Hipster Duck
Senior Member
Does Vancouver have a GO commuter rail equivalent?
Vancouver has the WCE, as denfromoakville mentioned, but, truth be told, Vancouver is not well-suited for commuter rail. There are only two viable rail corridors heading out of downtown Vancouver, and both of them leave from separate stations. One is the existing West Coast Express CP mainline that heads to Waterfront station while the other is the old CN mainline which heads into Pacific Central station on the outer edge of downtown - similar to if Union Station was at Cherry street.
At any rate, the CN mainline is more or less paralleled by one of the Skytrain lines which provides rapid transit service that is both more frequent and faster than anything that they could run on the existing mainline tracks.
Anyway, I don't think that the expansion of the GO train is a magic high card that can be used to trump Vancouver's real transit gains. It's not like GO has expanded that much in the past 30 years when you think about it. We still have only one all-day, relatively frequent rail line and the same 5 rush hour only lines that we did back then, we just added a few more stations and built a whole lot of parking. In GO's case it might be even more embarassing since the population of the 905 is about 300% bigger than it was in 1986.