Sometimes it All Comes Together

Things have been going well for Van­cou­ver. Last night, our beloved Canucks man­aged to beat the Dal­las Stars, and won the first set of play­offs in the final 7^th game. It was make or break, and they made it. The cel­e­brat­ing on Rob­son Street was so loud and long that I sus­pect a lot of peo­ple are head­ing into work sleepy-eyed this morning.

Yes­ter­day was a pic­ture-per­fect day, with mild breezes, sun and a few scat­tered clouds. Before the game start­ed at BC Place, I met up with Mark, a Com­put­er Sci­en­tist vis­it­ing from LA, whom I’d met through my arti­cle in the LA Times. While we tried to chat over a few brews, the groans and cheers of the crowd would punc­tu­ate the evening (I got home before the rev­els start­ed). As the game-win­ning goal was made by Trevor Lin­den we heard the cheers from the whole city from our bal­cony in False Creek. A slew of hang­overs was prob­a­bly made just bit worse by the return of rain today.

Tomor­row night is the Blog­ger Meet­up, and I sus­pect that our cel­e­bra­tions will con­tin­ue, although some­what tem­pered by the fact that it’s not over; the Canucks now have to go on to face the Ana­heim Ducks, and will be doing so that evening just as we’re sit­ting down. (I’m sure we’ll know the play by play, either from TVs or the Wi Fi connection).

The CanadaLine 
Today I came across this video via Pacif­ic Metrop­o­lis, who track this sort of thing, that details the new mass tran­sit sys­tem that is cur­rent­ly the rea­son that they are tear­ing up much of down­town and Cam­bie Street (as well as the air­port, I sup­pose, but I haven’t seen that myself). As it shows, It will make Rich­mond and the Air­port about a half an hour from Down­town’s Water­front Sta­tion, which is the con­nec­tion to North Van­cou­ver (and ulti­mate­ly by motor coach, Whistler) via Seabus and the oth­er towns to the east via the Sky­train system.

It’s a typ­i­cal, cheesy cor­po­rate video, with some tru­ly awful stock music and over­ly plas­tic nar­ra­tion, but you can get the gen­er­al idea:

Frankly, if this is what the tax­es that we’re fil­ing (due in 6 days and count­ing) are going toward, I’m more than OK with it. Yeah, I know, I know, there are lots of folks here who aren’t thrilled with the Canada­line, and fought against it (and I sus­pect that it real­ly was­n’t pret­ty the way it was pushed through). I say, let’s make the most of it. Final­ly, peo­ple will be able to get from the Air­port to Burn­a­by (and even Sur­rey) with­out burn­ing an ounce of gaso­line. And with local prices at the pump around 1.18 per liter, as well as the usu­al Glob­al Warm­ing argu­ments, being ahead of the curve on mass tran­sit can’t be a com­plete­ly bad thing.

I remem­ber the videos and praise for the Big Dig back in Boston, but I always hat­ed the idea of a road for more cars, built under the city. So much mon­ey and so much engi­neer­ing (and cor­rup­tion) mere­ly to build a high­way? What were they thinking?