With the huge influx of people discovering my South of Fraser “Transit 2011″ plan, enough to take my site down for a bit over bandwidth overload, I’d thought I should write an quick lil update about it.

First off, thanks for all the very supportive comments. While it is easy to poke fun at TransLink’s plan, in comparison to mine, we must remember that they do truly only have limited funding and other political constraints to getting anything done these days - something I didn’t have to face while developing mine. That doesn’t mean however, that I didn’t try to keep mine realistic. Frankly, while it may be completely unscientific, I did try to get a reasonable cost analysis and keep the plan actually doable. The funding required for it isn’t *all* that much different than that which would pay for the Evergreen Line.

Just to recollect: As of now, while I haven’t gotten much way in response from TransLink officials concerning my plan, we know that the Livable Region Coalition, Stephen Rees, VALTAC, Gordon Price, the City of Surrey planning department, and a handful of transit riders love my plan and consider it far better than the official TransLink plan. Hehe, maybe that’s what you get when you give transit supporters what they want!

To that end, I received a comment on the old post suggesting that I go out and find more vocal support for the plan. Originally, while I was conceiving it, these types of ideas were in my mind (taking it to council meetings and such). However, as you may understand, I eventually lost interest in my plan as my views changed, and barely got it up on my site in a readable, concluded fashion. I do not consider my plan fully developed, nor fully backed by sources - and I don’t have the motivation, certainly not in 2008, to go back to it and update it. It was not exactly designed to be an official alternative to TransLink’s plans - in fact, mine was created before TransLink even released their draft version - it was more of a suggestion of creative, and reasonably priced solutions to our transit problems in the SoF area.

So, to both gnoble and Ken Hardie, no need to fret, I am not shopping this plan around town.

To reiterate, certain aspects of my opinions at that time have evolved - such as the use of the Interurban line for community rail. You can stay tuned however, because, in a very short time, I will be releasing a long overdue update to both my vision for transit in the SoF, and across the region.

That is, as long as the provincial government doesn’t do it first. Ken Hardie:

If you look at the real substance of the complaints by the five muni’s South of the Fraser, their issue is with timing. What we’ve proposed is in line with what we heard from the public and stakeholders, and the timing is dictated by what we can afford to do given the current revenue streams. If we get more provincial support…which may well be indicated on Monday…then of course we can do things more quickly.

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