You know that part about travelling—the part where you roll off an aircraft disoriented and bleary-eyed, locate your luggage, extract a stack of bills from an ATM and then hand half of them over to the nearest cab driver in return for a lift to your hotel? Yeah, we don’t like that part so much, either.

Which is why we’re more than a little excited that one of our favourite cities—Vancouver, BC—is about to join the ranks of Beijing, Athens, Berlin, Barcelona, Copenhagen, London, Frankfurt, San Francisco, Paris and a whole bunch of other global destinations that provide quick, cheap and efficient light-rail service from their airports to their urban centres. It’s called the Canada Line, and you can jump onboard at the Vancouver International Airport (YVR) as of August 17, 2009.

The automated system is not only safe and fast—the trip downtown takes just 25 minutes—it’s also green. (That’s because the electricity that powers the system originates from British Columbia’s 90%-clean-and-renewable resources.) And though the shuttle will also serve commuters, its designers specified extra-wide cars to better accommodate bulky luggage—the kind of things an Olympic athlete might carry perhaps…

Best of all? A one-way jaunt to or from YVR to downtown is expected to set you back a mere $6.25 CDN. Which is, of course, almost what you’d tip a cabbie for making the same trip…
www.hellobc.com