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Anatomy of a bus ride: How to catch the westbound 99 B-Line at Clark
Anatomy of a bus ride:
8:40 a.m.: Arrive at Clark and Broadway bus stop headed west.
8:51 a.m.: Note that two B-Lines and two 9 Almas have stopped but are too crowded to board. Stay back from the hordes of shoving people to avoid early morning fistfight.
8:53 a.m.: Another B-Line stops; I can't board due to shoving.
8:56 a.m.: B-Line doesn't even bother to stop.
8:59 a.m.:
And ANOTHER B line pass up! What EXCELLENT transit service in Vancouver!
— Miranda Nelson (@charenton_) September 13, 2012
9:02 a.m.: Despite standing exactly where the back door to the B-Line opens, I get flanked by two people who shove their way onto the bus ahead of me. Finally lose my patience and yell at the entitled jerks who pushed their way on ahead of me. "I've been waiting here for SIX buses! What is your problem?!" Continue yelling until bus doors close.
9:04 a.m.: Begin rage crying at the bus stop.
9:07 a.m.: Finally board an overcrowded B-Line to take me to work.
It is this painful to board a bus at Clark just about every single day. (And don't even get me started on boarding at Commercial-Broadway.)
We don't need more enforcement, and we don't need a $171 million fare gate-smartcard system if we can't even get enough buses on the road to service the current ridership.
Fun fact: yesterday morning, something magical happened. While enduring the regular stream of pass-ups and shovers, a completely empty B-Line arrived at my stop. EMPTY. I got to sit in a seat. It didn't make my blood pressure go through the roof. I wasn't almost trampled to death by a steady stream of college students, iPod zombies, and tiny old ladies. By the time we got to the Cambie stop, the bus was full, but not so much so that I could smell the coffee on the breath of my fellow riders. I managed to get to work without screaming at a single person or crying once.
It was, quite frankly, a miracle.
When your morning communte reduces you to screaming and tears, there is something fundamentally wrong with the transit system.
For more bus-riding tales of woe, follow Miranda Nelson on Twitter at @charenton_.
It's pretty obvious why there isn't one: the property values of the areas that a skytrain would run through. Where would you run the line? Above ground or underground? I can't see any way of doing it that wouldn't require buying private property in a very expensive part of town full of well connected people who don't want some noisy train for poor people ruining their neighbourhood.
I can see why no one wants to take this nightmare on after all the issues with the arbutus corridor and the cambie delays during construction of the canada line. It sure is needed though, maybe in the 2020's.
And if the 99 is just too much, from that corner, it is four blocks to catch the 84 which is often not full and depending on your place in line, it might be possible to get a seat all the to UBC.
Yes we need more buses, especially at busy times, but we also need less overblown accounts of everyday events.
Also, if you know the 99 B-line is going to be ridiculously crowded, and you're able bodied, wouldn't it make sense to walk the three or so blocks east to Commercial to get on at the origin station? I'm not sure which B-line this author has been riding but I've never had more than a one-bus wait at Commercial in all the time I've been living here, and I usually get a seat, too. Seriously, whiny, hand-wringing pieces like this do little to help and only serve to marginalize what are very real concerns.
I used to take the SkyTrain from Nanaimo to there (a nightmare in and of itself), then catch the B-Line. I would more often than not be stuck in a lineup of no less than 300 people, and have to wait for 3-4 buses to board. The worst lines would wrap through the station and up Commercial Drive.
See photos and write-ups of those wonderful commutes here and here.
The main point of my comment, though, was not to dispute your contention that the B-line is ludicrously overstuffed more often than it should be; it certainly is a problem that obviously needs to be fixed urgently. (Though I may experience it infrequently, I have friends who, like you, encounter this sort of frustration more regularly.) My point was it's time to start directing these frustrations - and not in a whiny, oh-so-typical-of-Vancouver manner - toward their true sources, rather than constantly saying, "It's all Translink's fault." Some of it may be, sure. But it's lazy not to look at the bigger picture, at the forces at work preventing Translink from receiving more funding for badly needed transit.
I'm still not sure why you seem so against faregates/smartcards and more enforcement, though. Doesn't it make sense to you that the millions of dollars lost to fare evasion could be used to put more buses on the 99 B-line route (and other places in dire need of better service?)
Anyway, we can both agree that things need to change in a hurry. How to effect that change is going to be a lot more difficult.
If every one of these people complaining about lack of room on Skytrain and buses used a bicycle, the overcrowding problems would be solved overnight.
Stop your whining and get your ass on a bike. Now.
My personal peeve is watching people at Broadway station walk straight past the waiting area for the B-Line's back-door entrance, casually hang out there, and then board when the bus comes as if they actually waited their turn. Nobody ever calls them on it.
Yesterday, however, I got tired of being hit by somebody's backpack on a crowded Skytrain. So instead of stewing in frustration like I usually do, I asked them (nicely) to take it off. They did.
Wow. Guess I'll hang on to my faith in humanity a little longer.
(In all fairness, the pushy jerks were more of an annoyance.)
My big problem with the fare gates is that the numbers don't make sense to me. By their own estimates, the gate/card system will save $10 million per year at most. Considering the cost of the system is $171 million and it'll cost $15 million per year to maintain, it doesn't seem like the system will ever be able to pay for itself.
But I don't know that for sure. Maybe it'll be the best way of collecting data and adjusting routes, riders, resources, etc. and will completely revolutionize the system. My fingers are crossed, but I won't hold my breath, y'know? :)
"If every one of these people complaining about lack of room on Skytrain and buses used a bicycle, the overcrowding problems would be solved overnight."
Rather than sounding like a self-righteous asshole, maybe you could simply comment on the positive aspects of cycling, as opposed to hopping into the human-stew that is the 99. Lots of folks on the bus have physical disabilities or are not in good enough shape to whip up Vancouver's hills, or are terrified of traffic.
Of course, lots of bus riders could be on bikes, and that day is coming, mostly because the experience of cycling around this city is so amazing, especially when compared with the god-awful transit experiences depicted here, and caused, as some commenters have noted, by neo-liberal tax-hatred.
As long as there aren't people who are more representative of those who actually ride the bus, there won't be more buses. I doubt any of them have ever had to deal with getting a stroller on the bus, or trying to do the right thing by taking transit with a toddler and not a damn bathroom in any of the stations, or experienced the joy of riding with f-bombing gangsta wannabees.
As long as the board consists entirely of caucasian executives, a sliver of the bus-riding demographic by my experience, there won't be more buses. Where's a board that's actually representative of the people who use the service? Not at Translink board meetings that's for sure.
Hundreds of millions to recoup a few million in lost fares... this they have money for. A decision that's more about a get tough, law and order mentality than spending money to actually improve service.
As long as the region's employers don't collaborate on staggering worker start times by even a quarter hour, to deal with the rush of people all trying to start work at the same time, transit congestion is a given, as is road congestion. This is the bizarre-est piece of the puzzle. Does it really matter if downtown paper pushers aren't all at their desk at 9am? I took the Skytrain at 9:10 am on Tuesday, and Broadway station was like a ghost town.
For Miranda:
I'll bet two people sharing a Car2Go would be as cheap as the bus if you're going from Clark/Broadway to the G. Straight offices. At $0.38 a minute, two people can drive for roughly 13 minutes before it's more expensive than two single zone fares. Car2Go is going to crush Translink in the downtown core eventually, if they don't start making their service more attractive.
It will be painful/inconvenient at first. Start out with a bike/transit combo. (Bike part of the way, transit part of the way.) Even that will be painful/inconvenient. Eventually, you will get in better condition, and fine-tune your "systems". Eventually you will ride the entire way, and not even consider transit.
Eventually you will love the ride, crave the ride, need the ride.
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