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SkyTrain Mark V arriving at the station

Sorry for the lack of posts for the past while. I have been unbelievably busy. Enjoy this new blog format!

I had the fortunate luck to catch a brand new Mark V over the weekend and I have a lot of thoughts on why this train is good and why we’re sort of at the end of Expo Line expansion. Overall the train is really good and iterates well on four decades of experience by local transit officials.

Since then, some thoughts have been percolating in my head over what these trains mean and what I think the future holds for the SkyTrain system as a whole.

Interior of a Mark V showing the next station

The Mark V came into service last week here in Vancouver. What makes them special is not the LED displays which show all sorts of useful information nor the wonderful indigenous art laminating the glass dividers between the doors, but it is the length of the trains.

Train interior looking outside showing the train at the very edge of the platform

These trains now occupy the full length of the platforms on the Expo and Millennium Line. Getting to this point has taken 40 years since the opening of original Expo Line, which tells you a lot about how forward thinking we were thinking with everything then—I wish the same could be said for the Canada Line, but that is a whole different topic.

When I made an appearance on Gareth Dennis’ podcast, Railnatter, I pointed out that the Expo Line once the new extension is completed will put it at just six kilometres short of the Northern Line in London (58 KM compared to Expo’s future 52), to which he had a bit of a negative reaction to.

His reaction was right because it’s actually the city’s busiest line. I’ve had the ‘joy’ to use the Northern Line while working in London and it’s not a pleasure to be on. There is no real alternative to the line when it’s busy and many of the stations are either really crampt with narrow platforms or have interchanges that will test your claustrophobia—try Bank between 4 and 7 PM on a weekday and you’ll quickly understand.

Interior of Clapham North on the Northern Line, which is something like 2-3 metres wide platform-wise

There are very few metro systems in the world that have lines that exceed the Northern Line. San Francisco has one BART line that exceeds 100 KM, but its excuse is that it’s hemmed in by geography and operates in a very non-metro-like way I find.

China has two systems that are between 800 and 900 KM total trackage, but only Shanghai’s has three of which exceeds the Northern Line—and unlike the BART, the redundancy in the system is quite apparent.

So why do I care about the length? It’s simple: capacity of the system. You can only move so many people on these trains comfortably and metro systems are not meant for long distance travel. I am a bit baffled at Chinese systems doing 80-100 KM, but I am certain it works for their use cases and provides a heck of a lot of redundancies, but it will not here.

These trains are going to be maxed out by the time they finish passing through Surrey. While commuting patterns have shifted in the years towards staying within Surrey, the two largest economic centres remain downtown and Broadway, both of which are in Vancouver and are already on the system or will be before the Expo Line expansion completes.

Even at north of 600 people per trainset and even if you were to push the 70 second headways the system is capable of achieving, these sort of trains are meant to be for short journeys despite how many people it’ll move. This is what our system was designed with and there are only a few examples where you can buck this trend.

Two potential routes for SkyTrain in Vancouver going to the North Shore

We’re never going to really go much east beyond the terminus being built at Langley Centre. Perhaps the Expo Line will be part of the extension to the North Shore, but it’s looking like the powers that be in Victoria don’t want that and quite honestly I think it’s the right idea at least for now.

What about the rest of the valley then? Aside from maybe an extension of the Millennium Line out to Pitt Meadows or Maple Ridge, which really would run into the same problems as the Expo, we’re probably looking at alternatives from SkyTrain when trying to get out there from the western shores of the region.

I have made remarks around this problem in the past both in video and written form, but as it stands, your options for getting to Abbotsford or Mission for the most part relies options such as taking a crowded bus that runs hourly, riding a train that only leaves from the valley in the morning to then return in the evening, or driving a car.

The West Coast Express is a really pathetic system even though it does punch above its weight all things considered.

If this region is going to grow, if we’re going to resolve our housing situation, and if we’re going to reduce our greenhouse emissions, we’re going to need to think big and also systematically.

MVX and its grand vision of regional rail going into the Valley and even towards Squamish and Whistler

Buses are one part of the solution (the Fraser Valley Express operated by BC Transit is a great idea), but I think we need to get more serious with high volume movement of people. The folks behind Mountain Valley Express have the right idea, but it’s going to be a waste if we don’t align everything around it. We did this with SkyTrain back in 1985 and we will have to do this with any new mode of transportation in the future.

If we’re going to go on an infrastructure building spree in this country, let’s get people moving en masse. The Mark V is a symbol of the progress we have made and the progress we have to still make.

Also, to close off: good riddance to the Mark Is. They were good for the time, but they’re rubbish now and I am glad to see TransLink slowly taking them out of the system. I’ll be pleased to see them as heritage vehicles periodically, but I look forward to never having to be forced to ride in them again.

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Depiction of the Butlerian Jihad from the books

Earlier this year, my friend asked me to come over to her place to watch Dune Part One so she could the next day drag me to see Part Two in cinema. After that weekend, I gained a new set of worlds to explore: a universe once tainted by artificial intelligence but no longer thanks to a war with “thinking machines”.

This wasn’t my first experience with Dune, as I had at one point in my past watched the David Lynch rendition, which came out the year I was born. However, the Denis Villeneuve version captured my attention due to its non-goofy approach to the story, and as a consequence I now find myself reading through the books.

One plot device of the (known) universe in Frank Herbert’s Dune is the lack of anything resembling a computer as we know it. Approximately ten thousand years before protagonist Paul Atreides appearance in the story, the established royal houses were engaged in a war — dubbed the “Butlerian Jihad” — with thinking machines where humanity was victorious.

Thufir Hawat, a mentat as depicted in Dune (2021), played by Stephen McKinley

This victory led to anything resembling a thinking machine considered as forbidden technology and instead led to humanity being dependent on but not limited to mentats (human computers basically), analogue technology, and genetic modification including eugenics (unfortunate).

In the real world of 2024, we don’t have to worry about computers having sentience and we never will in 2025, 2026, 2032, or 2038 — check in with me in 2039 for an update. The suggestion that it will achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI) any time soon is absolute nonsense — the power requirements that AI-championing OpenAI is desiring is the equivalent to the output of some countries.

Just to map one cubic millimetre of the human brain required 1.4 petabytes of storage, meaning that to do its entirety, based on its average size of 2,174,340 mm², you’d need 3,044,076 petabytes of storage. If you convert that to zettabytes, you’d end up with about 3, which about 2% of what is suggested as the entire Internet’s total storage capability.

This is for one human brain. The entire Internet infrastructure is suggested to consume about 800 TWh of electricity, meaning that to simulate this one human brain, you’d need 16 TWh just for storage — this is enough to power all of Cuba just to put it all into context and we’re not even considering all of the other technicals we’d need to examine to pull it off.

At 640 grams each, you’d have 64,000,000 KG of these bad boys floating around for just one brain, putting them all at around 20% the total weight of the Empire State Building

We cannot map the entire brain without having to have nearly 100 million of these hard drives spinning at any given time (imagine the failure rate you’d have to contend with) and yet we’re expected to believe arrogant pricks like Sam Altman have any clue about what its usefulness is?

Even if we play into the fool’s statement that we only use 10% of our brains (this is untrue), we’d still need just over 1 TWh for storage for a human brain. Why are we suggesting that we go and speed up climate change in favour of a machine that relies on a garbage in garbage out philosophy?

Recently, I became aware that I was put on someone’s list as “someone who doesn’t get AI/NFTs/crypto” — here’s the thing: I do understand it, but what I don’t get is why do these types of people who champion these fads never take a step back to understand them?

I have a decade and a half experience with computer security and have seen so much change, but what hasn’t changed is the creature in front of the display. Humans are complex creatures; we don’t understand why we have consciousness and yet we have clowns in the world who suggest we can replicate some or all of it?

Quantum computers probably won’t help either here — if they even ever work.

The idea of classical computers with their binary states achieving the intelligence of a human brain is short-sighted — the idiocy I already am making an argument for here.

A thousand lines of code is more than enough to power a large language model, which forms the basis for the AI software we see commonly today, but to suggest that is enough in contrast to the billions of years of evolution that led to our species being here today is pure hubris and will lead to us hoisting ourselves by our own petard.

Were the Butlerian Jihad were to start today, I know which side I’d find myself on. Stop boiling the damn ocean to make soulless art, worthless and insecure code, and education materials of which are lacking in facts.

You have a brain; use it, exercise it, and find what you’re actually capable of.

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Press release from the Saskatchewan Party on September 13, 2024

Often I find myself writing about transit and thinking that many lives would not have been lost were we to have more publicly funded transit options. However, despite all of that, we have governments that don’t ever equate the use of transit and the reduction of vehicular alcohol abuse.

Earlier this month, The Saskatchewan Party released details about its slate of candidates ahead of the election writ being dropped. What was interesting was a line stating that there are five candidates who have past drunk driving charges.

Scott Moe, both current leader of the Saskatchewan Party and Premier of Saskatchewan, is also included in this list of having an impaired driving charge in 1992.

However, what is not mentioned here is that he has had two other incidents including a 1994 charge of a hit-and-run and a 1997 collision that took the life of a mother of two sons.

In the 1994 incident, Scott Moe never received a breathalyzer test but did admit that he had consumed alcohol earlier in the day. However, there is a contradiction in all of this because this is what the police charge stating:

…control of a motor vehicle that was involved in an accident with a vehicle at the Shellbrook Co-op with intent to escape civil or criminal liability, fail to stop his vehicle and give his name and address…

With Moe clarifying in an interview when he was confronted over it:

I exchanged information with the owner of the other vehicle and I called in the accident to the police.

Of course, since he apparently only called in the accident to police, there would be no evidence of him being under the influence at the time. We will just have to take him at his word that in 1997 when he killed 39-year old Joanne Bolog and injured her 18-year old son.

No alcohol was cited here, but he was charged with driving without “due care” and “failing to come to a complete stop”.

Especially rich considering that in 2019, the Humboldt Broncos junior hockey team had sixteen players killed when their bus was hit by a truck in a much similar fashion. The driver of the truck, who was just a permanent resident at the time, is now facing deportation.

Scott Moe commented on the tragedy:

“Nobody sets out one morning with any intent of being in a car accident of any type […] [to] some degree I feel for Mr. Sidhu and his family.”

Moe is just lucky that he has a certain degree of privilege that lets him get away with his past behaviour.

I could comment on other reasons for why Scott Moe (and his Saskatchewan Party) are a danger to others, but it doesn’t really matter what happens before you enter public life because it won’t matter when you are in office as Premier of a province anyhow.

Then-Premier of British Columbia, Gordon Campbell

In January 2003, while leaving friend and Vancouver-area broadcaster Fred Latremouille’s Hawaiian home, Premier Gordon Campbell was arrested and pled no contest to driving under the influence of alcohol.

In Hawaii, it was merely a misdemeanour and not a criminal offence such as the case is in Canada, so he was fined US$913 and sent on his merry way under the condition he be checked for alcoholism and participate in a substance abuse program.

Calls for his resignation were made from groups such as MADD, but he managed to survive another seven years in office only resigning in March 2011 after being bogged down by a poorly implemented sales tax.

Drunk driving is OK because these two idiots never faced the music for it.

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Promotional image showing a Class 142 railbus somewhere in the Fraser Valley (British Rail)

The theme of Expo 86 was transportation and many, many countries took advantage of the show to demonstrate their developments in this field. Of course, the star of the show was Canada’s SkyTrain, but Japan showed its maglev train, America its cars, and the United Kingdom showed its conventional rail.

Said railbus being transported to Vancouver (Colin Arnot/RRPicturesArchives.NET)

British Rail, the then government corporation behind operation and development of rail transportation in the United Kingdom decided to send one of its Class 142 train sets (aka “Pacer”) diesel trains (dubbed as “railbus”) to tour Metro Vancouver.

They regularly ran service from a temporary station in Abbotsford to New Westminster during the summer months of 1986 along the railway once referred to as the Fraser Valley Line during the BC Electric Railway days.

Railbus parked at the railyards in Strathcona (City of Vancouver Archives)

It did make an appearance near the Expo grounds at Pacific Central and was given a largely lukewarm reception by locals and government officials. The common critique of the train was the one shared by those back in the UK: it was an uncomfortable ride.

Railbus parked in New Westminster (J.W. Booth)

The reasons behind the uncomfortable ride are known: unlike most trains, this was based on a bus made by British Leyland. A rail chassis was fixed to the bus body and then some slight modifications were made to the cab to make it “rail-ready”. Unlike a typical train, the wheels were fixed in place which made them noisy. To add to this, there were only two axels per car unlike the typical four you’d see on other trains including all of the ones used by SkyTrain today, which resulted in a rougher ride.

Railbus parked somewhere in the Fraser Valley (City of Vancouver Archives)

After the summer, the train set was sent back to the UK where it operated on various different services until all Pacers were retired at the end of 2020.

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BC Electric train at New Westminster Station during the Duke of Connaught visit (City of New Westminster)

New Westminster Station today

For those who use New Westminster Station on the regular, it’s a place you either pass through, you get off to see a movie, or you catch a bus from to go up the steep hills of the city is named for. However, it has a long history of being a terminus going back to the early 20th Century.

The original station building was located adjacent to the present-day station and is now a thrift store and office. It was opened in 1891 and sat directly next to the Canadian Pacific Railway’s station.

Interurban as seen from the entrance of New Westminster Station (City of Vancouver Archives)

It was a terminus for the Burnaby Lake and Central Park BC Electric Railway (BCER) interurban lines plus provided through service for the Vancouver to Chilliwack service as well. Add on top the street cars that littered New Westminster and a connection to Richmond (Lulu Island) and also to Vancouver via the Marpole line, you find yourself with a major hub for railway services in the region.

New Westminster Station’s current location as seen in the early 1980s (City of New Westminster)

With the dissolution of passenger service provided by the BCER, New Westminster being a transportation hub in what was then Greater Vancouver came to an end. It became an area dominated by the car especially after the City of New Westminster opted to build a giant parkade on its waterfront in order to “revitalise” the area.

New Westminster Station as seen in 1986 (City of Vancouver Archives)

In 1985, New Westminster returned to being a transportation focal point with the opening of SkyTrain service and once again it became a terminus station. To facilitate it being a terminus station, half of the tracks were covered over with a temporary platform. This was because there was a planned extension to another station in the downtown area and then off to Surrey.

New Westminster Station as seen in the 1990s

This station became important to New Westminster’s efforts to revitalise its downtown core and in the 2000s, it became a focal point for densification. The former grounds of a car dealership, a parking lot, and a retail complex were all to be used as part of turning the station into a hub for residences and shopping.

New Westminster Station is now part of a shopping centre

Today, New Westminster station is not only a hub for connections elsewhere in the city and beyond, but you can go there to get your groceries, eat a meal, and watch a movie. It even acts as an intermodal as a brief walk can take you to a ferry which connects downtown New Westminster with Queensborough.

Perhaps in the future it will be a connection to Vancouver via the old Marpole line?

This was originally posted to cohost.org/VancouverTransit.