Homeless in Vancouver: Crowds begin making their Grexit from Greek Day

It’s 6:30 p.m. in Vancouver. The skies are now overcast and a light drizzle is intermittently falling through the sultry early evening air.

From my vantage point in the the 1400 block of West Broadway Avenue, I can infer the course of distant events in much the same way that astronomers can detect unseen planets by perturbations in the orbits of planets that they can see.

For instance, I can see that waves of people are making a hasty “Grexit” from Greek Day, which is is taking place down on a stretch of West Broadway Avenue in Kitsilano, 13 blocks westward, between the five blocks of Macdonald and Blenheim Street.

I can see this because in the last hour and 50-some minutes westward 99 B-Line and number 9 Boundary buses have quite suddenly increased both in terms of their frequency and their filling.

The westward rush hour of buses continues but has subsided slightly in frequency. At its peak, just after 5 p.m. the buses were coming almost one a minute and the first few were stuffed to the ceiling.

It didn’t help that at the very beginning of the rush, one of the full 99s conked out in the 1400 block (TransLink maintenance has come along twice to poke at the motor but the bus still sits idle).

One member of the first TransLink maintenance crew shook his head and admitted the obvious to me that Greek Day was very “challenging” for the transit schedule—and then, seemingly apropos of nothing, he expressed the hope that I had voted yes in the referendum.

So many departing revelers should just mean more elbow room for other attendees still arriving at Greek Day because the giant family-oriented block party continues for another two hours, until 9 p.m. tonight!

Greek Day has, in past years, attracted something like 100,000 people so we can expect several more hours of heavy ridership on transit buses coming out of Kitsilano.