Category Archives: Touring Vancouver

Translink Wants To Raise Rates

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Breakfast Television (my morning news source) is reporting that Translink wants to raise some of their rates in the new year. This isn’t that new, as it was partly announced a few weeks ago after their funding from local government was turned down.

They’re proposing to raise FareSaver ticket book prices and Monthly passes by up to 10% and claim it’s necessary as these prices haven’t been raised in a few years.

They also want to tack on a $2.50 surcharge for using the Canada Line SkyTrain service to the Vancouver International Airport (and from). Basically if you travel between Bridgeport and Templeton stations, you’d be subject to this additional fare, which I think is pretty steep and nothing more than a cash-grab.

If the concept is to encourage people to use the SkyTrain to travel to the airport instead of driving, it needs to be cost effective. With the proposed increase, travelling from Vancouver to the Airport after 6:30pm or on a weekend would cost $5.00 per person. During the day (Monday – Friday before 6:30pm) it would be $6.25, coming from say Surrey, it would be $7.50 per person.

TransLink knows that the airport will be HUGELY popular during 2010 and I feel they’re just looking to steal as much extra as possible during that period. Why wasn’t this pricing put in initially? Why 4 months after it opens?

If you want to comment, you can send an email comments@translinkcommission.org and voice your support or lack there-of for the above proposals.

Kudos for Coast Mountain?

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Translink Community Shuttle
Translink Community Shuttle

I was cruising Google Reader last night and came upon a recommended feed that sounded interesting. Price Tags, it’s called. It’s an unassuming little blog by Gordon Price, director of the City Program at Simon Fraser University.

One of the recent articles is entitled “Vancouver’s bus service tops in the world,” which had me scratching my head. If you follow me on Twitter or Facebook, you’ll know I regularly complain about the crappy service I get from transit in Vancouver.

Color me surprised to find out we actually have one of the BEST and most ON TIME bus services in the world.

I’ll have to remember that the next time the C23 comes every 15-30 minutes instead of every 10 during rush hour.

Transit Thoughts and more

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Now that the rainy season has begun here in Vanouver (I just call it “anti-summer”), my thoughts have turned to travel.

Sadly, not the exotic vacation kind of travel, or even a fun weekender in Victoria. No, merely the pedestrian “how do I get to work” kind. This anti-summer (aka winter) may be especially challenging for a number of reasons.

  1. Dog. Rumble isn’t at all fond of the anti-sunshine (rain) that happens during anti-summer. He hates being un-dry and double-plus un-likes the sound of cars roaring past on the un-dry pavement. (Ok, enough of the Orwellian-speak). Most days that it rains, we take the bus. Amazingly convenient.
  2. Rain. Can’t stand it, hate it. It makes me sad. When I first moved to Vancouver over 10 years ago, I had heard of SAD (Seasonal Affected Disorder) but never thought it might affect me. But it does. Last year, Chris even arranged to get me a sunlamp for work, for mornings when the sun isn’t shining. And here it comes again.
  3. Translink. If you’ve followed me on Twitter, then you know I rant about the bus regularly. Translink’s concept of a schedule is laughable at best. I know that traffic is random and an accident along a bus route will mess things up, but when 2 bus routes are virtually identical and one manages to get 3 busses through to the other’s 1, somethings wrong.
  4. Olympics. Yep. They’re gonna SUCK. Every route I can take to work involves passing through some sort of Olympic security / pedestrian zone. Unless I can find a route that takes me through North Vancouver or something. Living beside GM Place (Canada Hockey Place soon, I guess) will mean it’s going to be busy around here ALL THE TIME. Olympic re-routes go into effect in late January.

So what brought this on? A few realizations from the last week. Chris came to pick me up one night and the bus was packed due to the number of people getting on at the Yaletown SkyTrain station. Same thing in the other direction. A lot of people take the bus along Davie east and get off at the SkyTrain station.

But wait, what’s that you say? Why is this a problem? Downtown Vancouver is now home to 3 SkyTrain stations (Burrard, Granville and now Yaletown) and of those, only 2 are serviced directly by busses. Of those 2, only 1 is new Canada Line station, and that some one is also the ONLY one easily accessed by people in the West End.

Seriously. Think about it.

Granville Station currently has it’s ONLY stops 1.5 to 2 blocks away (Between Georgia and Robson, or North of Dunsmuir somewhere) which the 5 and 6 both stop at.

Burrard Station has a number of stops outside, but neither the 5 nor the 6, downtown’s only 2 regular busses, go near it.

Translink Community Shuttle

Translink Community Shuttle

Yaletown Station is serviced by the C23 and C21 depending on the time of day and direction of travel. Wait, what’s a C23 or C21? C stands for “Community Shuttle” or as they’re known to the rest of the world “Short bus” – a modified bus / van that holds a maximum legal capacity of 16 people as long as there’s no wheelchair passenger or strollers, and they run every 10 to 15 minutes.

Think about that. Canada’s most densely populate area (the West End) has only 1 real direct bus route accessing the SkyTrain, and can only handle (16 people x 4 per hour=) 64 people an HOUR. Huh?

Oh, and did I mention how busy the Olympics are going to be?

Oh, and have you see the route of the C23? The one that runs RIGHT through an Olympic Security, no car zone? Uh huh. That one.

I’m sure TransLink has a plan for that, but nobody is making it easy to find.

So, come the end of January, not only will I have weather/darkness related depression, a dog that won’t walk in it, no way to bus to work, and a longer community, but 40,000 idiots partying outside my door when my dog is going to need to poop.

Fun. 2010 should be fantastic.

I’ve been disappointed by cookies, by George

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Yeah, I never thought I’d say that either, but I’ve been disappointed by cookies. More on that later.

So, on this beautiful Saturday morning, Chris and I got up early, dragged the dog out of bed for his walk, and headed off to the ScotiaBank Theatre or whatever to see Terminator Salvation. While not quite as bad as X-Men Origins: Wolverine (bad), it was no Star Trek (awesome) either. It also had nothing much to do with any other Terminator product you may know.

Ok, that’s not true. We see a picture of Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton style, thank-you), we have an Arnold-bot, John Connor, Kyle Reese, Cyberdyne and a bunch of killer robots. I guess the basics are there.

What’s different (without giving everything away)? John’s not the be all and end all for the revolution. Either he hasn’t gotten to that point yet, or this timeline isn’t quite the same. He’s a well respected leader of the rebellion, but NOT the boy-king he’s painted to be previously. There’s no time-travel here, although Sarah mentions it on a tape John listens to.  In fact, this story is more about Kyle Reese ultimately than John Connor.

John Connor is of course played by Christian Bale. Yawn. He chews on scenery and is cranky most of the time. Christian’s done some good work, but he’s overshadowed here by pretty much everything else in this movie, and the sourness of his character. He’s not the smart-alecy John Connor we saw in T-2.

This time out, Kyle is played by Anton Yelchin (Yeah, Chekov is fighting the terminators) and they’ve given him an adorable little sidekick named Star(r). Star(r) is great but other than being adorable and handing people weapons at the appropriate time, I’m not sure why she’s there. She reminds me of Newt from Aliens or Laddie from The Lost Boys. Fun little kids, but not 100% relevant to the core story. For the record, I think Anton does a better job as Kyle Reese than he did as Chekov, but I wish they’d gotten B.A.G. to do the movie. Much hotter.

Sam Worthington – handsome bloke. Needs serious acting and dialect coaching. Seriously, WTF? His accent was all over the place. For a few minutes it was flawless American. Then, for most of the movie, every third word sounded like a cross between Crocodile Dundee and Mel Gibson on a bad bender. The opening scene of the movie is an intense prison scene between him and Helena Bonham-Carter (huh?) and I almost quit the movie after that. McG may be a good action director, but give him an emotional scene and he’ll let the actors do whatever they want with no regard for  how it ends up. Like he delegated it to the 3rd unit and didn’t care.

Overall – the special effects are pretty awesome. Good scale, decent story, interestingly different from what you’d expect.

Now for the cookies.

In our quest for lunch, we ended up at FatBurger on Denman Street as we often do. Not sure why sometimes because the food isn’t that good. It’s pretty good, but todays Crispy Chicken Burger with Ranch just didn’t cut it and the regular chicken burger is bland. Don’t get me started on the Turkey Burger. It’s tried to kill me twice.

So, after our lunch, we needed dessert. Right across the street is Cookies By George (now you get the title of this post) so we went over and indulged in several (expensive) cookies. Considering the price and size, the cookies at Starbucks are a better deal, and actually taste better.

I had 3 (which is why I’m sick now). My first cookie was something with big chocolate chunks and that one was ok, so I boldly moved on to cookie number two. Peanut butter. Yuck! I love peanut butter cookies, but this was horrible. Like they waved some peanut butter near it and the rest was slightly undercooked dough. Blah. Finally I had an Oatmeal cookie (they have some other adjective at the start, I don’t remember what) and it was horrible. I gave it to Chris and he wouldn’t finish it either, even though he said he enjoyed his. This Oatmeal and Raisin cookie (again, LOVE them usually) was laced with orange peel or something and had a strong orange/citrus taste. I hated it.

Thus, after a morning of disappointment, I am now laying on the bed at 4:00 in the afternoon, tired, slightly nauseous, but finally happy. Why? Because I have an awesome husband and the world’s cutest dog right here with me, and outside is the gorgeous bright sunshine you can only find in a world-class city like Vancouver.

Touring Vancouver some more

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Christopher and some giant wood

Christopher and some giant wood

Another beautiful day in the city of Vancouver, and another amazing weekend spent mostly out of doors along the paths and streets of this amazing city.

Today, we took a bus over to Kitsilano Beach and headed west from there. We really enjoyed the walk since it was something different from our usual strolls along the familiar shores of downtown. The houses, the views, the architecture and the surprising lack of smokers was amazingly refreshing.

We watched a lot of kids and families at play on the beach, and there were a LOT of cute dogs playing along the beach and walking politely with their people.

We took some video too, and I‘ll post that shortly. We‘ve been taking video whenever we can to share with friends and family in other places. Mostly to rub their noses in it show them how nice Vancouver is in the hopes they‘ll come and visit us once in a while. We have a borrowed video camera from work and figure that as long as we have it, we might as well take full advantage of it. Anyway, here‘s the videos. Enjoy, feel free to chip in with comments.

And this is from today: