The Editor,
We finally welcomed the “Nevergreen” line to Coquitlam — or so it was called in our house because it seemed like it was never going to arrive. By all accounts, it is at least two decades late.
Now that the Evergreen Extension is here, it has made transit to and from downtown so much better. I can be at work in one hour, door-to-door, in rush hour. Sure, there are several well-publicized outages each year, but that’s still far more reliable than taking the car given how there are daily traffic issues that need to be avoided, causing inevitable delays.
Now the bus routes have changed. This underscores the real problem of our transit system in Metro Vancouver. Everything has always been geared to getting you to and from downtown Vancouver. Want to go to the airport from Coquitlam? Head downtown first. What about local trips? Did anyone even consult the users of the system?
Case in point: I have a family member who needs to take the bus from Lansdowne Drive and Guildford Way in Coquitlam to get to work at North Road and Cameron. With the 97 B-line, that was a single bus, 24 to 26 minutes, one zone. Now, with the new routes, that jumps to 44 minutes for a single connection (one zone), or down to 30 to 38 minutes with two connections (bus, SkyTrain, bus) and two zones! There are even some three-zone options according to the TransLink trip planner.
Well done, TransLink. Take a 24-minute single-bus trip for $2.75 and turn it into as much as a 44-minute trip for $2,75, or $5.50 for a 30-minute, two-connection trip. I think he might have to leave the bus and start taking the car instead.
I am sure the people at TransLink are well intentioned. If their only goal is to get people downtown, they have done a fantastic job. But they seem to have given little thought to the people who need to get around locally.
Yes, it is now much faster to get downtown via transit, but intra-city travel is now worse and more expensive. A 197 bus, travelling the old 97 B-line route, maybe not as frequent, would have worked nicely.
Mike van der Velden, Coquitlam
