For the care of my readers, who despite the absence of blogposts in the last half decade have loyally continued to subscribe here, please note that this blog is mostly dead. But, as a wise man once noted, mostly dead is a little bit alive. In the event that Twitter joins MySpace, Tumblr, LiveJournal and all the others in Social Media Valhalla, I'll likely be here.  I can also be found on Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, and (for the knowing) Reddit.  ..read more

From my presentation to the Vancouver City Council on Wednesday, November 29 ..read more

On October 14th, a minuscule share of Vancouver's registered voters turned out to elect a new city councillor, called to fill the seat vacated by the resignation of Vision Vancouver's Geoff Meggs.  At the end of the evening, 28% of the voters voted for the winner, Hector Bremner of the NPA, 21% for independent Jean Swanson, 20% for Pete Fry, 13% for Judy Graves of OneCity and a dismal 11% for Vision's Diego Cardona, a frightful showing for an incumbent council majority party.  Scroll below for maps While it should be noted any voter could vote at any polling station, the convenie ..read more

Montreal is home to Canada's most well-utilized heavy rail system, the Metro, which sees one-and-a-quarter million boardings on the average weekday - 30% more than Toronto's Subway and nearly three times as many riders as Vancouver's Skytrain. But, while the Metro's ridership demonstrates an urban transit system that is excellent at what it does, there are limits to what it can do.  It's technology is not designed for outdoor operation, ensuring that it must forever live underground in expensive tunnels, and cannot be extended cheaply at grade or on viaducts. While Réseau de Transport ..read more

This post is on several interrelated topics surrounding the history and use of railways on Vancouver Island.  If you're looking for a concise point about something, I'm afraid I may disappoint  Since the 2011 suspension of VIA Rail's Malahat, running daily between Victoria and Courtenay, Vancouver Island has been without passenger rail, but for one brief period, there were five rail lines radiating from Victoria These were, in rough order of construction:  The Esquimalt & Nanaimo Railway (E&N, in purple). This line was the first and last, and parts of it are ..read more

At a gathering a while back, a friend posed the question "What do we do if the Expo Line fills up?" The Expo Line is, after all, Vancouver's oldest and most heavily used rapid transit corridor, and has been since 1890 (with a 33 year closure mid-century).  Billions worth of building has been predicated on the presence of this high-frequency, medium-capacity rapid transit line.  And, after all, the line seems very full, with 120 second headways at peak hours and uncomfortable levels of crowding for riders. But, the Expo Line is not operating at maximum capacity.  During the mor ..read more

I really love stumbling on an interesting data set, especially when I can put it to a map. In this case, Translink has recently released their 2015 Performance Review, a set of documents detailing route statistics over the last  several years.  While they do provide 2015 rail passenger volume data, it is sadly incomplete, however the likely-not-terribly-dissimilar data from 2011 was presented as well for comparative purposes.  As such, I was able to map out what the 2011 Morning Rush hour looked like for rail transit (along with the SeaBus). Among observations - Holy ..read more

A while back I mentioned playing around with interactive GIS databases, and produced a web-based version of a GIS project that keep at home detailing the built up areas of North America, and how they are arranged along the rail lines.  The previous version of the map was coarse-grained and clunky, betraying my unfamiliarity with CSS, but I've had the opportunity to more finely scale the red  cartogram shapes that represent the population of urbanized areas. I've also added Canada, which has slightly different, but roughly comparable data for Canadian cities, towns and villages. &nb ..read more

The 2015 US Census Bureau population estimates have been released, and it has been much remarked that US population growth patterns, like their gas consumption and car-purchasing habits, appear to have reverted to their sprawling sun-belt ways seen before the Great Recession. Let's Map So most of the country grew last year, with most impressive growth in the Texas cities and the rest of the Sun Belt cities, along with significant growth in California, the Pacific Northwest, and the North East Corridor.   The Rust Belt, however, wasn't not part of this trend, with Chicago, Cleveland, P ..read more

The Raw ballot-box-by-ballot-box data has been released by Elections Canada More to follow ..read more