Markus’ Blog

I am currently taking the bus to and from work.

A couple of days ago, traffic on the freeway (Highway 1) into North Vancouver was really bad. So bad, in fact, that Hastings Street was completely backed up to at least Boundary Road. It took me a little while to realize why. There was another bus right in front of us, so I couldn’t see anything.

Once I figured out that it had to be the freeway entrance being backed up all the way, I assumed I’d be in for a long evening on the bus (at least another hour, till 7:00pm or so). This feeling was based on the fact that it had taken us almost 10 minutes to go roughly 200 meters, and we had over a kilometer left to go to get on the freeway.

Well, it came differently. Once we made it to Kootenay Loop, the transit supervisor at the scene suggested our driver take Renfrew Street and McGill entrance instead of trying to go the way everybody else was taking. We did. Was an interesting little detour that I quite enjoyed: The #28 bus going down Hastings Street, past the PNE, turning right onto Renfrew first and right again onto McGill and onto the freeway from there. You don’t get that every day. We went through all the bus stops in the process, of course, since the #28 doesn’t have any stops west of Trans Canada Highway.

The bottom line of the whole story: I got home a whole 15 minutes later than normal. Yep, just 15 minutes. Not over an hour as I had started to anticipate. Had we not done the little loop around the PNE, it may have very well been an hour later or pretty close to, at least.

So, thanks to Translink for saving my spare time. It is very much appreciated. I just wish I could have said the same about my (non-) friends in Austria, the National Austrian Railways or ÖBB. They used to do the opposite quite frequently, unnecessarily costing me time due to ignorance and not caring one little bit for their customers.