By David Proctor
Photos by Vaikunthe Banerjee
In a strange way, this is a difficult subject to tackle: how do you argue a plainly obvious point without coming off as condescending? This is a university newspaper; I would assume (and hope) that our readership is brainy enough to realize on their own that allowing boarding only through the front doors at the central Burnaby campus bus stop is a stupid idea. I would hope the same thing about TransLink’s bureaucrats, but ever y day I go to catch the 145 home, and every day that moronic handscrawled sign remains.
In theory, every policy is designed to address a problem, but that element seems to be missing from this equation. The obvious explanation is that this is part of a crackdown on fare evaders, but the centre of SFU Burnaby seems like the single worst place to lay this trap.
Who uses this bus stop? Obviously, it’s mostly students, who I hardly need to remind you are participants in a compulsor y U-Pass program. Are they targeting people like me, who work up here? If so, that’s stupid — I need to have a monthly bus pass to get across the Skytrain unmolested, and I would need one to board the bus up the mountain if I lived on a different route. Maybe the stingy scumbags of UniverCity are the problem? If so, what’s preventing them from boarding through the back door at the Cornerstone loop, which is closer to their homes?
Even if all of the handful of remaining riders are dodging their fares, it sounds like TransLink is saving a rounding error’s worth of money with this rule. Am I to believe that these savings outweigh the number of buses that are passing me by with plenty of room in the back? We can scream and bitch until Christ’s return about people who don’t move to the back of the bus, but wouldn’t it be easier to simply open the back doors so I can squeeze in on my own?
Here’s an important question: are the savings on fares greater than the cost of fueling an extra bus and paying an extra driver to come pick me up when I’ve been left behind?
But wait: it gets dumber! Regular users of this stop may recall a woman in a reflective vest who, as far as I could tell, was a TransLink employee being paid to pace around this bus stop and remind me that I’m not to board through the back door. In an apparent fit of basic financial management skills, this service no longer appears to be offered.
We’ve all heard the sob story that is TransLink’s precarious financial position, but this is just a bad way to tackle it. It reeks of a culture in which do-nothing bureaucrats need to do something, anything, to justify their paycheques. (I should know; I was a do-nothing bureaucrat at a crown corporation for the better part of a year.)
It’s the same culture that spends $100 million installing fare gates in Skytrain stations in order to avoid $14.5 million in annual losses to fare fraud. It’s the same culture that hires police officers with guns to check peoples’ tickets. Does anyone really expect that Translink will lay off any of these armed cops when these fancy fare gates start doing a significant chunk of their job?
Translink’s funding problems are partly the result of underfunding, and largely the result of poor management and prioritization. We should all have the brains to see that leaving me in the wind and rain as a three-quarters full bus passes me by is not going to make the slightest dent in those profound and systemic problems.
