More thoughts on the new BC Transit Plan
By b5baxter@drupal.org on January 16, 2008 - 9:38am
Speaking about the new Provincial Transit Plan, Premier Campbell said "Our transit mission is nothing short of being a global leader in terms of public transit and transit usage."
Unfortunately, the plan will get us no where near to being a "global leader." The new transit plan has ridership reaching 17% by 2020.
But in Stockholm 70 percent of peak period trips are by public transit. In Berlin it is 40% with a goal of 80%. Paris and London are both over 20%.
Other European cities :
Utrecht - 40%
Helsinki - 30%
Zurich - 40%
Copenhagen - 31%
Even some American cities seem to be ahead of us (note: these numbers are for percentage of commuters not total trips):
Washington - 33%
New York - 53 %
I would like to see us be a global leader in public transit. But unfortunately, this plan is too little too late. Maybe if we cancelled all the highway expansion projects and made transit a priority we could start to make progress towards that goal.
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I've never particularly liked "Slash Gordon", because, like most other politicians, he tends toward using the old "Mushroom Philosophy" much too often. (That's "Keep 'em in the dark, and feed 'em horseshit") And like most other politicians, he promises us whatever he thinks will get him re-elected, whether it might be possible to keep those promises or not. Also like other politicians, he tends toward choosing projects that will help to improve his own situation among his friends, associates, and general hangers-on. So I view with a jaundiced eye and the greatest suspicion anything someone like him announces as being "the greatest", or "good for the country" or "the best we've ever seen". Why? Because I've got an I.Q. of 131 and a very low tolerance for bullshit, that's why. I applaud your efforts at injecting some sanity into this madness!
I agree with Ray on this one.
I stumbled on Paul Hillsdon who seems to have analysed the transit issue in some depth. http://www.paulhillsdon.com/blog/2008/01/14/analysis-on-the-provincial-transit-plan/
From my side of the tracks, it needs doing and wherever possible it needs to be underground.
Try this.
sorry all, thought i did it according to the instructions. Ray please fix it and many thanks.
But I'm not able to correct your original one, because I'm not one of the editors on this site.
You need to use the HTML code for creating a link, which is what I did above where it says "Try this." You'll notice the word "this" is in blue, which means that if you click on that word, it takes you to the website you wanted to link to. If you click on that blue "this" you'll be taken to Paul Hillsdon's website with the article you want us to see.
Ray
Thanks for trying.
I can't remember what I did. I'm missing some html somewhere. Oh well, maybe the readers will go to you next comment and click on your "try this" and get where they need to go.
Effort appreciated.
You can find a chart of HTML Codes by clicking here and the second item in that chart list, "anchor", shows the code example for making a link and if you click on the word "Tip" on the right-hand end of that line, it will explain more about how to use that. Another page of info is this one with separate sections on various subjects.
I hope this is helpful.
With a glaring lack of a national strategy, Canadian public transit is mostly stuck in neutral. So how else can we improve the mess? Suggestions most welcome!
The Walrus Magazine is discussing traffic congestion this month:
http://www.walrusmagazine.com/articles/2008.01.18-traffic-wars-rem-knew-...
You will find it by clicking here.
Hey Ray, I noticed you've been helping people out with clickable links. Thanks for that. I enabled the thing that makes URLs clickable, since we're getting a few people who don't know HTML. I think that's fine, we're going to add some more features that makes it easy to select text and quickly make links, as easy as making stuff bold in Microsoft Word. Also, the software that powers this site is up to date with the latest bug fixes and security releases.
Now that I'm catching onto this html stuff, it isn't so bad. The worst part was getting over my fear of making terrible mistakes. I solved that by making myself a 'cheat sheet' with the most common stuff on it. (Works for me!) - I remember a while ago, during one of our chats about the site, and Drupal the base upon which this is built, you said that one of these days, you would get everything right up to date. I have an idea of how much work that actually is, and on behalf of us users, may I please offer our sincere thanks to you for doing all this? We do appreciate your attention to detail on here, and your generous assistance whenever we're in trouble. Thanks, Richard!
Now then, what's Microsoft Word? Is that something like OpenOffice.org's Writer?
Incidently, OpenOffice 2.3 now handles those Microsoft equivalents seamlessly, and can convert all that into Open Document File format, for more universal use. (just an FYI, folks).
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