A Glimpse of a Future Transit Option (for a short time, at least)

While walk­ing back from gro­cery shop­ping at Granville Island today, we saw the new Olympic Street­car, which they are test­ing on the tracks nearby. I did get a fuzzy pic­ture of it a cou­ple of weeks ago. It’s sim­ply beau­ti­ful. We went a lit­tle closer and thanks to a friendly Bom­bardier employee, we got a look inside. I wish I had my cam­era in hand, and I inad­ver­tently left my iPhone in its cra­dle back at home. That also wouldn’t cap­ture the fact that the train smells new inside. It’s a 5-car model with 2 artic­u­la­tions, which are the ‘hinges’ between cars (if you ride the B-Line Bus, you know well what I’m talk­ing about), accord­ing to the engi­neer. It’s oper­ated man­u­ally, and to open the doors, you press a but­ton on either the inside or out­side while stopped (the door stays open for about 20 sec­onds after that). There are info screens at var­i­ous points on the ceil­ing, and the engi­neer said that they are linked back to the com­mu­ni­ca­tions sys­tem back in Bruges, Bel­gium, where this train was built.
The street­car, which is really much more like a train, will begin oper­a­tion on Jan­u­ary 21, and will then run back and forth between Granville Island and the Olympic Vil­lage at Cam­bie street for 60 days, where it will be free. We were sur­prised to find out that it won’t con­tinue past the Olympic Vil­lage and con­nect up with Main Street/Science World, which would have cre­ated a per­fect cir­cle around 1/2 of the down­town area plus False Creek (See map below. Anno­ta­tion and dashed line for the con­tin­u­a­tion of the route are mine. Click to see a larger version):

While I was a big fan of this new addi­tion to our tran­sit sys­tem, if it only goes from Granville Island to Cam­bie, it’s not as big a deal as if it had gone to Sci­ence World. If it had gone that far (as we had always assumed — since the orig­i­nal tracks that are orig­i­nally there go that far) it would have pro­vided a really easy way to get to Chi­na­town and other parts of down­town from our neigh­bor­hood. Tran­sit lines always open up new neigh­bor­hoods to explore, but get­ting to Cam­bie and 6^th from our area is already reach­able by a pretty fast bus. Still, I’m look­ing for­ward to rid­ing this new tram. What is per­plex­ing, is that in addi­tion to the abbre­vi­ated route, is why it isn’t a per­ma­nent addi­tion to down­town Mass transit.