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Archive for the ‘skytrain’ Category

Riding transit

Posted in British Columbia, Bruce Byfield, Personal, skytrain, transit, Vancouver, tagged , , , , , , , on November 10, 2009| 2 Comments »

One thing you can say about public transit: It may not be cheap or convenient, and you learn more about people’s personal hygiene than you ever wanted to know, but there’s nothing like it for people watching.

Sometimes, the people are just outlandish – and I say that as card-carrying eccentric myself. For instance, last weekend, a couple boarded the Skytrain walking very close together. He was tall, with a near beard and long hair and sun glasses. She was shabbily dressed, in kneeless jeans that only stayed up when she held a belt loop, and bobbing her head in a stoned sort of way to the tracks on her iPod. She also had an odor of at least two types of smoke and unwashed body trailing her like a shadow. Close inspection showed she was wearing a dog collar that was chained to his belt. Every now and again, he would give a little proprietary tug, not hard, but enough so that she would try to fix her eyes on him. I try to be broadminded, but if ever a couple needed to be told to rent a room, this one did. That’s not the sort of role-playing you expect to see in the middle of a Sunday afternoon.

But people on transit frequently reveal so much about themselves that they seem to be under the illusion that nobody around them can see or hear them. I remember one time when a young man got on at Metrotown looking distinctly lumpish. He was carrying a dozen coat hangers, and seemed to be wearing as many shirts and sweaters. I’d say he got on casually, if there wasn’t such a nervous edge to his casualness.

That attitude is especially common with people on cell phones. They talk as loudly as possible, until I’m tempted to clap at the end of their calls. One man even broke up with his lover in the middle of a crowded car I was riding in. “But I love you!” he keep saying, while embarrassment spread around him like a stain. After he left, I could see people relax, and several looked at each other and shook their heads.

It’s encounters like these that generated my first dictum about riding transit: Whatever you do, don’t make eye contact. The risk of having to make conversation with some of your fellow passengers is simply too high.

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Canada Line stories are missing the point

Posted in British Columbia, Bruce Byfield, Canada Line, Personal, skytrain, Uncategorized, Vancouver, tagged , , , , , , on August 19, 2009| Leave a Comment »

I ride the buses at least as often as I do a private car, so I’m as pleased as anyone with the opening of the new Canada Line on the Skytrain system. But I do wish that when the media or casual conversation mentions the new rapid transit line, they would focus on what matters.

To start with, before anyone praises the fact that the line was opened three months early, let’s remember how that was done. It was done by ruthlessly ignoring the effects of construction on small businesses along the route. Dozens have closed as a result, and some may yet manage to get the compensation they deserve through the courts. And let’s not forget the hiring of foreign workers at sub-standard wages, or the farming of the management of the new line to private industry. If such things are the only way to finish a construction project early, then I think I might prefer delays.

For another, just as when the Millennium Line opened a few years ago, the commentators are babbling about the wonderful view on parts of the line. And it’s true that running seven meters off the ground, Vancouver’s transit lines can offer a better than usual view of the scenery. But, for those of us who will actually be using the line, the wonder of the view will last no more than a few trips. Soon, people will be reading, talking on the phone or fiddling with their music players, just as they always do on a routine trip.

The same is true of the comments made by the would-be architectural critics. What matters for daily travelers is not aesthetics, but practicalities. Are the stations well-lit? Are there enough signs so that people know where they are going? Are the stations safe? Can they accommodate the thousands of people passing through them during rush hour? The answers to all these questions seem mostly positive, although I’m willing to bet that the above ground platforms act like a wind tunnel, just as they do on the other lines. But what everyone seems to be commenting on is how the glass and metal and terra-cotta colored walls make an aesthetic experience.

To someone on transit as often as I am, the scenery and aesthetics soon fade into the background, except in unusual circumstances, such as an unusually vivid sunset. What regular riders like me want to know is something far simpler: Does the new line save us time?

I didn’t ride the line on the first day, when the fares were free. But I did ride it on the second day as I went about my business. So, I’m happy to report that, yes, the new line did save me time – some five to ten minutes compared to the bus when traveling across False Creek from Yaletown to Cambie and Broadway, and maybe twenty minutes total on my entire trip. Better yet, the connections were better than on my old route.

Obviously, how much time you save depends on where you’re going. But, for regulars, that is the real story in the new line – the time saved, and the relative convenience compared to the bus or the car. Most of the rest is background, at least for those who will actually be using the new line. I suppose the new line makes a change from the usual stories straight from the police’s media departments, but, as happens all too often nowadays, in this story the media is missing the point.

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A petty abuse of authority

Posted in authority, Bruce Byfield, bullying, Personal, skytrain, Uncategorized, Vancouver, tagged , , , , on March 26, 2009| 1 Comment »

One of the drawbacks to being raised on stories about King Arthur and Robin Hood is that seeing abuses of authority make me want to leap to the defence of their victims.

For instance, I was waiting on the Skytrain platform today when I saw a man hauling a bicycle up the escalator. As he got to the top, I saw that it was a woman’s bike, and that he had several garbage bags bulging with cans and bottles strapped to the handlebars. The man himself was dressed in threadbare clothing that was not too clean, and had a bearded face that look as though he had lived roughly. As he came closer, I smelled beer on his breath. If he wasn’t actually homeless, he was near to that state.

A Skytrain attendant at the other end of the platform saw him at once. Immediately, she started walking towards him.. As she got closer, she seemed to stand straighter and to affect a bully’s swagger – but that could just be my jaundiced eye.

Still, I was completely unsurpised when she started lecturing him about not taking a bicycle up the escalator.

Technically, she was right – not because that’s the regulation, but because handling something the length of the bicycle can block the escalator, and it can easily slip. But she hadn’t said anything to the woman who took an equally-barred baby carriage up the escalator, and she had passed someone eating – something else you’re not supposed to do – on the way to the man. Clearly, she had profiled him as someone who needed admonishing on general principles, someone she could exert her authority over.

The man responded with the assumed cheeriness of someone who has been dumped on many times, but who has told himself that he will be damned if he will let the situation get to him. “That’ll be easier than taking the stairs,” he said when the attendant pointed out the platform elevator.

His cheeriness must have bothered the attendant, because, when he walked away, she followed him. He had to be careful, she said, of not taking more than two bags on the Skytrain. He said he was only going to the next stop, to the liquor store, but that didn’t stop her from lecturing him for another three minutes about this non-existent regulation.

At this point, I was standing about a meter away from the man, and seriously debating whether I should tell the attendant to leave the man alone. After all, he hadn’t done anything. In fact, he had remained polite, despite her unwarranted bullying.

But, perhaps his politeness was what made her so intent on going after him. She stood beside him for a moment, and I imagined that she was debating asking to see his ticket. But she had no reason for doing so. Besides, about then she noticed me watching her. She frowned, and slowly walked away.

The man laughed and made a joke to me about how she didn’t say how big the two bags could be. Next time, he added, he would board with two giant ones.

I shook my head. “Man, she was really on your case.”

He did a double-take, surprised that anyone else had noticed. We exchanged a couple more sentences, then went our own ways when a Skytrain arrived.

Sitting down in a car, I regretted not intervening at this petty bit of tyranny. But maybe my interference would have made the attendant worse. At least I had treated the man the same as anyone else.

I suppose I am as much to blame for my discomfort as anyone else. After all, small abuses of authority are common enough. The only reason I don’t see more of them is that I work from home. All the same, the attendant’s behavior grated, and I resented her intrusion on to my day.

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Reliving the commute

Posted in Bruce Byfield, commuting, exercise, Personal, public transit, skytrain, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on April 16, 2008| 1 Comment »

The first two days of this week, I left the house at 8AM to get to the Open Web Vancouver conference at the Pan Pacific Hotel. By doing so, I revived all the memories of commuting that I had almost forgotten, working from home for the past three years.

Understand that I have no particular problem getting up early (although I don’t see any virtue in it, either). By the time I start work at 9:30AM, I have shaved, read The Globe and Mail, run, done several exercises, bathed, and cleaned four bird cages, so I’m well-accustomed to functioning first thing in the morning.

What I’m not used to any more is the company of strangers first thing in the morning. The local bus that takes me to the Skytrain is tolerable; once past the high school a block away from our house, it is half empty as often as not anyway.

But once I climb to the train platform, I’m submerged in a crowd, which takes some getting used to. Moreover, some of the people on Skytrain can be – well, eccentric would be a polite term. For one thing, when you’re pressed shoulder to shoulder with people, you quickly learn that a surprising number either smoke so heavily that it must sit like starch on all their clothes, or else have an active fear of water, considering their personal hygiene.

Then there’s those who carry on their private cell phone conversations at the top of their voices in a crowded Skytrain car. I once heard a young man begging and crying for his lover (whose gender was never clear) to take him back, while those of us around him squirmed in embarrassment. It was, as humorist Kate Clinton, once said, an invasion of my right to know.

But, usually, I’m the only one who apparently finds it surprising that people would have personal conversations in the crowd. This observation that makes me think that if all those mentally troubled people who argue with themselves in different voices on the Skytrain would only be given a cell phone to hold to their ear, they would immediately become integrated into society. They would never be stared at again.

Then there’s people like the intrepid shoplifter I saw once, who boarded wearing three or four shirts and carrying their hangers in one hand and all their wrapping and labels in another. The supposedly deaf people, some of whom carry cards illustrating sign language and want you to buy them and one of whom sold elaborately folded and brightly colored origami that he arranged on a branched stick. The self-important men in three piece suits who try hard to maintain their dignity. The painters and maintenance workers coming home in soiled overalls and looking seemingly pleased at the way that everyone else keeps their distance (I suppose it gives them some personal space). The trusting innocents who actually sleep on the train (quite aside from possibly being robbed, how do they avoid missing their stop? And why, knowing they have to be up early, don’t they sleep the night before?).

And always there’s the Skytrain police, whom – I learned from the newspaper this morning – have a nasty habit of tasering fare evaders (And what do they do to vandals? Suffice it to say that long-term employees at Gitmo have been known to pale when they hear). One or two of them seem to take sadistic glee in hectoring teenage Chinese Canadian girls. All of them seemed to enjoy holding up the entire system while they do fare checks. They always travel in pairs, if not in groups of four or six, no doubt because to do anything less might put them in danger from the innocent commuters whose travel time they’ve just prolonged in their paranoia that someone, somewhere, might actually be riding for free.

With all these people playing out their dramas before the audience of commuters, there’s only one rule that can help you cling to even a shred of sanity: Read a book, carry an MP3 player whose playlists you can endlessly adjust, look out a window if you can see one, but, whatever you do, don’t make eye contact.

However, even this policy doesn’t work with the people who regard the delicate art of squeezing on to crowded car as an invitation to create a mosh pit. Inevitably large and overweight, these people wait until the second before the doors close to take a flying leap on to the train, trusting to the crowd in the car to cushion their fall and keep anyone from actually falling over as they land.

The worst of these people used to be a large woman on a scooter. Don’t ask me how she got the scooter airborne, but she was merciless in crushing your toes as it landed. If you complained, she would lecture you about respect for people with disability in such a loud voice that everyone would stare at you as though you picking your noise and describing the process with a gourmet’s delight.

Even on the rare occasion when you meet none of these types, the average commute still you feeling jagged and unsettled. I can’t believe that I endured similar commutes for years – and thank luck or fate that now I usually don’t have to.

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Taking transit

Posted in Bruce Byfield, buses, Personal, public transit, skytrain, Vancouver on July 19, 2007| Leave a Comment »

I wish I could say that I take public transit for environmental reasons. Environmentalism is trendy, and I could earn cheap social points by being green. Unfortunately, I can’t claim so much credit. The truth is, I prefer public transit because it gives me a block of time to read. When I’m not reading, the bus or the Skytrain is a perfect place for both thinking and people-watching.

Somewhere on each trip, I almost always use the time on transit simply to think. While I’m on transit, I may be purposeful, but, unlike in a car, I’m not responsible for that purpose. I can sit back, and let my mind wander. without guilt. Moreover, I’m doing it in an unfamiliar environment, with other unfamiliar ones passing rapidly by me outside, and unfamiliar environments often lead to new thoughts. Ride a bus for half an hour, I sometimes think, and I can often find a solution to any problem that’s on my mind.

Flying is even better, because it’s stranger and longer, but transit has the advantage of being cheaper and more accessible. Once or twice, I’ve even ridden a block or two past my stop, just because I was in the middle of thinking through an especially knotty problem and didn’t want to interrupt the process.

If I have a laptop with me, I can input my thoughts, so long as I’ve kept the battery charged. However, closing down a laptop can make me miss my stop if I’m not careful, and caring an open computer through a crowd is a good way to break it.

More often, I simply carry a notebook. The only disadvantage is that my handwriting has degenerated through marking student papers until it looks like an obscure style of cuneiform written in the dark. Nor does the motion of the bus or Skytrain car help. Later, I often can’t transcribe what I’ve written except for a few words here and there. Most, I frankly have to guess at through context.

At other times, I unabashedly gawk at the human parade around me. Generally-speaking, the people who ride transit do not represent a random distribution of the population. As a sample, they’re skewed to the teenaged and the old, the poor and the ethnic (by which I mean, anyone from a culture that isn’t obsessed with the idea of a personal vehicle). These populations are apt to be more colorful than the average suburb or city dweller: the young because they are asserting themselves, the old because they don’t care about fashion, the poor because they can afford to care, and the ethnic because they have their own sense of style.

If you want to hear the latest concerns among teenagers, or get a sense of different speech patterns, all you have to do is ride and eavesdrop shamelessly. What I hear can be embarrassing, like the time I heard a man pleading with his lover not to break up with him via a cell-phone, but it will be a genuine slice of life of the kind that would make short story writers drool. From people discussing their plans for the weekend, giving Twitter-like updates on their cell phones to families swarming with young children and cyclists still dusty from their ride, you can find a bit of everything on transit.

And these are just the ordinary riders. If you could the genuine eccentrics, the bikers who have lost their driver’s licenses and the homeless who sometimes ride for free in the downtown core, then the people-watching never palls. The one drawback is that you don’t always see the end of the drama. I still wonder, sometimes, whether the shoplifter I saw wearing half a dozen shirts and carrying their clothes-hangers was ever noticed by the transit police, or how well the busker with his thirty-second balloon show did. Nor do I know just who the man strumming a guitar for the driver was the other night, although from the way people acted, he might be someone moderately famous.

People-watching never completely palls. If nothing else, it’s a basic precaution for riding. Without being paranoid, it only seems sensible to be aware of those around you on transit, especially at night. However, the one rule you need to remember is: “Don’t make eye contact.”
Not that is, if you want to avoid being dragged unwillingly into a conversation. The eccentrics on the bus are often lonely, and even meeting their eyes for a moment can encourage them to tell you their life story in real time or in repetitive, rambling detail.

Of course, transit isn’t always smooth riding. If I’m foolish enough to travel during rush hour, I can learn more about other people’s personal hygiene and smoking habits than I ever wanted to know. Mostly, though, riding transit is so rich in people and thoughts that being in a private car seems an impoverished experience by comparison.

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