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So what if there are no Bus Schedules on TransLink bus stop poles?
sillygwailo says, on the photo above:
TransLink is lazy and doesn’t want to update printed bus stop schedules anymore.
That’s a pretty cynical take on it, isn’t it? Let’s take a closer look at who’s affected by this change in policy, then how we can interpret this.
Who’s affected?
People who do not have mobile phones or access to text messaging. Reasons for this could include:
- Financial reasons — they can’t afford the costs of a mobile phone or the costs of a text messaging transaction on a Canadian mobile phone carrier service.
- Social reasons — they don’t have any need of a mobile phone because it hasn’t sufficient social benefit for them to justify it.
- Functional illiteracy — they can’t use a mobile phone or its text message capabilities. The elderly or differently-abled (with visual or tactile impairments), for instance, may not use text messaging because the screens are too small and the keys too unwieldy for the time investment. Phones marketed specifically to overcome these problems are not yet popular in North America and require further financial investment to obtain, if someone’s even aware that they exist.
- All of these reasons may also apply in various forms to Visitors to our fair city — roaming costs may be high for text messaging. There may also be uncertainty about whether North American shortcodes work if a person and their phone are here from another continent or country (say, perhaps, to attend some large two-week multi-national sporting event).
But TransLink suggests an alternative!
What about the TransLink Customer Service phone number? Why, I’m glad you asked:
- Phone booths are hard to come by now with the popularity of mobile phones. Their uptime is generally reliant on the backlog and workload of public phone repair technicians. It’s likely there are fewer of them to service geographically-dispersed phones. But this, to me, is less important than the fact that…
- Phones tend to be located in SkyTrain stations, but not all paper schedules were located at stops even remotely near phone booths. Would you walk 100 or 200 meters away from a bus stop to call a customer information line to find out when the bus comes? Especially if the bus comes only once every half hour?
- …And don’t forget the cost. They have also thought about raising payphone charges.
The Boy Scout Clause
Perhaps TransLink and Coast Mountain are simply trying to look out for us by making sure we leave home Fully Prepared. Available at your local libary, transit office or TransLink Lost Property Office is one of their gorgeous new multilingual paper schedule compendiums (picture forthcoming).
Make sure you collect them all, for those times when you are away from home taking buses in new corners and being a tourist in your own city, as TransLink has advocated we do from time to time.
Why so glum, chum?
Let us not abandon our propensity to put a brighter spin on things. How could we interpret TransLink/Coast Mountain Bus Company’s policy change in this regard? Let me name (some of) the ways:
- The Cynical Interpretation. The paper bus schedule information service has been removed as a cost-cutting measure in these difficult economic times. TransLink’s budget shortfalls, and the ongoing underfunding and de-emphasis of transit at the Provincial/Federal government levels more generally, are to blame.
- The Optmistic Interpretation. TransLink’s real-time bus routing information system is just around the corner, so all these bus stops will soon have even better information for customers traveling on transit. The paper bus schedules have been discontinued as an interim cost-cutting measure while the final spit-and-polish is being done on this system that will bring Vancouver’s transit into the 21st century.
- The Realistic Interpretation is a combination of the two. TransLink/CMBC may internally and on paper have said that this is an interim measure, designed to cut costs while the new real-time bus information system is implemented. TransLink’s budget shortfall, however, may mean that the final bell is tolling for real-time bus tracking initiative, unbeknownst to the cheery folk at CMBC. So the effective and resultant impact on riders outside the text-messaging set could turn out to be exactly as cynical as you can imagine.
The final read on it is yours, dear reader.
Update (July 10th, 2009): TransLink’s Buzzer Blog reports that Coast Mountain has “rallied up the resources” to put schedules back on the posts as of June 29th.
