Fellow SkyTrain advocate Eugene Wong has made his mark on the comments thread of a Buzzer blog article. He has stated that he is clearly a proponent of SkyTrain expansion as the best choice for continued
Mr. Wong, we would like you to know that one of your comments stood out to our Initiative. We loved your comments. We are republishing one on our website so that people in this city can get the ideas they seriously need to get!
By Eugene Wong on The Buzzer Blog: Transit in Vancouver vs Seattle vs Portland
David, how does that answer any of our concerns?
In Calgary, the train has to sit at an intersection until the light turns green or the equivalent colour. Cars could literally keep going, and the train driver will not be allowed to barrel through. I find that infuriating. Even with our transit system, we *still* have bus drivers offering car drivers the opportunity to cut in. If you ever see tufts of hair on a bus, then that’s from me pulling my hair out.
The photo that you showed has a cross walk right in front of the train, and it is about to cross a road or has crossed a road.
In Calgary, there are signs all over the place to not stop at certain places, or the railway gates will come down on top of the cars. This is a true testament to how desperate car drivers are to get across those tracks. They probably won’t even flinch when a train comes, while the vehicle is in the way.
Speaking of cars in the way, Vancouverites already have condemned themselves. I volunteered for the Downtown Historic Railway. A driver pulls into the railway crossing. 1 of the volunteers walked up to the driver, and starts dishing it out. You know what the driver did? He didn’t even look. He just flashed his police badge. Yes, that’s right, an off-duty cop believed that he was immune from the law, and that he had earned the right to do as he pleased.
As it is, we still have people holding the doors open, when SkyTrain is about to leave. We also have people chasing after buses [I’d never…well, actually, I do do that :^(]. You can image what Calgary must be like. A train comes every 15 minutes at certain points in the day[or it did, in the 90’s, I think], so you can imagine how angry you’d be to see the train pull ahead just 5 feet only to stop at a light, while you ran for the train and missed it by a few seconds.
On top of that, maybe the driver left the station a minute early, or even 10 seconds early. If you arrive 5 seconds early, after a run, and then have to wait 15 minutes, then I bet that there’ll be hell to pay.
I refuse to budge on the LRT issue. There is no way that I would approve of spending on something that is weakened by union strikes, and traffic lights.
From what I recall of the last Translink strike, the SkyTrain people were helpful enough to run the system during the strike. I think that they knew that there would be bad will, if they striked. After all, only a hand full of employees were needed to run a system that affected thousands of people each day. The bus drivers striking made a point already.
Let us accept the goodwill of the unions, and make good use of it.
When I see an LRT train rolling by slower than a pedestrian walking by, I can’t help but think that it’ll never reach the 90 second frequency that we’ve been spoiled by.
The whole reason that we can think of SkyTrain as a glorified bus exchange is because of how frequent the trains are. You don’t get that with LRT. Once LRT is built, then that’s what the community is getting for the 100 years.
100 years of casually rolling around? No thanks!