Markus’ Blog

It has been in the making for a while (hints here and there), now it looks like it’s official. Translink’s new price structure as of January 1, 2008 has been published on their web-site.

Unlike the last time around (January 2005), this time they are increasing the cost of (pre-paid) FareSaver tickets as well.

I don’t find the increase for a two zone monthly pass (from $95 to $99 or 4.2%) too bad, but at the same time the increase for a one zone pass (from $69 to $73 or 5.8%) seems a little steep.

I am not going to rant how evil Translink is for increasing the price. They have been doing a lot of improvement to the public transit system (new light rail, more and new buses, etc.). What I am going to say, however is this:

They still have a long way to go.

Why? Because there are still not nearly enough buses. I can only speak of the #8 Fraser route, but it is bad, seriously bad. In the mornings, because the buses are often completely packed half way down Fraser street going North and a lot of people get by-passed. Every single day. Sometimes about a dozen of them at one single stop. I wouldn’t be surprised if people actually got passed by more than just one bus. I am not amongst them, because I get on before the bus fills up too badly, but it would sure suck #$!#^% if I were.

At night, it’s similar, but worsened by downtown rush-hour traffic. There frequently are 15-20 minute “holes” between buses, which means that once a bus comes, it’s too packed to pick up passengers. Wait times for the #8 at night (going South) are completely unpredictable. You can get three buses in 30 seconds or you’ll end up without a single bus in 25 minutes — and then get three buses in 30 seconds (usually it’s somewhere in between). It has all happened. And I do end up stranded then, sometimes. (Just yesterday evening was one of these 25 minute incidences.)

So, I am sure people getting by-passed on a daily basis will have a hard time swallowing this fare increase. (“What? Now I have to pay extra just to be by-passed like before?!”)

Apparently not only the #8 is affected. It seems bad enough that the U-Pass (transit pass for university students) is now dubbed Pass-U (pass you), because students end up being by-passed by buses so frequently. (Found that in a comment to a CBC article.)

PS: In case anybody read this far a little “reward”. Are you interested in a paid-for 2-zone monthly pass for December? I only need it till (including) Dec. 18, so there’d be almost two weeks of two-zone traveling left (it’s un-scratched, so it could be turned from a zone 1/2 into a zone 2/3 pass.)

And just for my own reference, I am “saving” the old and new price tables here.

(Read on …)

Today’s commute to work was pretty much an exact repeat of yesterday’s. A few things were different:

• At 7am, a radio announcement was made on 95 Crave that Translink had kept four trolley buses running overnight to keep the wires clear and that that had worked.
• The bus was just beeping, it didn’t turn into the continous alarm heard yesterday.
• We were going faster (maybe 25 km/h as opposed to 10 km/h yesterday).
• We made it till 29^th Avenue till we were told to get off the bus (yesterday the journey was over for me as 31^st Avenue).

Without the radio announcement I probably would have checked Translink’s web-site for up-to-date information or I would have walked over to Knight street right away. With the announcement, however, I decided it would be “save” to just give it another shot. — It was not.

This is what Translink has to say this time around:

17 trolleys were kept running through the city overnight to keep the trolley wires warm, and that’s helped get our morning rush-hour service on the roads. Still some isolated instances of delays due to ice on overhead, predominantly in shaded areas.

So, yes, while it may be true that running 17 buses over night (not 4 like they said on the radio) helped, it did not make much of a difference for me. Still ended up taking #25 and #22 instead.

And the main question remains:

Why did nobody clue into this ahead of time?!

Something else is not going to change, either:

I hate incompetency, of which this is a prime example.

This is the story of my commute to work this morning. When I left the building, I could see a new trolley bus approaching my stop. Excellent! I wasn’t going to have to wait in the (below freezing) cold at all! But then I realized that the bus wasn’t moving. It was stopped and its hazard flashers were on. And I am thinking to myself: “Oh, oh. That’s not good. Doesn’t bode well.”

To my surprise, the bus started moving again only a few seconds later, and I was relieved. Way too early, as it would soon turn out. Leaving our stop, we started down Fraser Street slowly, to the noisy beeping of the bus, complaining that it couldn’t get power from the power lines. The beeping soon turned into an angry, continuous alarm. When that happened, the bus driver would go to “work the poles”: park the bus, get off, knock the ice of the poles and/or power lines and start going again. Within the next two blocks, the bus driver had to stop three times to to this. And every time, the bus would complain again pretty much immediately. So, it took about 3-4 minutes to travel a distance that normally takes 10-15 seconds.

When I saw two more buses having the exact same problems going the other way, I knew it was time for me to get off the trolley and use bus lines I know are serviced by diesel buses. All the while, I kept wondering why the old trolley buses never seemed to have this issue, but I was not going to go through any more slowly creeping down Fraser street on the #8 and follow that up by slowly creeping down Broadway on the #9. I took the #25 over to Knight, instead, and the #22 to Clark and 6^th Avenue, which is about a block from VCC-Clark Skytrain station.

That didn’t work out too badly. It took me about 50 minutes to get to work that way. It should have been more like 35 minutes going the regular way, but oh well. Could have been much worse. I am pretty sure staying on the #8 would have been.

The only thing that sucks is that I was leaving home early to make some phone calls to Austria before starting work (on my cell, not using the work line for that), but by the time I got into the office, it was past 5:00pm over there already and everybody had already gone home. Without this issue, I would have made it on time.

And this is what almighty Translink has to say about the frost disaster:

Coast Mountain Bus Co.

Trolley bus service is slowly being restored, but there are still major delays.

Diesel buses are being used on some trolley routes, and this may cause slight delays on routes normally served by diesels.

Suburban routes coming into Vancouver are picking up local customers, as well. B-Line buses are picking up at all stops for the time-being, as well.

Old trolley buses with ice cutters are being used to clear the overhead lines, thereby setting free more and more of the new trolleys.

We remind customers to please dress warmly and exercise patience on this commute.

The City of Vancouver has closed Yukon Street at West 7th Avenue, therefore 50 service will re-route via West 5th Avenue, Columbia Street, Broadway to regular route.

I “like” the “dress warmly” part the best. Fun stuff — not.

And how come the old trolleys have ice cutters and the new ones don’t? How come nobody clued into this before trolley bus service broke down this morning? Is it going to be like this for the rest of the cold season or are they going to wake up and do something to prevent this in the future?

Looks like Translink finally switched the last two remaining trolley bus lines that were still being serviced (almost) exclusively by old trolley buses (Flyer E901/902) over to the new models.

As of yesterday, it seems, both, the #8 and the #20 are now being serviced by the new New Flyer E40LFR buses. Just in time for the new school year.

It is no coincidence that both lines were switched to the new trolleys the same day. The #8 and the #20 route are “interconnected”. Both lines overlap in the downtown core of Vancouver. Several times a day #8 buses “become” #20 buses while in the downtown core and vice versa, meaning a bus will enter that area as either #8 or #20 and will leave the area on the respective other route.

Update

Maybe not “all the way” after all. It looks like the old trolleys are still servicing some lines. They just got moved from #8 and #20 to #4, #7 and #16 (which used the new trolleys before).

Yesterday, Brigette took the car in to be fixed. Since we are having the work done by Dueck (they are conveniently located, almost on Brigette’s way to work), I was joking last week that she’ll “get a Chevrolet Cobalt” as a courtesy car for sure. I was referring to how not impressed we both were with it, when I ended up getting one as a rental car in the Bay Area. We both drove it on our little road trip from San Jose to Napa and back to San Francisco. It sucked really bad. The worst “feature”: totally mushy breaks.

Apparently, it wasn’t just that one Cobalt that we got in California. The one they’ve given Brigette seems just as bad, which doesn’t really come as a surprise (the car in California was basically brand new, so it couldn’t have been worn out or anything). Here’s a picture of it (the red car in the foreground). It looks half decent, but it so doesn’t live up to its looks. I am not even kidding when I say that we are both agreeing that this must be the worst vehicle that either of us has ever driven.

Not that we had any plans on doing so before, but now we sure know that we aren’t going to get a Chevrolet any time soon. Especially not a Cobalt. While their other vehicles may not be that bad, it makes one still wonder: if you can build decent cars, why not do it consistently? And if you can’t, why are people still buying from you? There are plenty of good, affordable cars out there, these days.

So we got four quotes to fix the damage I inflicted on the left front fender and bumper.

The quotes came in between $757 and $933. My initial gut reaction had been “that’s going to be around $1,300″. Well, I was obviously and luckily over with that estimate. I’d rather have been off more, though. Brigette was surprised by how much it was. I think she was guessing in the $400-$500 range.

Now, we gotta pick a place and a time to get it done. Lucky for us, all four places provide courtesy cars free of charge and I liked two of the four places we went to.

In one of my more glorious moments I managed to scratch/dent the front bumper on the driver’s side yesterday afternoon as I was backing up. I am not very impressed with myself. Especially, since it was very stupid and totally avoidable. I’m hoping it’s just the bumper and there’s no other damage. (The odds are not too bad that that’s all.)

I don’t know yet how much it’ll be to fix it, but I do know that it’s a needless way to spend money. If I am lucky, it’ll be less than $1,000, but you never know. Car repairs get expensive quickly.

Gotta take the car to a few body shops to have the damage checked out. They have to see it in order to be able to provide a quote. It’s a big pain in the rear, but it makes sense, I guess.

The other big pain in the rear is that I have to take time off work. None of the body shops seem to be open Saturdays. Hopefully these memories of hassles and wasted money serve me well and cause me to be more careful in the future.

Translink’s Trip Planning feature can be very entertaining.

Say, you wanted to go from Fraser Street and 33^rd Avenue to Fraser Street and 49^th Avenue, so a whole whopping 16 blocks South. It’s real easy, probably takes about 20 minutes to walk. Fortunately for Translink, the obvious option is first one they provide.

The simple way (4 min. travel time): the take #8 bus South.

The second option (40 min. travel time): take the #8 North/West, the #3 South and the #49 East.

And to top it all off, there’s a third (57 min. travel time): take the #8 North/West, the SkyTrain South/East and #49 West.

I’m just glad they are stopping after three options. Otherwise they’d suggest going via White Rock next. LOL

Well, it’s not so much that I hate flying as such, I hate what flying entails. Yesterday’s flight back from San Francisco was a prime example. It was the exact opposite of the smooth sailing down and — unfortunately — a much more familiar experience.

When we booked the flight (in January), it was scheduled to leave SFO at 5:55pm (this is Air Canada flight 565). A week or so after booking, we were informed that it had been pushed back to 6:55pm. So far, so good.

Like every good traveller, I confirmed with Air Canada, yesterday morning, that the flight was actually scheduled to leave at 6:55pm. It was. When we got to the airport yesterday afternoon, at about 4:30pm, we went to check in. First we found out that my seat reservation (20E) could not be honored, because the plane didn’t have a 20E. Great! After all the trouble we went through to get seats next to each other (since we had to book separately), this is what happens.

The nice schematics the had up on the Internet booking sites to pre-reserve your seat showed 3 seats, isle, 3 seats. The actual plane had 2 seats, isle, 2 seats. Since my seat was the middle seat, they couldn’t guarantee where I’d end up, given that there was no middle seat. They’d try and have us sit together, they said, but they couldn’t promise anything.

Next we were told the flight had been delayed till 8:15pm, due to mechanical reasons. The plane hadn’t left Vancouver yet, as they were still trying to fix the issue.

Not the best experience, so far, but still not too bad. We had dinner (with some beer) at the airport, after which I went to check the schedule displayed at the gate. I was expecting that the flight would be further delayed than 8:15pm. What I didn’t expect was reading 11:00pm as the new departure time. What the hell?! Another three hours and a bit of delay — it only takes two hours to fly down from Vancouver!

By this point, we were 100% certain that the flight would eventually be cancelled. We’ve experienced before how this works. So, we tried to be pro-active and inquired about alternative flights on Monday (today). We were told that the first flight out that wasn’t booked solid was the 7:50pm flight Monday evening. The only other option was to pay over $1000 per person to upgrade to business class. (To top it off, they were being bitchy about even offering that option.) The only thing that went smoothly was that we did get seats next to each other (29D and 29F).

So, there we sat, with our $20 voucher (not good for alcohol, too bad), waiting and waiting some more. Soon, they pushed back the planned departure time to 11:35pm. By this time it was about 9:30pm. We went to have our free snackie, paid for with the voucher.

At around 11:00pm, the plane actually arrived. We had not really been expecting that. Instead, we were still waiting for the announcement that the flight had been cancelled. They didn’t cancel it. We boarded quite quickly, but had to sit docked at the gate for a while and again before getting onto the runway. By the time we took off it was midnight. We landed in Vancouver at 1:50am. By the time we grabbed a cab it was 2:15am. We got home at pretty much 3:00am on the dot.

Of course, this Monday morning, of all Mondays, was a very important day for my wife at work. She had to hold an orientation for new employees at 9:00am and wanted to get into work early (like 8:00am) to prepare. So three and a half hours of sleep for her, that was all she got.

I decided to go in a bit late and got myself two more hours of resting, dozing (not really sleeping). It certainly helped, though. I am feeling much more human than I expected I would after a night like this.

One thing’s for sure, though: early bed time tonight.

For the first time in weeks (not to say months) I’ve seen one of the new Vancouver trolley buses (they are New Flyer E40LFR) in service this morning. Interestingly, it was running on route #8. This was the first time I saw one of them on the Fraser run, ever.

Could that mean that the “minor” power steering problem is on the verge of finally being solved, after almost two months? I sure hope so.

For now, though, Translink is still saying:

Due to a minor power steering problem with some Vancouver trolley buses, the following routes will potentially experience service disruptions (as well as loss of accessibility until further notice).

During the morning rush hour: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 15, 16, 17, 20, 22, 25, 32, 41, 43, 49, 84.

During the afternoon rush hour 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 15, 17, 20, 22, 25, 32, 41, 43, 49.