BREAKING NEWS: A recent controversy has come to light regarding Vancouver’s undisputed transit company, TransLink. According to an anonymous inside source, Metro Vancouver’s statutory transportation authority of 18 years is “a complete sham made to disguise the organization’s true objective: to conduct social experiments on the general public.”
That’s right: all the malfunctions, delays, and shitty planning experienced by TransLink users have actually been purposefully staged to document people’s reactions. Last summer’s TransLink referendum, which resulted in 61.7 percent of voters saying “no” to an alleged $7.5-billion regional transportation plan, was just as phony as its company. “The plebiscite was just a cover for the extra fine print, written in quarter of a pixel font.” An inside source told The Peak. “The real question being posed to the public was: do you not want us to increase on-transit surveillance?”
Due to the majority voting ‘no’ to this question, TransLink has since quadrupled the amount of incognito video cameras and wiretapping on each of their public transport vehicles. These include X-ray cameras that monitor activity in the cerebral cortex in response to classical conditioning methods such as late buses, unresponsive schedule texts, and getting stranded far from home. By cross-analyzing these findings, TransLink has secretly become Canada’s largest hub of metadata collection — a title previously thought to be exclusive to CSIS.
But the scandal doesn’t end there; in pursuit of a meta analysis on the reaction of psychologists themselves, the organization has been periodically hiring professional actors to render behaviour under extreme catharsis. These actors are paid to yell, stomp, throw up on buses, and act like complete assholes, leaving the psychologists to multitask mitigating the situation with driving. “It only makes sense to psychoanalyze the psychologists themselves,” said the source. “How else would we get data on psychologists?”
This brings into question why Vancouverites didn’t see the signs sooner. “People have just blamed the unstable job market for why all of TransLink’s employees had psychology degrees. It’s actually because they’re a guild who have negotiated with every BC government since 1999 to ensure their monopoly over the lower mainland’s public transit in exchange for data on Vancouver’s population.”
This explains why no additional services were provided after the price of fare increase in 2013: the money was allocated towards building their tech and research facilities instead. This ingenious plot has duped all of Vancouver for many years. Our anonymous source chose The Peak to break the story because “well. . . no one else would really listen to me.”
So the next time you’re riding the 135 down Burnaby Mountain only to realize it’s heading towards Production Station, bear this in mind: you’re being watched.
