The sorry saga of the Compass Card

The infamous non-functioning fare gates shall finally function.

THE#BCBIZDAILY
Plus, drones pose a problem for seaplanes and tear down those viaducts!

A fare gate affair
The Compass cards have arrived! Sort of. Those long-dormant vending machines will be activated over the next several months, but only selling tickets. The plastic cards themselves won’t be in the machines until November. TransLink is scrapping zones! Not quite. All buses will be one zone, like on weekends, but Surrey is still a $5.50 trip. The SkyTrain and Seabus will keep the zone system. For the small number of commuters who bus-hop across zones, so far TransLink is mum on pricing details. Oh, and the change is temporary.

But back to the infamous Compass card. More than six years after the gates were announced and two years after they were installed, the system is being activated. And oh, the time it took. It was in distant 2007 that then-minister of transportation Kevin Falcon floated the idea of fare gates. Two years later the province said that the Compass Cards and fare gates were coming, eventually. The first rollout was supposed to be in 2013. Then 2014. Then finally, this year, UBC students traded in U-Passes for compass cards. But alas, there were problems with “tapping out,” i.e., ending the trip with the card, so TransLink took another few months to draw up a policy change to address the issue. But for all its problems, the system is up and running: to date, 130,000 customers have used the cards, according to TransLink. Six years to get up and running; that’s some sort of success, isn’t it?

Unmanned aerial vermin
A little black drone came dangerously close to a Seair seaplane earlier this week—10 feet from the windshield too close—as it was landing on the north arm of the Fraser at YVR. So what are the rules for drone use, anyway? Don’t fly closer than nine kilometres from any airport, heliport or aerodrome—which excludes all of downtown Vancouver—or 90 metres above the ground, and keep a minimum of 150 metres from people, buildings or vehicles. Those rules, by American standards, are lax, which has bolstered a small drone industry in B.C. and led Amazon to test its drones at an undisclosed location in the Lower Mainland. But when innovation clashes with safety, the outcome is pretty clear cut. 

A highway to nowhere
Whither the viaducts, the remnants of Vancouver’s neglected freeway ambitions? In September, city staff will present their recommendations to council on the future of the Georgia and Dunsmuir viaducts—still a major artery for traffic. The fate of the viaducts, whether they are removed completely or turned into a High Line-style park, were the topic of an SFU City Conversations roundtable on Thursday. You can check out the conversation on social media here. Those concrete eyesores also come into the crosshairs of Brent Toderian, Vancouver’s former chief planner, in his post “Tear the viaducts down” on the Huffington Post.