Tag Archives: north vancouver

Transit Thoughts and more

people rushing on the rainy street
rain in the city from Photos

Now that the rainy season has begun here in Vanouver (I just call it “anti-summer”), my thoughts have turned to travel.

Sadly, not the exotic vacation kind of travel, or even a fun weekender in Victoria. No, merely the pedestrian “how do I get to work” kind. This anti-summer (aka winter) may be especially challenging for a number of reasons.

  1. Dog. Rumble isn’t at all fond of the anti-sunshine (rain) that happens during anti-summer. He hates being un-dry and double-plus un-likes the sound of cars roaring past on the un-dry pavement. (Ok, enough of the Orwellian-speak). Most days that it rains, we take the bus. Amazingly convenient.
  2. Rain. Can’t stand it, hate it. It makes me sad. When I first moved to Vancouver over 10 years ago, I had heard of SAD (Seasonal Affected Disorder) but never thought it might affect me. But it does. Last year, Chris even arranged to get me a sunlamp for work, for mornings when the sun isn’t shining. And here it comes again.
  3. Translink. If you’ve followed me on Twitter, then you know I rant about the bus regularly. Translink’s concept of a schedule is laughable at best. I know that traffic is random and an accident along a bus route will mess things up, but when 2 bus routes are virtually identical and one manages to get 3 busses through to the other’s 1, somethings wrong.
  4. Olympics. Yep. They’re gonna SUCK. Every route I can take to work involves passing through some sort of Olympic security / pedestrian zone. Unless I can find a route that takes me through North Vancouver or something. Living beside GM Place (Canada Hockey Place soon, I guess) will mean it’s going to be busy around here ALL THE TIME. Olympic re-routes go into effect in late January.

So what brought this on? A few realizations from the last week. Chris came to pick me up one night and the bus was packed due to the number of people getting on at the Yaletown SkyTrain station. Same thing in the other direction. A lot of people take the bus along Davie east and get off at the SkyTrain station.

But wait, what’s that you say? Why is this a problem? Downtown Vancouver is now home to 3 SkyTrain stations (Burrard, Granville and now Yaletown) and of those, only 2 are serviced directly by busses. Of those 2, only 1 is new Canada Line station, and that some one is also the ONLY one easily accessed by people in the West End.

Seriously. Think about it.

Granville Station currently has it’s ONLY stops 1.5 to 2 blocks away (Between Georgia and Robson, or North of Dunsmuir somewhere) which the 5 and 6 both stop at.

Burrard Station has a number of stops outside, but neither the 5 nor the 6, downtown’s only 2 regular busses, go near it.

Translink Community Shuttle

Translink Community Shuttle

Yaletown Station is serviced by the C23 and C21 depending on the time of day and direction of travel. Wait, what’s a C23 or C21? C stands for “Community Shuttle” or as they’re known to the rest of the world “Short bus” – a modified bus / van that holds a maximum legal capacity of 16 people as long as there’s no wheelchair passenger or strollers, and they run every 10 to 15 minutes.

Think about that. Canada’s most densely populate area (the West End) has only 1 real direct bus route accessing the SkyTrain, and can only handle (16 people x 4 per hour=) 64 people an HOUR. Huh?

Oh, and did I mention how busy the Olympics are going to be?

Oh, and have you see the route of the C23? The one that runs RIGHT through an Olympic Security, no car zone? Uh huh. That one.

I’m sure TransLink has a plan for that, but nobody is making it easy to find.

So, come the end of January, not only will I have weather/darkness related depression, a dog that won’t walk in it, no way to bus to work, and a longer community, but 40,000 idiots partying outside my door when my dog is going to need to poop.

Fun. 2010 should be fantastic.

V-Day – The married way

Today was Valentines Day and an all around good day to be a married guy in love.

It wasn’t a perfect day, or didn’t start that way, but kept getting progressively better, which is what really matters, along with getting to spend it with Chris.

We stayed home until late-ish and had a nice time hanging out on the bed with the dog and chatting. Then we decided to head downtown, do some reading at Chapters and do our part to stimulate the economy with some retail therapy. That was harder than we expected.

We headed to one of our retail meccas – Future Shop – in an effort to spend our hard earned money on shiny things that go beep and boop and show pretty pictures. Chris has been desiring after his own iPod Touch and I’m about ready for my first laptop. That’s right, I’m a laptop virgin. Oh wait, that may be misinterpretted. That’s right, I’ve never owned a laptop. Better.

We spent some time looking at the tiny little netbooks with me insisting I needed something real and devising various ways to WIFI the house, use the old computer as a fileserver and go all laptop-fu on the place. This pissed off the salespeople as they kept swarming us and we batted them away like King Kong did the planes on the Empire State Building.

We decided to hold off on the laptop (At least until tomorrow) and then headed off to get the iPod.

WRONG. They’re out of stock of all but 1 or 2 8 gigabyte ones. Seriously? WTF? OMG! The horror. Here we walked into Future Shop to drop nearly $1000 and we had to walk out empty handed. No wonder the economy is tanking.

Buddy at F.S. (not his real name) did check and tell us that we could get one at the North Vancouver store – “in a strip mall or something” he said with distain. So we headed home, walked the dog and caught the bus to North Van after calling to verify they had them in hand.

Once we got there and tracked down a salesperson (Hossein) we found out he couldn’t help us, but after leaving us in his stinky wake, he toddled off to tell someone we wanted to buy an iPod. 10 minutes later we still waited. We finally grabbed Vince who seemed like he wanted to help but he didn’t have keys. He called someone twice, and hung out with us until they came. I liked Vince. Chris thought he was too eager to apologize for his co-workers.

Vince was great, Future Shop in North Van needs to give their customer-service-head a shake. Only 1 person in the store on Saturday afternoon had keys to the iPods.

On the way home there was an adorable young couple on the SeaBus. She was pretty and he was a very handsome young man all dressed up. Nice suit jacket, shirt and tie. And blue jeans. But with nice shoes. He seemed to be very eager for a man of 16 or so and very sweet, doting on her. Problem is he set off my gaydar. No problem for me, but maybe for her. It was still very sweet to see the young lovers going out for their date.

Chris and I spent the rest of the night at home sitting next to each other watching COPS, eating junk food and playing with our iPods. 3 feet from each other but not talking.

I think the iPods may have been a bad idea. If we start emailing each other from inside our tiny little condo, I’ll know it was.

Happy V-day Christopher. I love you.