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Remnants of an overpass at Boundary and Vanness

In today’s modern Vancouver, the section between Joyce-Collingwood and Patterson stations on the Expo Line is often seen as a relatively sleepy area with access to a large park, a corporate office for a major employer, and a connection to one of the Rapidbuses.

However, if you have a keen eye and opt to walk along the route, you might stumble across some interesting history that makes this stretch of the SkyTrain network rather peculiar due to it having one of the few BC Electric Railway overpasses still left standing directly underneath.

Remnants of an overpass near Kingsway and Sandell on Smith

Situated between Kingsway and Sandell on Smith, you’ll find this interesting little structure that is very much out of place and is towered over by the railway overhead. Today, it acts as an underpass for access to the office building on the other side, but beyond that it doesn’t have much of a purpose today. It likely still stands as there is a gas line which intersects underneath.

Overpass as it appeared in the 1980s at Boundary and Vanness (City of Vancouver Archives)

However, until sometime in the 1990s, there was another overpass just 100 metres to the west at the intersection of Boundary and Vanness, which remained even after the Expo Line had opened. It was to serve the industrial complex which eventually became the various apartment and condominium buildings we know Joyce-Collingwood for.

This likely resulted in a lack of need for the railway overpass to continue existing. For the most part it is now gone and now Boundary Road is now six lanes as opposed to four and it is still an uncomfortable connection for cyclists who wish to continue on the BC Parkway, which follows most of the Expo Line.

That last part is a bit of a thorn in my side as the overpass could have served a use for cyclists who wanted to avoid having to make an awkward connection to the path on the Burnaby side. Aside from that, the whole overpass itself has some interesting history and could have been a station if BC Transit had its way in the 1980s.

Map showing the Central Park line (City of Vancouver Archives)

Two stations on the above map do exist on the modern Expo Line: Patterson and Collingwood East, which is now Joyce-Collingwood. However, one other station on here labelled as Park Ave could have existed as it was a station under consideration when planning for the Expo Line.

View of what is now Boundary and Vanness in the 1940s (City of Vancouver Archives)

Park Ave was really what we today call Boundary Road and its station was situated directly behind what is now one of TELUS’ corporate office. As you can see in the above photo, the overpass is very much the same design as the one I paid a visit to.

BC Transit planners were seriously considering a station called Boundary in that same spot. BCTel (who was gobbled up by TELUS in the late 1990s) was the province’s largest employer at the time and the government was keen to provide the office workers with access.

Why it never got built is unknown to me, but I imagine since the distance between Patterson and Joyce-Collingwood isn’t terribly long that they opted to not bother. As it would have straddled a zone boundary, it’s possible it could have produced a possible conflict. However, considering the existence of two consecutive stations with this fate on the Millennium Line, I think that is a moot point nowadays.

All that remains today of Boundary Station, formerly Park Ave Station is just a retaining wall for the old BCER overpass which was torn down sometime three decades ago.

This originally appeared on cohost.org/VancouverTransit but has been moved here due to the site’s shutdown.

This was written on cohost.org and thus references some matters that had happened around this time. Much of this thinking applies to other websites and is why I rarely talk about social media companies since they’re all going to be a waste of time in some way.

Rarely do I dare wade into the discourse, but I felt like it was time and I need to voice my support for the decisions made by @staff to the benefit of the site as a whole. It is hard to discuss content moderation openly and their decision to open the floor on content many who see it as objectionable as well as not was not only brave, but completely the opposite of what one would expect from much bigger social media outlets.

Like many, I find a lot of content disturbing. I am not going to hide this fact. However, regardless of the reasons for my biases, it is irrelevant to the reality that cohost faces: it is a small operation, moderation requires a lot of resources, and moderation on a service with an international audience is extremely fraught with legal jurisdictional landmines.

This point is lost on so many people in the comments made in recent posts by the cohost staff, leading to inappropriate ad hominem remarks and outright accusing them of censorship.

Let’s talk about the second point, because the first one has me quite angry.

Firstly: if you scroll down to the bottom of any page on cohost, you’ll notice that has a copyright mark belonging to anti software software club llc who describes themselves as a “not-for-profit software company”. If you have never seen the term “LLC” before, it means “limited liability company” and that should be your first clue about what grounds you stand on.

As an LLC, this makes cohost a private space. As a private space, cohost has every right within the confines of the laws they’re governed by to do whatever they want. This means and is not limited to deciding on what content they wish to permit or deny on this website. This also means they have every right to object to your participation on this website and that is regardless of what sort of financial relationship you might have engaged in.

Because of cohost belonging to an actual company, all staff have to abide by the laws of whatever jurisdictions apply to them. But because this is also the Internet, laws of which apply to users outside of the jurisdiction of what cohost itself is subject to come into play.

Many of the dissenters against cohost often look inward at their own countries’ principles and never consider the headaches others face. I am not an American and I do not live in the United States, so while I may benefit from cohost’s existence at the will of the American constitution and its federal and state laws, I am still subject to the laws of Canada and the European Union because of my nationalities.

There have been Supreme Court cases in Canada which have made certain content outright illegal to possess and there are laws in Germany against certain imagery of which I need not elaborate on. These are just a small sample of situations where if cohost wants to exist for an audience outside of the jurisdiction it is legally incorporated in.

If we flip this on its head, despite the fact that the United States is not the country I live in, the DMCA still ends up applying to me. If I download a movie through illicit means and I am caught, despite my ISP being outside of the country, they’ll still handle a DMCA claim against them because failing to do so has repercussions for them as a service if they wish to benefit from connecting to the United States. This is very simplified, but I am certain that you understand this logic.

For cohost to exist outside of an American vacuum, they have to consider what content they wish to permit. The alternative for them is to do what every small non-European website does when they don’t want to deal with GDPR: block anyone from the EU. This happens and if this small group of people were to get their way, cohost would effectively become an American-only website.

Is it censorship for them to remove content they decide is objectionable? Of course it is. Is it bad? Objectively, not really. And to further this: it’s a private space.

And that is where the first part I skipped needs to come up: this isn’t your space.

For cohost to come out and talk about this the way they did, it wasn’t an invitation for you as an individual to act as if somehow your rights were being violated because they decided as a private entity what they wish to have on their private space–irrelevant of whether or not you have paid for the service.

Also if you’re an American and you’re going to rattle off “free speech”, you should feel ashamed of the fact that a foreigner is more aware of your rights than you are.

If tomorrow it was decided by the staff that my posting about obscure video games was not going to be allowed on this website, that is their decision. Am I going to like it? No.

And that is the point: if you’re here to post content that cohost, a private company no less, objects to, you know where the door is. You can complain on some other website about cohost and let an echo chamber make you feel better, but maybe consider that there are other people here too and you have to share this space under the rules set by cohost themselves.

All of this falls on the shoulders of three people who are human beings. They are here to provide a website for us to shitpost on. They don’t have the resources to moderate content which often requires nuance to understand and examine. Speaking professionally, I do not want them to have that burden (I for certain know more about this than you do). If they don’t want the content you want to post on here, that is your problem and not theirs.

At least we don’t have to worry about people buying us custom titles.

I posted this reply elsewhere but figured I’d share it here too.

Stuxnet was not only a complex attack but the whole operation was clandestine and intentionally vague in its origins. Nobody officially admitted to its creation even though it was produced by the United States and Israel. Russia is not unwise to these sort of attacks on its industrial control systems and unlike Iran is unlikely to fall victim to the same tactics due to the nature of the country being the source of such attacks themselves.

I would not rule out the possibility of a Ukraine or someone aligned with Ukraine attacking Russian industrial control systems, but Stuxnet was such a huge investment of time and money and it would be easy to tip one’s hand very fast were the tactic to be used today. You’re more likely to see someone on Twitter brag about finding some random water flow system for a distillery or some sort of traffic light system via Shodan than something like the 2015 Ukrainian power outage.

Basically, Stuxnet was a slow boil and is now too obvious to anyone familiar with this stuff. Would not rule it out, but I am not going to bet on it.

This is my line of work and thus y’all get a rare opinion about geopolitics from me.

Mars and Earth at its closest point are 54.6 million KM apart. However, this shortest distance is not expected to occur until 2287, but as a consolation, almost two decades ago we were as close as 56 million KM. This variability exists because both Earth and Mars do not have perfect circular orbits around the Sun.

In that distance, light takes a hair over three minutes to travel. While the space between Mars and Earth is a vacuum, were it not to be and sound could propagate between uninterrupted, it would take almost four years to go between the two planets.

Now why do I care about this?

If you take the total distance of roads on Earth, it would come up to 62.3 million KM. Humans have built enough roads on this planet that if stretched out, it would easily slap Mars about twice per Martian year.

The thing that I cannot figure out is how much of that distance is paved. World Bank data is consistently too old or poorly defined, and some countries of advanced development (Austria, I am looking at you) do not seem to provide a percentage of what roads are paved versus not. However, some messing with the numbers in the cited reference (which is based on data from the CIA), it seems that 22.6 million KM is a reasonable number.

At 22.6 million KM, that is of course not enough to make to Mars. But, this is where it gets interesting because Venus has a much closer orbit! At its closest, Venus is 0.28 AU or 41.9 million KM away, meaning that we’ve paved enough roads on this planet to get us half-way to our runaway greenhouse of a neighbour.

Although Mercury is the closest planet to us most of the time keep in mind.

The banner text above reads:

Programming is the second literacy. The first one gives you knowledge: the second allows you to implement it in practice.

However, below, the three posters underneath have my attention.

• There’s a new IMKO2 in our school
• Train Basic everyday!
• That’s my new friend?

The IMKO 2 is an 8-bit computer made in Bulgaria. It was largely compatible with Apple II except it supported the use of Cyrillic.

I kind of want a high-resolution of any or all of the posters shown because they’re kind of endearing. It’s interesting to see that the posters were promoting the use of computing using English as opposed to Russian, due to the school’s location near the Finnish border.

There are some additional details about this image if you’re interested:

The first winter computer class for children (1985-6), a class at Chkalovski Village School No. 2, using “Pravets 82” computers. On the photo, unidentified school workers are familiarizing themselves with computers. In winter, a class was held here for children and adults. There were no exams: children were graded for creative works, and adults were not graded at all.

Image source: Wikipedia.