Over this past winter break, I felt like all my social media news feeds were clogged with complaints of travel troubles. Whether it was cars turned around by shut down roads, cancelled flights or delayed busses, the time of the year when everyone wants to get around coincides, of course, with the most impossible time to do so.
I empathize with my fellow student traveller; we are all trying to get to family that most of us don’t see any other time of year. I cannot even begin to imagine how bad things have been for those trapped in eastern Canada trying to get back in time for the new semester.
When considering travelling, I think about the day-to-day travelling we do in Vancouver. I actually don’t find the transit in Vancouver to be all that bad, at least for me in the city and getting to SFU.
Coming from a substantially smaller city, I am used to buses that come every 45 minutes — if they bother to come at all –— with many major neighbourhoods not being connected to public transit lines at all because they are “too new” and not developed enough to expand bus lines. Although, last time I checked, a ten-year-old development isn’t really all that new.
Considering the chaos of transit in winter, I feel my sour expectations in Vancouver changed.
On winter break, considering the chaos of Canadian winter weather and transit, I feel my sour transit expectations in Vancouver changed. The city is trying, at the very least. The new Evergreen line is expected to go in sometime in 2016. If I miss my bus, there is another one in 15 minutes. If the lines for the 145 are super clogged at Production, they send extras.
Consider Greyhound: they won’t even call ahead to your connecting city to see if you’ll make your next bus if your current one is running four hours late! But I digress.
There are definitely problems with Vancouver transit, but there always will be. We all want to get somewhere, preferably faster than what is possible.
I have a long list of resolutions this New Year, and one of them is to be a little more patient. To maybe leave my house a little earlier to account for possible transit delays, to give transit police the benefit of the doubt — being just normal people doing a crappy job — and to accept that, overall, the transit in Vancouver isn’t that bad.
We get to transit in fairer weather than most of Canada, and we have a city that is actively trying to encourage its occupants to travel greener. Let’s make the best of what we have.
