If, like me, you missed last night’s Next Generation Transportation: All Party Forum, you can catch up on the conversation by viewing a summary of the participants’ tweets (thanks SFU Carbon Talks). Don’t forget to also search #bctranspo on Twitter.

On Election Day (and advance voting days), join the BC Cycling Coalition’s Bike to Vote campaign by pedaling to the polls.

Together, we can make transportation an election issue!

Lower Mainland mayors seek funding for transit expansion, Georgia Straight

Declining car use drives demand for transit, Georgia Straight

Fewer drivers among urban youth in Metro Vancouver, Vancouver Sun

I’m not a fan of fare zones so I was pleased to learn from this blog post that true distance-based pricing will be explored as an option when TransLink conducts a comprehensive fare policy review in the next few years. Also, the picture of the 1958 fare zones is fascinating!

You can follow the Bruntletts’ car-free experiences on Melissa’s Velo Family Diaries blog.

The next Women Transforming Cities Café, on Gender and Public Transportation, will be held on Wednesday, January 16, 5-7 p.m. at Kiwassa Neighbourhood House, 2425 Oxford Street.

This event will feature discussions about improving public transportation, with:

• Dr. Leonora Angeles, UBC Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice; School of Community and Regional Planning
• Christine Morrisey, Chair of the City of Vancouver Seniors Advisory Committee
• Patricia E. Aguilar Zeleny, Centre Coordinator at the Vancouver Status of Women
• Andrew Brooke, Manager of Public Consultation, and Marissa Espinoza, Senior Manager, Service Planning TransLink
• Carlos Moreira, Vice President Local 111 – Canadian Autoworkers Union

Round-table discussions will be held in Spanish and English. Register online or phone Kiwassa Neighbourhood House at 604.254.5401. Admission is free and all are welcome to attend.

Trains

Everything you’ve heard about train travel in Japan is true: it’s fast, punctual, frequent and comfortable. Japan’s trains, including those in the transit systems of the places we visited, were the highlight of our vacation. Our 14-day Japan Rail Passes (about $580 CAD each) were useful for intercity travel and even hopping around Tokyo on the famous Yamanote Line.

We zipped between Tokyo, Nagano, Nagoya, Kyoto and Hiroshima using the super-fast Shinkansen bullet trains, which easily exceeded our expectations. Zooming from Hiroshima to Tokyo (800 km) in a mere five hours is impressive, and puts to shame Amtrak’s eight hour travel time between Vancouver and Portland (500 km).

Even the train station architecture is amazing in some places. Kyoto Station is a marvel from top to bottom, so much so that we decided to have our anniversary dinner there. We found a quiet corner on an upper level of the station, and we munched on takeout while enjoying a perfect view of the orange and blue lights of nearby Kyoto Tower.

Trains within cities, particularly the legendary ones in Tokyo, were easy to navigate and often very fast and frequent. Taras Grescoe’s chapter on Tokyo in Straphanger: Saving Our Cities and Ourselves from the Automobile is the perfect introduction to the city’s transit system and helped me to appreciate the astounding flow of people at busy stations like Shinjuku and Shibuya.

Walking

We wandered around cities using a combination of transit and walking, which is an ideal way to explore. Walking seems safe thanks to thoughtful pedestrian crossings, separate facilities (such as the many car-free walkways in Tokyo), and quiet side streets where vehicles are rare and attentive.

Walking in Japan reveals the joys of serendipity. We got lost. A lot. We learned quickly that it can be very frustrating to find a particular address in parts of Japan. We enjoyed ourselves much more when we let go of searching for specific places and needing to know where we were. Wandering, exploring and discovering were consistently more rewarding.

The bonus of combining walking and transit is that you can never be really lost. Eventually you find a transit stop or station and you can usually at least navigate back to your accommodation from there.

Walking is the best way to experience Japan’s large cities since there is so much to see everywhere, indoors and outdoors. Department stores aren’t just for shopping — if you walk through them you will find food (often on the lower levels), restaurants (often on the upper levels), and maybe even bowling alleys or rooftop gardens. In, over and around transit stations are shops, restaurants, and pachinko parlours.

Japan also reminded me of something very simple that makes it easy to travel car-free: abundant washrooms. I’ve never understood in Vancouver why our transit stations, particularly our new Canada Line stations and Waterfront Station with all its amenities, don’t have public washrooms. There are washrooms everywhere in Japan, and travellers can reliably count on finding them at transit and train stations. It’s a simple thing, but something Vancouver is strangely reluctant to provide unless you consider the often-broken soaking wet automatic toilets in the ad-laden metal boxes adequate.

Cycling

We only rode bicycles on the Shimanami Kaido cycling route (more on this in a future blog post), but we loved observing all the people riding bikes everywhere we travelled in Japan.

The weather was sticky, humid and in the 30s every day, but this didn’t seem to stop anyone from riding their bikes in everyday clothes.

In North America, we often hear that when children enter the picture it will be time to get a car or at least drive more, and Japan showed us that families can stick to bicycles for most of their transportation needs. When I saw a mother with one child in a front seat and one in a back seat on her bicycle, I thought, “right on!” because I don’t see this very often in Vancouver. I soon realized she wasn’t doing anything extraordinary. Over the course of our two-week vacation, we saw many parents (mostly mothers) travelling with multiple children on their bicycles and they didn’t need fancy cargo bikes, trailers, bakfiets or other expensive equipment to do this. Bike shops in Japan sell a variety of bicycles that are already equipped for carrying children.

Japan changed my opinion on sidewalk cycling. Prior to travelling there, I was known for grumbling whenever I would see someone riding their bike on the sidewalk. Now I see that sidewalk cycling can work, even in a busy city like Tokyo, if people pay attention to each other and the cycling is slow.

OTHER HIGHLIGHTS AND RECOMMENDATIONS

If you’re planning a trip to Japan, you may be interested in some of the other things we enjoyed:

• japan-guide.com – an unbelievably helpful and accurate website, particularly if you’re planning day trips where you need to do some transportation research
• Magome-Tsumago Trail, Kiso Valley (more on this in a future blog post)
• Cho Bali Bali Restaurant, Nagano
• Accommodation at Capsule Ryokan Kyoto
• Nishiki Market, Kyoto
• Eating delicious vegetarian food in Kyoto
• Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park
• Eating huge portions of okonomiyaki in Hiroshima
• Yakult Swallows baseball game at Jingu Stadium, Tokyo
• Grand Sumo Tournament at the Ryogoku Kokugikan, Tokyo
• Wandering around Shimokitazawa, Tokyo
• Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo
• Eat More Greens Restaurant, Tokyo
• Exploring the world of food equipment and plastic food on Kappabashi Street, Tokyo
• Being able to speak and understand a little Japanese thanks to the UBC Continuing Studies Japanese Beginner 1 course I took prior to the trip

The Car Free Vancouver Society is looking for new committee members, and particularly needs Car Free Vancouver Day festival liaisons, web team members and volunteers with administrative skills. The AGM is also the place to discuss ideas you have for hosting a car free day festival in your own neighbourhood. Is there anyone out there who wants to take up the challenge of bringing a car free day to Surrey, Burnaby, Richmond or other communities in the Lower Mainland?

Bring your ideas and friends! Full details about the meeting can be found on the Society’s website. See you there!

TransLink real-time API is now available for developers via The Buzzer blog (cached content). Visit TransLink Open API to register for an API key.

How would you like to see 800-block Robson Street and the Vancouver Art Gallery North Plaza used in the future and do you support the permanent closure of 800-block Robson Street to create a pedestrian plaza? Share your thoughts by completing the City of Vancouver’s Block 51 survey.

End of Blacktop Politics – Peak Car Use in Vancouver via Canadian Veggie

Initiation Trilogy, three experiential installations based on the writing of Vancouver’s Jennica Harper (What it Feels Like for a Girl), Elizabeth Bachinsky (God of Missed Connections) and Marita Dachsel (Glossolalia), begins in a “secret lounge” in a corner of a parking garage on Anderson Street. I took only one photograph of a small detail in the lounge so that I wouldn’t ruin any surprises, but this image alone makes me wish that more parking garages could look like this:

One of the performances, God of Missed Connections, takes over an unmarked garage near Emily Carr University of Art + Design. The mechanics pit inside the building is even used at one point during the show.

It’s wonderful to see such creative repurposing of these car spaces and I hope that more independent theatre companies will transform them equally well in the coming years. Vancouver is becoming a great city for site-specific theatre thanks to the efforts of theatre companies like Electric Company Theatre, Zoo Crew, Osimous Theatre and others. The Vancouver International Fringe Festival also deserves a mention for adding more site-specific theatre to the Fringe program each year.

Initiation Trilogy runs until October 28 on Granville Island and it’s definitely worth seeing. If you’re keen to know more about the production before you buy a ticket, Colin Thomas’s review in the Georgia Straight is spot on.