Still Here, Still Building!

I'm still here, still working on doing & making things - and systems better. Most of my writing lately has been over at Better North Shore (https://www.betternorthshore.ca), the municipal advocacy group I co-founded

My personal projects lately have been less about writing prose about how I did something, and more sharing how I built something - often with programming code - and sometimes electronics. They've been more suited to a place designed for sharing and collaborating on code - GitHub. 

Check-out my GitHub (https://github.com/dpwilcock), to see some of what I’ve been up to. Two of them sum up what has me excited right now. 

1. One keeps an eye on what my municipality is about to do. 
2. Another other keeps an eye on my health & my family’s health - through data.
   
   

Municipal Council Watchdog

Automated municipal council agenda monitoring for my municipal advocacy organization in BC. (www.BetterNorthShore.ca)

This watches 3 municipal council websites for regular council meetings at the 3 munis we watch and aim to contribute to. It downloads the agenda package, scans it for housing, transportation and climate items (our 3 priorities) and produces a briefing digest — so members our chat server (Discord) can more easily see & stay on top of what council is about to decide.

Instead of digging through 3 sets of agenda PDFs by hand before every meeting - let's be honest, that was rarely happening in full - we get a digest that surfaces the items that matter to us. Each municipality exposes its agenda differently, this normalizes the output by storing them on a Google Drive with permanent, consistent, and shareable links, including the digest.

It's built to be adapted to other minis “forked” in programmer parlance: the readme file walks you through adding your own municipality.

https://github.com/dpwilcock/municipal-council-watchdog

Personal Health Monitor

My watch data used to be trapped in Apple's cloud, doing a handful of curated things. Now every metric lands in my own database, where I can run fatigue scoring, sleep/HRV correlations, CUSUM change detection, and get my own charts generated by my Ai/LLM agent. Owning the data means I get to ask the questions, not just the ones Apple thought of.

Data is pushed to a local server/computer/laptop that also runs an Ai/LLM agent, which coordinates and leads the analysis work that this ingestion makes possible.

https://github.com/dpwilcock/apple-health-data-monitor

Why this matters to me

Both projects follow the same philosophy: take something important - our local governments, and community - or your own body — and don't rely on someone else's black box to tell you what's happening. The tools are small, MIT-licensed (meaning freely adaptable), and designed to be borrowed, riffed on, and changed for your needs.. Let’s see what we can build together! The code is sitting there on GitHub waiting for you to riff on. Enjoy! 🙃💪❤️

The Ski Bus: A Frequent Express Coach Network for the Sea-to-Sky

What we can do right now — while we plan for rail

The Problem We All Know

Every winter weekend, thousands of cars crawl up Highway 99 toward Whistler. The Sea-to-Sky is one of the most beautiful drives in the world — and one of the most frustrating. A trip that could take 90 minutes on weekend mornings can have 40 minutes of traffic at the end. Worse - in 2023 alone, 12 people died in crashes on this highway, triple the previous year. When a collision closes the road, the entire corridor grinds to a halt — and can do so for hours.

We talk about a train. Rail advocates like the Mountain Valley Express have laid out compelling visions for a Sea-to-Sky commuter rail line. With CN decommissioning track north of Squamish, the window for preserving that corridor is closing. We should pursue rail. But a train is a 20–30 year project. What do we do this winter? And next winter? And every winter until rail arrives?

The Vision: A Ski Bus Network

Imagine a fleet of modern coaches — some with executive-class seating — departing every 10–15 minutes from multiple points across the Lower Mainland on weekend mornings. You don’t check a timetable. You just show up. You board a comfortable bus with Wi-Fi, power outlets, and legroom. You use your phone, read, sleep, or watch the Howe Sound cliffs glide past. You arrive in Whistler Village rested and ready, in roughly the same time it takes to drive — or faster, because your bus bypasses the traffic, with queue-jump lanes at strategic points.

This isn’t a new idea. Ski trains and ski buses have a long history in Europe, Japan, and across North America. What’s new is the urgency, and the opportunity to do it well.

How It Works

Frequent departures from multiple locations
Departure points connected to existing public transit and easy to reach by car:

• Burrard Station — SkyTrain-connected, central Vancouver pickup
• Park Royal — serving the car-dependent North Shore, connected to the R2 bus route, and with retail partners at the end of the day for food, shopping, and amenities.
• South Squamish — a park-and-ride or retail partner site south of town, reducing through-traffic in Squamish

The destination: Creekside and Whistler Village bus loops, with seamless connection to local transit. Weekend morning and end of day service initially, with less frequent all-day return trips as well. Starting at departures every 15 minutes, scaling toward every 5–10 minutes as ridership grows. When a bus comes that often, you stop thinking about schedules.

Better than driving
Very comfortable - executive sections with three-across seating instead of four — think airline business class legroom. Every seat has power and climate control, and wifi. Some seats have built in massage. Best of all, you gain back four hours of your day that can be spent having better conversations with your kids and travel mates, you can use your phone safely, or relax and have a snooze.

A queue-jump lane to beat the traffic
The single most important infrastructure investment: a 6.3 km bus priority lane approaching Function Junction on weekend mornings (Northbound). This is where the worst bottleneck occurs on ski mornings, and it’s where transit can leapfrog private vehicles. BC already uses queue-jump infrastructure on urban routes — extending the concept to the Sea-to-Sky approach into Whistler is a proven, relatively low-cost intervention. The future vision includes a bus and HOV lane through Squamish, giving coaches a consistent travel-time advantage across the full corridor.

Why It Matters

Traffic. A full coach can be expected to replace 20+ private vehicles. The traffic reduction would be visible and tangible. Reducing vehicles on the road by 10 to 20% can unclog traffic jams, including easing the burden on the highway through Squamish. Less congestion on Highway 99 benefits everyone — including drivers who still choose to drive, Squamish residents who need the highway daily, and emergency vehicles that need clear roads.

Safety. Fewer cars on a mountain highway means fewer collisions. Professional drivers in purpose-built coaches are safer than thousands of individual drivers navigating winter conditions, many of them unfamiliar with the road. Every person on a bus is one less car in a potential pileup.

What’s Needed

Private operators like YVR Skylynx already serve the corridor with up to 14 daily departures from YVR and downtown Vancouver. They’ve proven the demand exists. But turning a shuttle service into a true transit network requires public-private collaboration:

• Government investment in bus priority infrastructure — the Function Junction queue-jump lane, and eventually dedicated lanes through Squamish. Without a meaningful travel-time advantage over cars, the service doesn’t have a “why should I” advantage.
• Transit integration — departure points at existing transit hubs (Burrard Station, Lonsdale Quay) and seamless connections to Whistler local transit.
• Frequency funding — getting from hourly service to every-15-minute service may require public subsidy in early years, just as any transit expansion does. Transportation infrastructure is not just the roads - is the transportation service that gets the people where they want and need to go.
• Multiple departure points — not just YVR and downtown, but the North Shore and Squamish. The more origins served, the wider the market appeal.

Bus Now, Rail Later

A frequent express coach network doesn’t compete with the vision for Sea-to-Sky rail — it builds the case for it. Every rider who discovers they prefer the bus to driving is a future rail passenger. And every year we wait for a train while doing nothing about buses is a year of avoidable congestion, delays, and risk on the highway.

The ski bus isn’t a compromise. It’s the first phase of a better Sea-to-Sky. And it could start as early as next winter.
Ask your MLA: What is the plan for a frequent, reliable bus service to Whistler — and when will the Function Junction queue-jump lane be built?

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Further Reading References:
Mountain Valley Express - a detailed vision for passenger rail to Whistler and MetroVancouver.
Human Transit - a book for the lay-person about how bus and rail transportation work.
www.BetterNorthShore.ca - Activating smarter housing, transportation, and environmental choices to make our community more livable, sustainable, and lovable.