In a somewhat recent video made by Jago Hazard on Wes Anderson’s new film, Asteroid City, he discussed the train depicted in the movie. It reminded me of times where SkyTrain had appeared in movies itself, so let’s talk about where it started and the ones that I can recall.

And yes. I am aware that the above photo was taken in a West Coast Express vehicle, which I guess at some point I should write a piece on.

Filming in Metro Vancouver for global audiences has been a thing for over a century, but it was never formal until 1977 when the provincial government established an office to attract production work to the region. Since SkyTrain grew alongside the development of the film industry in the region, it was only natural that TransLink would support production crews on their services.

The underground stations appear to be popular to film as evident by MovieMaps, but I was not able to find much showing the use of anything above-ground. This would add up as it is easier to dress up an underground station as belonging to some other city than it is to obscure anything above ground. There is an excellent video called Vancouver Never Plays Itself, which goes into depth about the relationship of Vancouver, its identity, and how filming obscures it all.

One of the earliest films to feature SkyTrain I could find was 1989’s Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan. Jason is shown as chasing through a Mark I train albeit in a curious fashion: he and his candidate victims were going between cars, something that isn’t doable unless you’re transit staff.

The train cars used were 061 and I believe 062, which is interesting for another movie later on.

It also portrays Granville as what seems to be Eighth Street-New York University station in Manhattan. However, it’s kind of funny of them to do that considering that the actual station isn’t very deep and isn’t anywhere near as modern as the movie depicts.

In the 2003 movie, Paycheck, Ben Affleck’s character is shown being chased down in a train tunnel with very distinct Mark II train chasing him down ever so slowly. The train car is marked as 162, but not only does that car number not exist for that model of train, the whole thing is in fact a set.

Interestingly, the European cover of the DVD release for the movie shows this train but it’s omitted from other regions.

Also there is a scene involving TransLink buses but that is perhaps for another time.

The 2012 movie, The Company You Keep directed and starring Robert Redford, has Granville standing in as “50th Street” station in New York city. A Mark I is shown arriving in the station and the main character is shown boarding the train. What stands out most here are the very Vancouver-specific ads left on the walls of the station.

In this movie, train 062 is used in this scene and I was made to not see this as a mere coincidence. I asked TransLink about why 061 and 062 is the most common vehicle seen in filming, but I never got an answer.

Pacific Central Station is also shown in this movie. This building alone deserves its own article, but unlike Waterfront, it is not a SkyTrain station.

Hard work is done by the writing crew, cast, and stage production staff to turn these stations and trains into pivotal or supporting scenes. I had put off this little entry for a few months due to the SAG-ACTRA and SWG strikes, but with their now conclusion, I felt it appropriate to finally post it.

One of the things I’ve been slowly doing the past year is spending less time online. I’ve noticed that since doing so that my mental health has been easier to manage and I have had a better relationship with my body. Is what I am about to say going to apply to everyone? No. But I do want to share my experiences.

I’ve been an online person for a very long time. I have my career due to my online activities, I’ve appeared in the press due to my online activities, and many if not all of my friends I owe in one way or another to being online. The Internet has been for better or for worse the reason for my life being the way it is today.

However, one of the things I’ve noticed is that while I have a lot of great long distance connections, it’s the connections I make in person I’ve always done better with. During the first year of COVID, this became acutely aware to me because many of those links became strained and limited. I couldn’t engage in the same activities as I did before. I just wanted a goddamn hug and aside from my partner and a handful in my bubble, that was it.

This ate at my extroverted personality so much that it probably played a role in my then partner and I separating. It made me make some pretty terrible decisions dating-wise soon after and it also made me reengage in some activities that my past-self had sworn off. I often joke that COVID “didn’t at all leave me with mental health challenges”, but the sarcastic statement was for sure untrue because I earlier this year admitted here on cohost that I was struggling but working to turn things around.

It goes a bit further than that, as in summer 2022, it started to dawn upon me how bad things were and I piecemeal had to figure out what to do. Two successive incidents across a bit over a week in August of that year clued me into where my brain was at. I had to change things in my life and my online activities were part and parcel to that.

When I say I have been an online person for a long time, I am not joking. Over two decades of being on IRC, message boards, and social media have built a legacy in my own head. In reflection, a lot of it was not a waste (as evident by the wonderful friends I have been blessed with), but so much shit I did online is seen by me now as a waste of time. This is not to say that what I consider as a waste to be without benefit, as I can argue that I am the person I am today because of it, but how much of that waste really mattered ultimately?

Five years ago, I would have come home from work and then would go straight on to my laptop. Now? I come home from work and I want to watch TV, play a game by myself, or socialise.

I joined softball this past year and it was the first time I’ve done a sport since I injured myself out of roller derby–I have hip problems now. It was also the first time I’ve picked up softball since 2007 and since I dislocated my shoulder that same year. Playing the sport clued me into something: I need human interaction and it has to be at the same level and same stakes as where I am.

I also picked up photography again (of which I will be posting about here on cohost eventually), got back into dancing after an eight year hiatus (I used to on the regular do Cuban Salsa and briefly West Coast Swing), formed a renewed interest in birding, and have gone and done day trips for the sake of doing day trips.

I still want to do the nerdy things I love, but i also want to just get far away from technology short of having my mobile phone on hand. Camping in situations where my phone is useless is really important to me for example–I am likely doing camping in the winter just to make it clear how much I like being outside.

One of the drawbacks of all of this is that I just have less to post on cohost because oddly I have content to consume outside. I want to see my friends and I want to go do the things because that is what my brain wants me to do. This has also meant that my streaming on Twitch has been greatly reduced, because it was starting to severely stress me out having to maintain some artificial schedule at the expense of being able to see people in person.

So the decision I’ve made is to be social and not stress about the social media. I’m going to do the hikes, the photoshoots, the dancing, and the hanging out. I’m also going to keep COVID and other ailments in mind. However, I am not going to stress out about what is online.

I should have seen this mentality coming really. A year before Twitter became what it is today, I had noticed that I was posting on it far less. Heck, even on Facebook I started to post a lot less sometime around 2019. The only social media besides cohost I give a damn about is Instagram, and what I post on there is really just a lot of IRL stuff.

What I have come to the conclusion of here is really for me. It works for me because I do have some level of privilege. I live somewhere that has exceeded the low-bar for public transportation in North America, I own a car and can drive to things public transit is not capable of providing access; I have a modest income, and while I have health challenges, none of them are limiting me from going to places. This is why I know what I am writing about is not going to reflect upon everyone, but I can at least give you all pause for thought.

This also doesn’t diminish the importance of online communities. For many, it is what works for them be it due to circumstances or just due to who they are ultimately. It is just for me, it isn’t the be all end all and while it could revert in the future, for now I feel like this is what works for me. I’m still keeping tabs on what is affecting the world I must add, but I am just consuming it at a pace that works for me.

If online stuff is stressing you out, consider my post as a guide and not a ruler.

Tomorrow (October 23) marks seventy years since BC Electric Railway’s Central Park line was shutdown. For almost 32-years from that day, no passenger rail service existed for many residents of Metro Vancouver, resulting in much politicking later on over what to do about rapid transit.

This wasn’t the first interurban service to be discontinued I must add. The line from New Westminster to Chilliwack was shutdown in 1950 and the last line to be closed was between Steveston and Marpole in 1958. This shutdown was part of a rail to rubber initiative by the BCER starting as early as 1944 when the company embarked on shutting down its rail services, including its first streetcar service shutdown in North Vancouver in 1947.

How we arrived at this shutdown in favour of buses is a bit complicated. Much of it had to do with logistics and it also had to do with corporate profits. I won’t get into the latter, but the former I can talk about a bit here.

One of the problems which the interurban system faced as a whole was that the terrain it navigated was quite challenging for the aging vehicles. Operators often complained about the hill at what is now McSpadden Park between Commercial and Victoria; the trains would struggle to get up the hill at anything more than walking speed.

And to add to this, the Fraser Valley is prone to flooding and this proved to be a problem for the line out to Chilliwack. Trains are naturally restricted to tracks and being that the trains in use by the BCER were electric, they could only use lines for which the vehicles could derive power from. In the above photo, you’ll see a BCER vehicle stopping next to a BCE bus to allow passengers to transfer due to one of the flooding situations.

Over the course of a decade, roads improved and BCER opted to not keep infrastructure up to standards and instead shutdown the network. The government was providing open access to its roadways and BCE wanted to take advantage of that.

One thing I have not discussed exactly is who the BC Electric Company is. You’d be correct in thinking that it was the predecessor to BC Hydro, but it was never originally a public company. In fact, the BC Electric Company existed out of the BC Electric Railway, meaning that the movement of people facilitated the growth of electricity in this province.

In 1961, three years after the last BCER interurban service ceased to be, the provincial government under W. A. C. Bennett expropriated the private BC Electric and formed BC Hydro.

This is why for almost two decades, BC Hydro provided both local bus transit and freight rail services. This changed in 1979 when BC Hydro gave up its transit services when the government created the Urban Transit Authority, which then in 1983 became BC Transit–it would not become TransLink in Metro Vancouver until the late 1990s.

All of this of course deserves its own article at some point, because for example, BC Hydro had a lot of objections to mass transit returning to Metro Vancouver at the expense of its freight rail operations. This became less of an issue as we went later in the 1980s and 1990s.

However, I often wonder if the actions of the provincial government in 1961 were to have happened a decade sooner we’d have had a radically different transit system. Much of the infrastructure perhaps would have been improved, but who knows if the trains would have survived. Maybe we’d have ended up with railbuses zipping along the Arbutus and Fraser Valley corridors.

PHOTO BY DARREN STONE/TIMES COLONIST

University of Victoria professor, Alzheimer’s researcher, Airbnb operator, and resident of James Bay, an affluent neighbourhood of Victoria which includes the provincial legislature and Royal British Columbia Museum, Debra Sheets made an appearance in Tuesday’s Vancouver Sun to complain about new legislation to reduce the impact of short-term rentals.

Since I hate media pieces which make people like her appear as suffering, I feel like collecting some articles together in one spot so if anyone searches for her on Google, they’ll see her repeated lines.

Again, she is not at all new to the media as she regularly makes appearances in her fight against any legislation against her ability to protect her “investment”. I should note that since she is a public servant, we know that she made CA$156,000 in 2022.

One of the earliest appearances she has made in the press was in 2017 when she and her Greater Victoria Short Term Rental Alliance created a GoFundMe to launch legal challenges:

Debra Sheets has a business licence for her STR unit in The Janion building, which lies in a transient zone. She’s concerned about the licensing fee potentially being as high as $2,500, which is significantly higher than the $110 she paid this year.

“I feel that’s completely and ridiculously unfair,” she said, adding that she would support a legal challenge to the fee. “I’m not doing anything illegal … that’s a lot of income to lose every year, not to mention that it’s decimated the value of my unit.”

As of today, units in this building can be found going for CA$1.1 million. If this page is any indication of how much she paid for her unit when it was renovated in 2016, she would be able to sell it for double at a minimum. I am glad to see that her unit’s value was not decimated as much as she feared.

The GoFundMe raised just over a quarter of its goal. I guess they were all bleeding money collectively then.

In 2020, when vacation rentals were suffering due to the COVID-19 pandemic, she once again appeared in the news:

Debra Sheets, a member of the Greater Victoria Short Term Rental Alliance, said she doesn’t see many short-term rental owners offering their units for long-term lease.

“I will never go to a long-term rental, you face so much long-term risk,” said Sheets, who uses Airbnb to rent out her micro-loft in the Janion building overlooking the Johnson Street Bridge. “You cannot evict someone if they’re not paying rent.”

Sheets said she’s currently renting the micro-loft for $75 a night, half the typical rate.

Property owners struggling to cover a mortgage without tourist dollars are more likely to put a unit up for sale, she said.

She has seen six units in the Janion, which is zoned for short-term rentals, listed for sale.

Sheets said the lack of tourists is just one more challenge faced by short-term rental owners, who are already hit with the speculation tax, commercial taxes similar to hotels and a $1,500 City of Victoria business licence fee.

“I think short-term rentals provide crucial income to families,” she said.

She knows of one property owner with a suite who uses profits earned during the high season to offer below-market rent to students from September to April.

Sheets is also concerned that municipalities could follow the Town of Sidney’s steps to ban short-term rentals.

Debra is concerned about “long-term risk” but never took into account that legislation would be brought in down the road to limit her investment. Real estate is too sacred to have any risk I guess.

She wrote to the Town of Sidney stating the following:

What is the logic behind banning STRs? It is a protectionist move that seems to be a response to the hotel lobby which is eager to eliminate STRs. The evidence is strong that AirBnb’s offer a different service than hotels- they do not compete. Would you shut down Italian restaurants because they might compete with Mexican restaurants? If Sidney does not allow STRs then people will go to communities that do.

[…]

My time is very limited these days as the pandemic has increase my workload to support nursing students to graduate from the University of Victoria. But this issue is very important to me and I must speak out. I am not eligible for rgtiree savings accounts and my STR is my sole plan for retirement security. Your vote to support hotels over individuals who have a small business has threatened my future. I hope you will reconsider.

So of course, this struggling professor at UVic was in the media again this week and the following came up:

If passed, short-term rentals in B.C. can only be offered in the host’s principal residence, which includes one laneway house or basement suite on someone’s property. The new rules would impact municipalities with a population of 10,000 people or more and in smaller communities within 15 kilometres of a larger municipality.

[…]

Sheets, whose principal residence is in a rental home in James Bay, purchased the 250-square-foot unit in 2017 with the intent of renting it on Airbnb to fund her retirement.

The Janion building is specifically zoned for short-term rentals and so isn’t subject to a City of Victoria bylaw that, like similar laws in Vancouver and Kelowna, already restricts short-term rentals to one’s principal residence.

So she still has that unit mentioned earlier. Its value is definitely higher than what she bought it for. I guess since she now claims to be retired, she should consider selling, considering she has more than this single unit as an STR:

The retired UVic nursing instructor said she invested all her money in buying the units and now owes just over $1 million in mortgages.

She sees an uncertain future following the province’s decision to prohibit short-term rentals unless the unit is a principal residence, which is not the case for Sheets.

Hey Debra. How about instead of being a leech on housing supply you go about selling off all of your units? It’s obvious that your inaudacious investment has become a risk and thus it’s probably time to live off of your ill-gotten earnings.

You’re not the only problem causing the housing crisis, but you most certainly do not help it.

This past week, New Westminster made it clear that it wished to see a North Fraser BRT connecting 22nd Street Station on the Expo Line to Marine Drive Station on the Canada Line.

On paper, this idea makes sense. 22nd Street is a major hub for buses coming in from New Westminster and south of the Fraser River and Marine Drive provides a link to options in South Vancouver and to Richmond and the airport. However, BRT stands for “bus rapid transit” and it’s the “rapid transit” part that has me irritated.

Sometime around 2004 or 2005, TransLink was considering options for the Evergreen extension of the Millennium Line which included a possible use of existing rail routes from what is now Marine Drive Station through New Westminster towards Coquitlam Centre. This would have used DMU (diesel multiple units) along the former BC Electric (now CN) Westminster-Eburne Line.

Instead, an alternate route was chosen for this extension, but TransLink and the City of Burnaby still consider this as a future potential transit link. However, the desire right now is to go with the cheaper option of BRT when in reality, I feel like it’s longer-term a bad idea.

There are cons against this idea of mine of course. For example, the railway link itself is almost 300 metres downhill across a highway from the proposed hub at 22nd Street–the height difference is 50 metres too. This really speaks to the impracticality of having the two points linked I will admit.

However, the pros are numerous. For one thing, we’re away from cars and the area around 22nd Street Station itself is notorious for traffic jams due to its proximity to the Queensborough Bridge.

By instead placing the terminus of this line at New Westminster Station itself (which would be a mere 50-75 metres away), we’d be able to take advantage of a more practical terminus while still connecting to a hub.

As for how active the existing rail line is, the yard near New Westminster Station is fairly active and is so right past the Queensborough Bridge, but around 2020 or 2021, CN put a concrete barrier just as the line crosses over at Glenlyon Parkway. It seems that sometime in the past few years, its last customer for local rail service ceased to be. This and the fact that the Marpole Line which this line once connected to is no more, CN seems fit to just consider the whole right of way fallow.

The Expo Line itself was built alongside a former BC Electric rail line. For many decades after the Central Park Line closed, many governments argued to return local passenger rail service along its right of way (something I am writing about for next week on @VancouverTransit I might add). This is how we ended up with SkyTrain and it has proven to be an integral part of our region.

We now have a disused rail line connecting to major centres (Marine Drive, River District, and downtown New Westminster) which is ripe for the taking. BRT is going to be subject to the whims of Metro Vancouver traffic whereas we could purchase a half-dozen DMUs and run them along this right of way with a lot more frequency. We’re going to need to buy new vehicles for this new rapid transit link, so why not just buy some trains?

Sure. We’re going to have to probably buy rights to the railway or outright buy it. There is also going to be a need to build stations and probably a short rail link to get us to Marine Drive, but the benefits to going this route are huge.

I don’t have hope in this ever becoming a reality, but honestly I think it’s the better idea.

Update (November 17, 2023)

I had to make a trip down to the River District today and opted to snap these photos for a possible future blog entry. In positive-ish news, TransLink did not opt to go with the route I hated.