Light Rail

Last week, we treated ourselves to a ride on the new Canada Line.  We rarely go into Vancouver because of the traffic and parking difficulties.  Mainly, we just hit the outer edges of the Greater Vancouver District when we go back and forth to the Sunshine Coast.  Just before the Olympics, Ed's daughters were here for a week and they arrived at YVR and immediately took the new Canada Line downtown and then after a little touristing, took it back to the airport, picked up their rental car, and came down to Point Roberts.  They had such a good time, were so enthusiastic about it that we were inspired to do it ourselves when some friends came to visit.

We went to Safeway in Tsawwassen where we bought our day passes ($7 for 65 y/o), then drove on to Richmond where you park, apparently all day, for $2.  I didn't think there was anywhere in the world that you could park for $2, but there it is: an incentive to take the Canada Line.  The parking garage was connected directly to the terminal and we were on a train within minutes.

Any new experience like this involves a certain amount of phumpering around, trying to figure out how the machines of various sorts work.  In general, it was pretty obvious, and credit cards could be used.  It is something to go into a brand new terminal and into a brand new train.  The absolute newness of it all just keeps being remarkable; partly that's about cleanliness but it's also about the this-momentness of everything, the posters you've never seen before, the design and layout of the whole thing.

We rode down to Waterfront (and be warned if you are riding for the first time absolutely absolutely to hold on when the train starts; it goes from standing to moving very quickly very fast and if you aren't holding on to something, you have a good chance of falling down).  Waterfront is the end of the line in that direction and you can go on and take the seabus to North Van on your day pass ticket.  Or you can go outside the wonderfully spiffed up railroad terminal building and find a Vancouver bus and go somewhere else...clear out to Mission or Horseshoe Bay, if you are so inclined.

We walked up Granville and eventually over to Robson and enjoyed all the features of a spring day in Vancouver.  Eventually, we returned to the Canada Line and went down to Yaletown and looked around that waterfront.  And then back, in the early evening, to Richmond and the parking garage.  It was a lot of fun.  I might not do it ever again because I was pretty overwhelmed with all the people and the sights and the high level of noise, but it clearly is a great addition to the city and to suburban and urban living for the residents. 

It did take me back to my childhood when trains were the way we travelled.  We should not have lost them, of course, but we didn't know then what cars and planes would ultimately do to us.

That Olympic Spirit

We drove down today from the Sunshine Coast (north of Vancouver) to Point Roberts (south of Vancouver) but failed to catch the Olympic spirit.  There are, of course, no signs of snow; what there are are drifts of daffodils here and there blooming profusely.  The crocuses are practically on their way out.  Everything is weeks ahead of time, except for the winter which we seem to have missed.

The trucks are still bringing snow into Cypress Bowl (which is the venue in the mountains just north of Vancouver and much lower in elevation than the Whistler venues), and have now been joined by snow-delivering helicopters, not to mention lots of dry ice.  The dry ice, according to the news, is buried under the moguls...suggesting that it might turn out looking like a misty day in May.  The organizers are saying, 'No Problemo!  We are right on top of all this.'  But 75% of Vancouverites think the whole thing will be a financial loss to, largely, Vancouverites, I suppose.

Up on the Coast, the torch bearers came through and took the ferry over to West Vancouver.  It was a special ferry; not the one we usually get to take the peasants back and forth from the Coast to West Van.  It was one of the newest, biggest, fanciest ferries that normally ply the Vancouver/Vancouver Island route.  It sailed a practice route to make sure it could get into our dock, and then it sailed a special sailing in order to bring the torchbearers and several hundred of B.C. elites who are somehow connected with the Olympics from point A to Point B, even though most of them had to be carted to Point A from Point X before the ride began.  The talk is that each of these sailings cost about $75K.  If they'd all gone on a regular ferry, they could have done it for about $8/person.  But, then, there's the security concerns, and the additional concern that the folks couldn't manage a 45-minute ferry ride without having a salmon/halibut/prawn and truffles treat table.

I think in Greece, way back when, the athletes just came and competed and everybody had a pleasant few days.  But nowadays, everything has to be 'world class,' for some reason, and a lot of everybodies need to be made to feel a great deal more important than they actually are (which is to say 'not very important'), everybody needs to grab a piece of some strange pie that has nothing to do with them except that it's all over the 'news' paper, and the burning questions are whether the event is making money for somebody and, if so, for whom.  The public we saw today, however, seemed to be taking this all outside their stride.  Very few cars were sporting Canadian flags...just enough so you realized that the vast majority were not.  There were no delays at the Lions Gate Bridge.  Traffic was minimal.  We sped through Vancouver, bereft of Olympic spirit, I'm afraid, but happy to be south of the border.  (In the photo above there is a flag flying over the house, but it is barely visible.)

Who's Doing This?

This past Monday evening, the Massey Tunnel (the tunnel that goes under the Fraser River on the main north-south highway into Vancouver) was closed for several hours after a 1981 Volkswagon pickup with a single driver had an accident while driving through the tunnel around 8:50 p.m.  The pickup then caught fire.  Unfortunately, the driver was killed.  Closing that tunnel in both directions, even for a short period of time (the accident was in the northbound section, but there was smoke in the southbound section) must have caused a colossal traffic mess, even that late in the evening.

The next morning, we were driving east on Highway 17, barely 6K from the Massey Tunnel, when we saw traffic backed up forever in the westbound lanes, near Ladner Trunk Road.  Just past the intersection, a trailer truck had turned right over on its side.  No curves in the road there, no wind happening; the driver seemed to have made the turn (if he was turning) before the truck turned on its side because it was stretched right straight out on the shoulder.  Many, many police cars around, lights flashing.  Many, many cars not getting to the Tsawwassen Ferry Terminal.

This, my experience of the beginning of the Olympic phenomenon here in Vancouver.  Today, the newsmedia report that they are trucking snow in from the interior to Cypress Bowl because it's 45-50 degrees F. all this week, all last week, all next week from all appearances.  My neighbors up here in the Sunshine Coast are not speaking kindly about the Olympics and the Premier who thought having it in Vancouver was such a great idea.

But here's the bright side.  If the Massey Tunnel closure had occurred in the U.S. on the first day of the Olympic schedule (that's when the various road closures began), somebody somewhere would have asked, suggested, insisted that the driver of that 1981 truck was probably a terrorist.  That the overturning of that tractor-trailer truck, barely 3 miles away the very next morning, was the work of a terrorist.  That the absence of snow and the high temperatures were part of some terrorist conspiracy.  And the official response, at the very least, would have been to let only one car at a time drive through the Massey Tunnel for as long as the Olympics lasted.

In B.C., there has been no indication that anyone thinks it was the work of a terrorist.  Although some people have wondered how you get a 1981 Volkswagen pickup to drive at all.

Strange Sights

The trip down from the Sunshine Coast began in total sunshine, but transited to gray clouds as we moved further southward.  I read a weather report the other day saying that for the next couple of weeks, the border area would be the battle ground between a warm, wet front coming from the south, and a cold, dry front coming from the north, and today’s drive made that seem at least visually correct.

Usually, we drive pretty much straight through (with, of course, a stop at Home Depot to pick up the months necessaries), but today we had a few additional adventures.  Ed, in search of some photographs, wanted to spend some time on Mitchell Island,  which lies in the Fraser River just east of the airport and very close to Home Depot.  The Knight Street bridge has an exit to Mitchell Island that we are always tempted to go right on, just before the right turn that we should be taking a little further on.  So, when we cross the Knight Street bridge, we chant loudly, ‘No going to Mitchell Island!’ until we are safely past the turnoff.  But today, it was ‘Yes, Yes, Yes--to Mitchell Island!’

My prior knowledge of Mitchell Island was that it seemed to contain all the empty cargo containers in B.C.  Stacked very high and very deep and very wide, were the cargo containers, like enormous kids blocks..  But then, this summer maybe, they disappeared.  Who knows?  Gone back to China?  But, it turns out that Mitchell Island is filled yet with all the equivalents of cargo containers.  There are great quantities of metal scrap, piled maybe 25-feet high behind fences about half as tall.  There are numerous very tall structures that are part of and attached to very long conveyer belts that lift, carry, and then deliver giant piles of gravel and wood pulp, maybe, down to barges.  There are all the ruined cars in the world, carcasses stacked up, lined up, poured in together, even unto on top of the roofs of sheds.  There are stacks and stacks of cut wood, milled lumber heading for somewhere else, somewhere where they still are having a building boom, I guess.  There must be 20 small businesses that sell auto parts for various kinds of cars, the rescued insides of those auto carcasses above.  There’s a drywall dump.  There are more useful and ruined products on that little island than my philosophy had dreamed of.  And someday, I imagine, all the containers will come back to be with their friends.

As a chaser, we dropped in to Galloways Specialty Foods (Richmond, on Alderbridge just west of No. 3 Road).  At Galloways, you can buy 50 grams or 5 kilos of dill weed, or ground cumin, or any other herb you have ever heard of  and plenty that you haven’t, or any other item that you might ever use in cooking and that was dry enough to put in a sealed plastic bag.  Lima beans bigger than any I have ever seen.  More different kinds of dried beans than I know the names for or even knew existed.  Three or four kinds of corn meal/corn flour.  Black rice, wild rice, short grain rice, long grain rice, all of the same in brown rice, mixtures of all of the before mentioned, red rice.  You can buy a little, a medium amount, a lot: it’s all there to choose from.  For only $1.50, you can have 50 grams of choice Saigon cinnamon.  You could spend an entire day in this small store and never actually see every different kind of food item that is there.  The world in a box.  A box that was more pleasing than Mitchell Island, perhaps, but no less a wonderful sight.

I forget sometimes that those sights are one of the things a city is for.

The Olympic Deficit

While the U.S. is celebrating all that is Obama, up here in Canada, they’ve got Olympics blues (or maybe ‘reds’ if you think of the debit side of the balance sheet). Back in 2003, when Vancouver was wooing the Olympic Committee for the right to host the 2010 Winter Olympics, there was a significant groundswell of public unhappiness. It got to be so pervasive that they actually had an election as to whether Vancouver should go ahead with what was endlessly advertised as less a sporting event than a cornucopia of benefits to the economy and a vastly improved quality of life! A rail line to the airport! A new highway to Whistler! Some really big sports arenas here and there that would be unlikely to be necessary as sports arenas after the fact! A rebuilt ferry terminal access! The public was sufficiently persuaded however: 64% of them voted in favor of the Olympics bid, which subsequently won the hearts of the Olympic Committee, and whose reality is now barely a year away.

In the interim, the snow levels have been a little dicey and one certainly wondered what they do with a Winter Olympics without snow. But…ah, well, we are all in a different space now. There may or may not be snow next year, but the bigger issue is whether there will be anywhere to put the athletes when they get here and who is going to pay for all the cost overruns.

The major crisis at the moment is that a big U.S. hedge fund--you know this sentence isn't going to end well--was financing the building of the Olympic Village and the hedge fund’s plan was to make a profit by selling the village as pricey condos afterwards. Alas, hedge funds have been having hard times and this particular fund recently pulled out of the financing, about half way through, citing cost overruns as well as hard times more generally. The city needs about a half a billion dollars (Canadian) to finish the project but the city charter requires a vote of the citizenry to take on that kind of debt. And then of course the city will need to pay back that loan along with associated interest costs.

In some way, the B.C. legislature just evaporated the charter requirement and now Vancouver is going out to borrow the money at what I doubt are going to be low interest rates. Subsequently, I guess, lucky Vancouver will be in the business of trying to sell those condos spring, summer, fall, winter, and perhaps spring again.. I suppose there could be worse market timing for that kind of real estate venture but probably not in my lifetime.

I was living in L.A. when the city had the summer Olympics. Although L.A. actually did manage to make money on it, there was precious little reason to believe that overall it improved our quality of life. And I doubt if it’s going to do anything good for Vancouver’s, either. One of my neighbors at the Point has been talking of making a killing on the Olympics by renting out his house (one bedroom, one bathroom). I doubt if that’s going to happen, but maybe we could offer all of the Point for an Olympic Village next year and, in exchange, Vancouver could underwrite a Point Roberts vacation for all of us somewhere sunny next January and February. Maybe December, too, so they'd have adequate time to get things ready for the athletes. Travel is such a nice way to get to know strangers, especially when they're your neighbors!

Bitter Night

Down to about 17 degrees F. (-8 C) and snow falling off and on throughout the day. This is definitely not the White Christmas I’d dream about if I were dreaming about one. The local/Vancouver news today is all about the homeless woman who died last night on a Vancouver street when the tarp-covered shopping cart she was sheltering under caught fire, apparently from a candle she lighted to try to provide herself with some warmth. Even though she was 42 years old, one’s mind goes to the Little Match Girl. Apparently the police had been in contact with her earlier in the evening and had urged her to go to one of the shelters, but she had refused and they judged her not to have mental problems and accepted her refusal.

We used to discuss this genre of problem frequently in my bioethics days: how far do you let people go in risking their lives? Great champions of patient autonomy, one and all, we would nod sagely that people have to be allowed to do what they want to. In the brief period when I was pitching bioethics stories to TV people, in fact, I almost sold a script based upon the story of a real-life, 8-months-pregnant woman living in an urban park near the university hospital where I worked. In real life, I thought she ought to be able to stay there, but in real life, the physicians at the hospital thought she shouldn’t and were happy to be convinced that she was endangering the life of another (the unborn child) as a result of either her mental illness or her failure to understand her situation and were happy to force her into the hospital.

Well, I probably was a stronger believer in letting people do what they wanted to in those days, but even then I talked to some people who worked with the homeless to find out why they insisted on staying in the streets even when there were shelters. Los Angeles homeless workers told me it was largely because the shelters were not, in fact, safe; that women, in particular, were preyed upon in the shelters by other homeless people after the lights went out.

So my response to the Vancouver situation is why wouldn’t this woman want to be indoors when it is 17 degrees F? She wasn’t out there because she was enjoying the brisk evening air. And now, everyone is appalled to hear of her death and appalled to think that the police didn’t have the legal authority to take her to a shelter against her will. No newsperson I heard today even asked why she wouldn’t have gone to a shelter. Isn’t that the question and the problem we should be addressing and correcting, not whether her autonomy should be respected? I’m pretty doubtful that homeless persons anywhere when the temperature is substantially below freezing are engaged in practicing their autonomy by risking death by hypothermia.

Point Roberts, as far as I know, does not have anyone homeless there. I suppose it is not so much because we are so kind-hearted and compassionate but because the homeless don’t have passports so they can’t cross the borders to get there. Here in B.C., on the Sunshine Coast, I suspect there are homeless people. The only ones I’ve ever heard about, though, were living up in the near mountains where it seems more like they are camping out than staying alive.

We don’t think about the homeless much, and especially when one comes from a warm climate like Santa Monica has. Up here on the border, though, it is not so warm, and right now it is unusually cold, so homelessness is a regular news story in the winter. I hope everyone who heard about that woman’s death last night thought about the homeless today and what they are going through. There was a homeless woman underneath a bridge as we drove up to B.C. on Wednesday. Her name was Dora. She was asking for money from people in cars driving onto the freeway from the corner she was standing on . I hope she’s still alive tonight. I hope she’s in a shelter. I hope she’s safe. But I know that most of us won’t be thinking about these people a week from now when the weather gets above freezing. Richest countries in the world; people freezing or setting themselves on fire in the streets trying to keep from freezing.

I don’t think it was anyone’s personal duty to keep her alive; I’m not looking to allot blame. But this is a civilized society and I genuinely don’t understand why we can't do better than this.

Confusion Rains

Tsunami update: If there’s a tsunami, don’t go to Canada. Go to the Firehall where you can play bingo. Upon our return to Point Roberts this May Day, we find yet another tsunami evacuation route sign. Unlike all the others I tracked down, this one sends the frightened native uphill to the high ground, which isn’t all that high, but is at least higher than 60 feet. (Wikipedia says that Point Roberts’ altitude is 0 feet and Tswwassen’s is 134 feet, so the high ground in Point Roberts is probably around 120 feet, I’d guess.) None of the tsunami evacuation signs actually make clear where you are heading or how you would know whether you’ve gotten where you are supposed to be going, but that’s what this regular update is to do for you, i guess. Go to the firehall or to Drewhenge, or to the sheriff's station, or to my house: all on high ground.

Vancouver Island Update.
After the trip to Vancouver Island, I got to thinking about why Victoria is the capital of British Columbia instead of Vancouver. From this century, or even the last one, it doesn’t really make any sense. But it turns out that Victoria was the big time before Vancouver was, and that Vancouver Island was its own province for quite a spell. It was combined with British Columbia as a single province (1866), and 5 years later, Victoria was was made the capital of this new province.

Victoria was only 28 years old at that point, but it was Western Canada’s oldest city and its largest city. And, since boats were the mode of transport at that point, having the capital on an island made more sense, perhaps than having it somewhere else with a smaller population and even less history.

Nevertheless, it doesn’t make a lot of sense that you can’t get directly to Victoria, which houses the Parliament and the provincial Capitol building, from Vancouver. The only direct ferry to Victoria comes from Port Angeles, in Washington. Vancouver ferries will take you far north of Victoria (to Nanaimo) or 20 miles north of Victoria to Swartz Bay. Is this any way to run a province? It’s as if they put the capital of Washington in Olympia and then put the big airport in Seattle. Oh, wait; that’s just what they did do.

We've Got Traffic!

Yesterday, we migrated northward on the regular schedule. We time these trips exquisitely so that there’s just enough time to do whatever Ed needs to do at Home Depot for the remodeling experience and then to get to the ferry landing about 10 minutes before the ferry departs. We have, of course, previously scheduled the trip on a day with relatively low ferry traffic and at a time when Vancouver street traffic is at a low-ish point. Except in the middle of the night, there is no real low point in Vancouver traffic because Vancouver long ago, based upon what was happening to Los Angeles, decided that keeping the traffic bad would limit the number of cars that people would try to bring into the city. This has not entirely worked except for the ‘keeping the traffic bad’ part.

Vancouver has expanded considerably in recent years as Canadians finally realized that greater Vancouver is the warmest part of their country. Though no Florida, B.C. generally and Vancouver particularly have attracted a massive migration from Canada’s more easterly provinces, especially as the Vancouver economy has exploded with its port/trade connections to Pacific Rim countries. From the west, which we also sometimes refer to as the Far East, large numbers of Hong Kong residents migrated here back when Hong Kong was turned over to China. With these population pressures, Vancouver real estate is now priced like Beverly Hills real estate. That means that people have been forced farther and farther outside Vancouver proper for affordable housing, and it has surely increased traffic formidably.

Even up here on the Sunshine Coast, we feel the impact of Vancouver expansion and traffic. When we first came here 16 years ago, you could arrive 8 minutes before any of the ferry departures any day, any time, at the terminal on either side and expect to drive right on board the Queen of Whatever you were getting that month. But now, no time in the summer and only Tuesday through Thursday in the winter (and not always then, depending upon regular holidays) can you count on not being told to wait two hours for the next ferry to come. Spring and fall, depending upon the weather, is iffy on Thursday and Monday, but Tuesday and Wednesday are okay. The weekends might be okay, depending upon the time and the direction you're heading: they’re coming here on Friday and Saturday, and leaving here Sunday and Monday, so you want to be going in the opposite direction.

But it’s not just people coming up to vacation or weekend. There were precious few people who commuted to Vancouver from the Sunshine Coast 16 years ago. Now, there’s an amazing crowd for that trip every morning and they are coming back every evening, all week long. Mostly, they don’t take cars (which would involve about $50-$60 per round trip). But all these people who are going to work in Vancouver are people for whom it was cheaper and less time-consuming to live here and take a 45-minute ferry ride plus another 45-minute bus or van ride from West Vancouver to downtown than to drive from up the Fraser Valley and pay a bundle to park in Vancouver. Something about that city planning really didn’t work.

The car-discouraging part of the city planning also meant that the City Parents refused to allow any freeways through the city. So all traffic is routed through city streets. There is a kind of beltway (but it’s only partial) that we take to the ferry, thus circumventing much of the street traffic but that works only if you don’t need to go into the city at all and are willing to drive, as the crow flies, a considerably longer distance.

So, Vancouver city planning has resulted in impossible street traffic and impossibly high housing costs for Vancouver. And for those of us just north, it has resulted in jammed ferry terminals, too-rapid expansion in population, and too-quickly-rising property costs. In addition, we get a different kind of traffic problem. The Sunshine Coast has, as its main and only thoroughfare, a 40+mile two-lane highway with (currently) a total of about six traffic lights along its length. You want to make sure that you don’t plan to make a left turn onto that highway when the several-hundred car ferry traffic is making its progression up to the next ferry terminal. So whether you are planning to take the ferry or not, you are always best to be thinking about what the ferry is doing.

Yesterday’s drive? Because of careful planning and no unforseen events, an excellent trip.