Bogota has a good system of blue busses.
Its 62c for one trip on a bus, swiped at the door. It lasts 60mins. If you transfer to one more bus, you pay an extra 15c. After that you pay again.
This means instead of people jumping in their car to go a few 10’s of blocks, people might jump a bus.
People who travel further over 60mins pay double. However, its still cheap.
Make it too cheap and people pile on and overload the system, make it too expensive and people get in their cars because gas is cheaper.
Make transit free - no fare cards, no turnstiles, no driver/passenger aggression etc. - and many people will get rid of their cars - traffic will improve - run transit buses on a headway gap system (every x minutes) create circular routes - no (not in service) useless trips - deploy transit signal priority - tax the sh1t out of downtown commercial high-rise buildings that require commuters to spend hours a day to commute …
Now have to wake up from my dream world
Your solution is partial, A few things needed to be change to improve
redevelopment efficiency so that people relocate to transit rather than
transit trying to reach every nook and cranny.
Generally you want to tax high value land, NOT high value property. The
reasoning is if there is a parking lot where a condo could be, tax it like
it was a condo so that parking lot goes away.
Make land speculation and holding property unused VERY expensive.
If you’d like to learn more about transit design and the challenges associated with it, I highly recommend you read Jarrett Walker’s* blog, humantransit.org. He’s even got plenty of articles on Vancouver transit (starting from the last page has articles that are more transit-focused and less failure-of-democracy-focused).
Dear @toptekkie: I am not sure I get your point in saying that
“Kindergartner could have designed that and not a consulting engineer”.
That basically tells me that consulting engineer did bad job and all agreed
with it by constantly buying tickets by those maps. Would it, in it’s
simplicity, then be correct enough to be understood even by Kindergartner?
I just think that the maps were poorly thought and that they repeated their
mistake with maps into new system. I am not arguing, or was not initially
arguing the cost of travel, just the unacceptable mistake in communication
made through maps on vending machines at Skytrain Stations.
AND YES, EACH TRANSLINK ZONE SHOULD RETAIN ITS COLOUR NO MATTER WHERE IT IS
PLACED, ON VENDING MACHINE IN VANCOUVER, OR ON VENDING MACHINE IN SURREY
AND FOR THE FUTURE ON VENDING MACHINE IN COQUITLAM.
Canada should basically have a Foreign Investment Review Board like Australia, that forces sales of unapproved foreign investments in real estate (ie speculative). The revenues will go to subsidizing transit.
I don’t think it’s necessary to shout this as if it is fact. It’s not at all cut-and-dried that what you think is the best solution actually is the best solution. Further, you opened this thread. If you have come with foregone conclusions and didn’t actually want to have a discussion about it, you are just being a troll.
In fact, I would disagree with you. When at the vending machine the user consults the map to determine which ticket he should purchase. The options are colour coded, along with the map, to indicate which option he needs to travel to his destination. There is no need for him to determine where he currently is, nor to count the zones his route will travel through, as would be required if the map were not coded in this way.
I’m not sure what advantage having the same colours on every map across the system has that counters this. I can’t think of one, and certainly not one that improves usability of the system for a casual user that would not even notice this discrepancy, but may make use of the existing coding. I suppose they could make the colour coding on the machines dynamic, but the maps all the same, however I think this would not be as good because frequent users would be more confused by the constantly changing colours (why do I purchase a Green ticket to go to work and a Red ticket to return home…?).
There are certainly ways it could be improved, but I don’t think making the maps coloured uniformly across the system is one of them. In fact, because printing the differently-coloured maps is clearly more expensive, they obviously made a conscious choice to do just that, and I would not be so quick to judge that it was made without due consideration to the options. In light of expected distance-based billing requiring new maps anyway, I don’t see much point in doing a serious review and refresh of it now.
Neo NO!!!
but I do agree there is an enormous cost caused by parceling into landserf
plots too small for land improvement
This is effectively what we do when we take a farm and divide the land in
house lots. These house plots are too small for property improvement into
higher density housing. And a speculator is currently required to gather
adjacent housing lots of sufficient size for redevelopment. Then the
speculator/developer must be “trusted” by the city so that the city can
approve the change in housing density. The whole rezoning process is ripe
for cronyism.
The land speculation cost associated with gathering a parcel of land large enough to build both housing and services required by the new residents is enormous and as a result does NOT happen here. The net result is that if the housing density is significantly increased there will not be services for residents. The infill density increase must be very gradual taking a generation. Such slow increase in housing density means that supply can only increase at the rate of natural population growth and can NOT accommodate immigrants with out extreme property price increase caused by the supply restriction.
Above is I think a good description of the Vancouver Property problem.
I looked it up and found this bullsh!t answer, basically saying we will not
tell you!!!
How Long Your Information Is Kept
TransLink retains records in accordance with the requirements of FOIPPA,
our legal obligations, and business requirements. We have developed a
Records Management Policy that provides employees guidance on the practices
and procedures for records retention and subsequent disposal.
(a) is in the custody or under the control of a public body, and
(b) is used by or on behalf of the public body to make a decision that
directly affects the individual,
the public body must ensure that the personal information is retained for
at least one year after being used so that the affected individual has a
reasonable opportunity to obtain access to that personal information.
There is NO maximum only a minimum.
So In effect Translink is telling you they are keeping your information
forever. Remember data storage is cheep, why not.
I haven’t used Compass yet. Is there any reason you couldn’t swap cards with other people? Do you need to tie your identity to a card somehow, or can you just put money on it with cash?
This is just now starting to look like an interesting discussion for a hackspace.
It is my plan to purchase a new Compass card for every month. Yes, it will cost me $6 for each card, but once I have enough cards, it will be worth my while to go to the office at Waterfront and get the $6 refund. Unless they make it mandatory to have to provide your name/address to get the refund.
You don’t need to provide any information to use a Compass card, however Translink is actively encouraging users to register their cards by giving their name, address, phone and email address.
However, as the Netflix experiment showed “Researchers reverse Netflix anonymization” It’s irrelevant if they have your name or not as the travel data could be used to identify an specific individual.
There really is no statistical basis for recording each trip with the unique ID of the card. All they really need for transit studies is to know where people get on and off, not how often this person takes this trip, or where else does this person travel to.
I ask, is this travel data for future planning purposes worth the ~$5 million loss due to yearly operational costs ( $12m - $7m due to fare evasion ) ? The government must see some other value in the data to make it worthwhile.
and who does this person often travel with
and the habits of people
Know this information is very useful for discovering who might have associations with a ‘Person of Interest’. Which is very useful when an secrete branch of the Government (CSIS) is operating in secrecy with powers to ignore Canadian Laws and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
