The Esquimalt & Nanaimo (E&N) railway is apparently out of service until further notice. Les Leyne’s column today points out that this violates the agreement for BC to join the Canadian Confederation. He neglects to mention that the original condition was that the railway would be complete by 1881 and the federal government was 4 years late.

Intuitively, the E&N seemed like a good candidate for commuter rail – it tags the populous (but sprawling) West Shore to downtown Victoria – if only they’d reverse the direction to serve commuters instead of tourists! But three fatal blows have been made to that notion in the last year:

• BC Transit’s analysis that the E&N line is too divided from the rest of Victoria to be viable as a light rail line.
• The Ministry of Transportation’s analysis that the E&N line is too old to offer competitive commuter heavy rail transit.
• The City of Victoria decided that their taxpayers shouldn’t pay to replace the rail bridge that brings the E&N to the edge of downtown, and no other governments stepped up.

Since those reports came out, the trainspotters in the Island Corridor Foundation have stopped being so vocal about using the E&N line for commuters. People who don’t follow transit issues aren’t aware of those reports, so I still hear on the street that the E&N would solve all our problems if they only ran it backward. Now that the E&N is no longer running and the rail bridge has been decommissioned by permanently raising it, I expect people will get the message.

Given the importance of the Canadian Pacific Railway in Canada’s history, there still might be a nostalgia movement. It’s good for BC to keep violation of Confederation in the back pocket if we ever need to unilaterally secede.

BC Transit has quietly rolled out a schedule feed that Google Maps is consuming to provide directions by transit for Victoria. For example, here are directions from Victoria city hall to UVic:

Transit directions are extremely useful for tourists and locals going to unfamiliar locations. When I’m travelling, I find Google Maps way easier to use than trying to figure out another city’s bus system. I know a lot of tourists are afraid of leaving simple mass transit networks for the complex bus systems, so they end up only seeing narrow corridors of a city. In Victoria, I assume tourists are reluctant to leave the downtown core or rely on taxis – spending less money in stores and restaurants. If transit is easier to use, locals will be slightly more likely not to use a car.

In Vancouver I pull up Google Maps on my smart phone, often while already on transit (SkyTrain goes where?!). In the US I find an open wifi connection and leave the directions open on my phone. Before I had a smart phone I would print them out or take notes. I will probably never use the Victoria Transit website again.

Congratulations to the tech team at BC Transit! It’s been painful waiting for BC Transit to implement this when Vancouver has had it for so long, but I’m really excited that it’s here now. Victoria hasn’t been added to Google’s list of open transit data feeds, but I assume the feed will be open if anyone has transit mash-ups.

PS: I hadn’t even noticed until checking out the transit directions, but Google Maps has biking directions up for Victoria too!

My bitching about BC Transit’s plan for Victoria got me an invitation to participate in an (open) survey about plan priorities. Similar to the City of Victoria’s prioritizing survey, BC Transit is running a “planning game”. I guess HTML forms weren’t up to the task, because it’s a on a Web 2.0 website as locked down as a Flash app: the back button is broken and there’s no way to see data without stepping through it. That being said, it does show you the average opinion after each step.

I believe that I should express what would personally benefit me and allow BC Transit’s planners to find the maximal utility for the population. Living and working downtown, I don’t use transit very often but I appreciate a good system waiting for me when I do.

The survey works by dragging options into an ordering. Some of the options do not have intuitive names (“economic growth” = jobs created by running transit operations) and the descriptions appear in an easily ignorable right pane.

Step 2 involves prioritizing the major edges in BC Transit’s planned network for Victoria. For each edge, you can specify whether you prefer frequent bus or mass transit. I neglected to “add a custom” options for better coverage of James Bay, Cook Street Village and Ross Bay Village. I did appreciate that the network edge enhancements were competing with whole-network options:

• Increased frequency
• Increased coverage
• Extend service day

The coolest section was Step 4: “How do we pay for this?”. I’d love to have a debate about all of these options:

• Passenger Fares
• Property Taxes
• Local Gas Tax
• Advertising
• Provincial Funding
• Road Tolls
• Parking Tax
• Community Pass (bus passes given to every household in exchange for property tax increases)
• Vehicle Levy