Games to Play on Transit #15

[mbarrick]

Dodge the onslaught of zombie commuters coming into town from the suburbs.

I live downtown and work in a suburb. I don't understand why there are so many millions that do it the other way around. In the evening and on weekends when I want to be entertained I'm in the middle of all the cinemas, night-clubs, restaurants, near the sea-wall, etc., etc. Tthe whole gamut of what I want to do in my time is a short walk or a 5-minute $5 cab ride away. There is nothing to do in the suburbs. And don't feed me that walk-in-a-park and cleaner air bullshit: downtown Vancouver has one of the world's great parks, Stanley Park, that people travel from the four corners of the earth to see, and it is right in the city; and the offshore winds blow all the smog away from the city and into the suburbs. Yet now that I am doing a reverse commute rather than walking to the end of the block, I am faced every morning with wading upstream against the great torrent of people who can't fathom that they have it backwards.

That by itself is enough to make me wonder about their intelligenge. There is, however, something else that boggles me on a daily basis. Years ago I saw a television program about the difficulty in making autonomous, self navigating robots able to navigate through a crowd. The program made the point that this was a feat that humans performed easily. I disagree. Throw an unexpected obstacle in front of the herd like one or two people walking in the opposite direction as the bleating sheeple and it's clear that the self-navigating robots have the advantage. The advantage being that they look where they are going and are incabable of not at least trying to avoid collisions.

The walk to the Burrard SkyTrain station is not too bad. It seems once people surface and are not all moving in the same direction like lemmings to a cliff and have the threat of bumping into something leathal like a cement truck, they pay a little attention to their surroundings. As soon as I begin to descend into the station the game beings.

First off the two columns of people coming up the two up escalators from the platform almost all trun to their left to head for the escalator to Burrard Street. Getting to the one down escalator is a live game of Frogger. At the bottom of the escalator, at the level of the west-bound trains, the people come streaming off the platform in such a way that one gets to choose between head-on collisions with the timid foot-watchers hugging the wall and blocking the path the the right-side staircase down to the east-bound platform or another game of frogger to pass back through the oncoming stream to get at the left-side stairs. Either path will garner you about six to twelve startled and angry glares at the affrontery of forcing them to look up from their underground shuffle towards Metropolis.

I prefer the left stairs because, although it is slightly more difficult to wade through the crowd than to wedge along the wall, displacing the shuffling rat-people, this is offset by the grief it saves when changing trains at Commercial & Broadway. Taking the left staircase to the east-bound platform at Burrard puts one at the tail-end of the east-bound train - the end closest to the walkway to transfer from the Expo Line to the Millenium Line. This saves traversing the platform at Broadway Station which is clogged on one side with people from New Westminister and Surrey exiting to move to the buses that will take them to whatever dismal job they might have on the outskirts of downtown such that they need a bus along Broadway or Commercial clashing with the people coming from Coquitlam and Burnaby trying to get on the train to go the rest of the way into town. The chaos does not stay confined to the west-bound platform as most of the people coming from the Millenium Line are charging up the east-bound platform, trying to flank around the people getting off the west-bound train. Being anywhere other than the last door at the back end of the east-bound train means trying to get through this clusterfuck, which is far more annoying than being the Frogger frog at Burrard.

There remains the problem of heading up against the flow over the pedestrian overpass from Broadway Station to Commercial Station. Every once in a blue moon one lucks out and you can get entirely from one station to another between train arrivals, but usually, at some point one gets hit with a tsunami of people who learned their concepts of personal space and courtesy in the most hideously overpopulated areas of Asia. I have, in all seriousness, crossed dance-floors crowded with drunk Punks more easily.

My next affront comes at Lougheed Station. The humanoid things in Coquitlam (they are just vaguely distorted enough that I hesitate to use the word "people" - I can't really explain it) must see in a slightly different spectrum than humans. It's obvious every time I am waiting to leave the train that they cannot see the sign on the door windows that says "keep back and allow passengers to exit before boarding" and/or cannot see me standing right behind the window waiting to exit. Somehow there is always someone standing directly in my way, jaw agape, and clearly confused about the posted procedure. These people are of the same species that cannot grasp the "walk left, stand right" rules posted on the escalator. One's width must indicate status in the social hierachy of these creatures, because those that don't naturally have an ass three feet wide make up for it by wearing backpacks askew.

Comments

[tnkgrl.livejournal.com]

I keep having this discussion with my coworkers, the "why are you living in the burbs and commuting [you stupid wasteful assholes]?" discussion... I just don't get it!

They have the same attitude towards me - they just don't get why I'd want to live in the city.

A lot of my friends are poor and can't afford to live in SF (where $500 US barely gets you a crappy room in shared house), so they live in Oakland or Berkeley accross the bay...

But my coworkers are not poor - they choose to live in the burbs! They claim that the city is too crowded, dirty, unsafe, unfit for children, and most of all that "parking is a bitch, you know?"

Well, parking is a bitch, but only because you're the ones driving in from the burbs, duh :)

And of course, the city is unfit for children - 'cause it's full of freaks like me who're going to turn kids into tattoed queers.

Yeah right.

[valerian.livejournal.com]

It actually amazes me that there NEEDS to be these little signs. It's just common sense. Although no one actually reads them.

Walk left, stand right. We drive on the right-hand side of the road. We pass slower cars in the left-hand lane. Thus, if you are going to pass people who are standing or going slower than you, you should pass them on the left. Or at least, if you are going to stand, stand right behind the person in front of you so there is a path around both of you. Imagine if everyone did this!

Wait for passengers to exit. You can't get in if there's no room. Letting people leave means there will be room. For you!

Merge alternately. Not mentioned because it's driver-related, but it is my favorite so I'm going to bring it up. Cars coming down a ramp to join the rest of the herd on the highway: picture a zipper, one tooth locking into place right after the one before it. Over and over, "alternately". Imagine blending into traffic in such a way, so that there was no stopping and starting, just a nice constant flow! One can dream.

:P

[valerian.livejournal.com]

But but but, it's cheaper to live in the suburbs. Cheaper, but then there's the vehicle upkeep or transit passes to purchase monthly, plus time out of your day commuting that you could be spending doing something much more enjoyable, plus trips into town to do entertaining things or to purchase things that you just can't get in the suburbs.

Somehow, costwise I think it evens out.

Oh yeah, and it's safer too, because there's NEVER any drive-by shootings in the suburbs. Or grow-ops. Nope.

[seymour-glass.livejournal.com]

i'm lucky now to have the best of both worlds, living and working downtown...but years ago i worked at the surrey tax centre...i loved going against the flow because it was so much easier...i always choose the left stairwell too...for one it's usually less crowded on that side and i often switch trains at broadway too...

[nicosian.livejournal.com]

we didn't even live in the "suburbs" before moving smackdab downtown and ye gods, the hours of life wasted on transit!

Almost all my co workers live in deep dark far surrey. Cheap rent, they say! they don't get enough hours at work, they say!

"you live too far. if you can only work certain shifts due to transit to buttfuck nowhere, MOVE CLOSER."

[nicosian.livejournal.com]

broadway's a nightmare around 8 am. I've waited 10 trains to for one with room.

[seymour-glass.livejournal.com]

see i'm lucky i'm always riding it at night...the only time it's a drag for me is just before or after football or hockey games...usually i'm going to hockey so i have a bag and some sticks and it gets to be a challenge to endure the crowds...the plus is i'm bigger than them, bald and have hockey sticks...they usually move out of my way...ha ha...

[mbarrick.livejournal.com]

I miss my downtown job. I like my work, but I'll like it better when I don't have to commute five days a week.

Every commute I've ever had that crossed city boundries has been a reverse commute - Kits to SFU, Kits to Kingsway & Grange, and this one. The closest I ever had to a "normal" commute was Commercial to UBC for about a year.

[saturnina.livejournal.com]

I go against the flow too - live in Kits, work in North Van. I really don't mind the commute at all, mostly because I find the Seabus relaxing.

BUT yesterday I was entering Station Terminal some moron decided to plow right into me on his way out. I was opening and walking through the door on my right, as I normally do. Usually the flow of human traffic somewhat abides by the rules of common sense and uses the door on their right, which allows us to both enter/exit the building at the same time. I guess this guy thought I was opening the door for him? Or that running directly into me was easier than opening the other door? Either way, it was truly boggling, as it is a glass door and there is no way he did not see me coming.