I just wanted to take a moment to comment on how impressive it is that Translink is continuously making well-considered and effective investment in capacity upgrades through continual train purchase orders and a substantial station modernization program. These aren't always ribbon cutting-type investments that garner headlines, but rather the mostly invisible investments into incremental improvements that let the system continuously grow and avoid the worst effects of 'success' (i.e.
your stations are terrifying because they're so overcrowded).
In retrospect, my peak transit using years in Vancouver (generally late-90s through mid/late-2010s) were a period of minimal investment in station upkeep and modernization (because limited capital funds were rightly going into system expansion: Millennium Line and Canada Line). We were still benefiting from the initial round of investment in the Expo Line and I clearly recall how big a deal it was to have Translink's expansion funding cut out from underneath it by the BC Liberal government, leading to a lost decade of wrangling to find some way to pay for expansion and increasingly needed reinvestment in all aspects of the transit system. Good choices were made along the way, like the renewal of the trolley fleet, major investment in articulated buses, new B-Line routes, and obviously the investments in the Millennium and Canada Lines. But those old Skytrain cars were getting janky and the first-gen Expo Line stations were already past-due for repairs and upgrade.
Looking from afar in Hamilton, where transit is stuck in a 1960s mindset, I cannot overstate how impressive the current Translink system appears, let alone its near-term future incarnation. Out here, the Hamilton Street Railway (our transit 'agency') is just another city department, seemingly without mandate to improve or the slightest ambition for it to be anything other than a municipal service provider that runs buses on routes, little different than how waste management runs its garbage and recycling trucks. In the local press and seemingly a fair part of the community, there is
still handwringing about whether it was a good idea to accept a
free $3.5 billion-plus dollar crosstown LRT line, with a very solid alignment terminating in the west at McMaster University, running through the CBD with a one-block walk to the downtown GO station, and an eastern terminus way out near the city limits at our second largest mall.
Anyway, good on Translink. I take great satisfaction in knowing things are headed in the right direction out west.
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