If you didn’t know, TransLink is hosting the 2010 American Public Transportation Association (APTA) rail conference this week! See the APTA Rail 2010 category for more posts.

So what do transportation professionals do for fun in Vancouver? A four-hour trip riding almost all of Vancouver’s transit vehicles — with an optional four-hour second leg on the SeaBus and the Grouse Mountain Skyride (with dinner at the top)!

This multimodal tour is lovingly crafted by Tom Hickey, associate vice-president at the Houston transit authority and longtime transit planner. He’s done tours like this for the past three years at APTA’s rail conferences: last year, we did a six-hour train tour in Chicago!

For the past decade, Tom has also run more intense versions of these tours at APTA operations planning workshops. One tour around Oregon took two and a half days, and another in Denver was a two-day affair as well. (People drop in and out of the tour as it goes on: Tom describes the tours as a “transit death march.”)

If you’re interested, here is a PDF download of the Vancouver multimodal tour map: it is totally worth a try if you want to experience virtually every mode of transit in town.

And here are some photos of the multimodal tour below. I’ll tell you, 43 transit professionals roving like a pack through the system is a sight to behold.

I skipped out on the second leg of the tour, but many continued on: I assume they all got back safe and well, without incident!