied much of my mind and presented a range of feelings. Gratitude for the opportunities I had to grow over the last 21 years with… 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 »
There is no greater gift than having a deep connection to the work you do all day. And it’s exactly that kind of connection that I heard from Winnipeg Transit’s Manager of Service Development’s Björn Rådström when I asked him about his job recently: “I don’t believe in the importance of transit because I work at a transit system,” said… 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 »
It’s been a very busy few weeks here at Connecting Dots… and I wanted to follow up on a few threads. Three Minute Math There’s been lots of great comments and discussion on the post about the “just three minute” requests that make transit planners twitchy. Much thanks to all who have read the post, shared it and added their… 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 »
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 »
“Oh, but it’s only adds on another three minutes,” is one of those phrases I’ve heard over and over again during my time as a transit planner and scheduler. And like some evil Pavlovian trigger, I can’t help but get bad flashback twitches every time I hear it. The changes that folks request that “will only take three minutes” sound… Read more »
Ever experienced a community process where you shared a common objective with others but your approaches seemed worlds apart and maybe even resulted in strife and conflict? Such a situation often seems all too common and can be demoralizing. Even more so, conflict over styles of approach has real implications in terms of our ability to make change happen. So,… Read more »