There have been a lot of Australians coming through Vancouver recently – something, indeed, that has been going on for decades, given the common heritage of our two countries, the similarity of our cities, 
and the fact that we like each other a lot. All the more reason for those interested in transportation to take a read of Melbourne prof Paul Rees’s new book, Transport for Suburbia.
Here’s a quote:
It’s not just that they (the Canadians) are doing better than us; it’s that 30 or 40 years ago they were doing less well than we are, and so they’ve kind of swapped places with Australian cities.
Canadian cities are kind of like a bridge now between, if you like, the European model of transport and the kind of spread-out urban form you get in North America and Australia. But their urban densities, which you can get from the statistical agencies in each country, are about the same as ours. So Montreal’s about same as Sydney; Vancouver and Ottawa are about the same as Melbourne, and Calgary’s about the same as Adelaide.
So even Canadian cities where really the only substantial difference is the appalling weather there, which would probably make you more likely to run off and get your car, they have also learned, if you like, the European lesson about how to provide effective public transport.
– Paul Mees, author of Transport for Suburbia. (More text here. Audio here.)
“they have also learned, if you like, the European lesson about how to provide effective public transport” – Mees
“Okay, I officially give up trying to understand what is going on between TransLink and the province or among TransLink’s mayors…
… the last time I had to take the 99B across town, three completely packed double buses went past me about 30 seconds apart from each other and I was only able to squeeze onto the fourth slightly less packed bus because I elbowed my way in.” – Bula
http://www.francesbula.com/uncategorized/translink-and-province-back-to-square-one-re-funding/
I still don’t know why the four-year old Main Street improvements (bulges & traffic-light control) haven’t been rolled out along the b-line at the very least.
I am afraid that Paul Mees thesis is to support urban sprawling, because he find out some example of good public transit patronage in low density juridiction…
Paul Mees mentions Zurich as a low density juridiction with high transit patronage, to support his opinion that transit efficiency is not correlated to density, and so can work well in low density suburbia…but things are not that simple like I aim to explain in this post I have wrote after reading his book,
http://voony.wordpress.com/2010/04/26/thezurichmodel/
By the way, Human transit has also run a series of interesting posts on the topic of density…