It's already in The Vancouver Province (when that link dies, check the scan of it on the organizer's LiveJournal), on page A2 of yesterday's edition, so thousands of people already know about it: at 6 P.M. tonight couples of no doubt all possible combinations are going to lock lips on the SkyTrain from Broadway Station here in Vancouver to Waterfront Station. The plan is to keep making out until the train loops back to Broadway. It's a sequel to the 8 hour makeout on Commercial Drive, which I first read about as a link in the Vancouver blogs section of Urban Vancouver. A couple days ago, I also saw the announcement that it would happen today, emailed in, and got the time and location of it, thinking it would be something that only a relative few would know about and that would be fun to "document". Evidently the Jason Botchford from Province got a hold of the info too. It's tempting to moan about the "mainstream media" broadcasting something that seems like it was supposed to be a surprise, but the idea and the slogan "bringing back first base" and the phrase "makeout artist" are pretty great. I still haven't seen anybody drop a reference to the phrase "all you need are kisses to start a makeout party", but maybe they'll use that for the next prank.
SkyTrain
Maria is reporting that the TTC is on strike. Hopefully they can avoid the 3 month+ strike transit Vancouverites endured in 2001. I've never had a car while in Vancouver (since 1996), so that meant 3 months of making sure I had a ride to work. (Luckily I lived near an arterial route, at the time a route that my co-worker took to work.) While in Toronto, I took the subway and streetcars, which I thought were the neatest things, because unlike Vancouver's automated SkyTrain, they each had operators. Crossing a lane of traffic to board a streetcar, and then make sure that traffic had stopped behind the streetcar (as required by law) when alighting took some getting used to. The streetcars aren't as neat as Portland's, which stop snug up to a curb and have a newer fleet, and Toronto's transfer system—which as I understand it means you can keep riding for a reasonable amount of time as long as you're going one way taking the most direct route. In Vancouver transfers are limited by time and "zone", but not by direction or amount of trips.
Sacha: “the ability of Skytrain to move people around is not dependent on the number of cars in the fleet, nor is it dependent on the amount of people that use the service. It is a completely scalable transportation solution with a cap on maximum capacity that is not a forseeable issue in the future. This is why I do not mind spending my tax dollars on such a service even though I probably will not use it most of the time.”
He is less approving of having more buses on the streets, since they take up space on the roads too. Instead, Sacha argues for better infrastructure such as more freeways. My opinion of that is rather biased, since I don't have a car and don't plan on having one in the near future, so there's no need to go into it.