Just before Christmas holidays, on a chartered trip with Island Pacific School, the odometer on Peter King’s bus hit the 625,000 mile mark. In kilometer’s, that’s more than a million, 1,005, 840 kilometres to be exact. It looks as though, with daily runs to transport commuters to and from Horseshoe Bay and downtown Vancouver, that number is likely to increase a great deal over the next four months while the Queen of Capilano is in the shop, and Bowen Islanders travel on the smaller, older, Bowen Queen.
Commuter Peter Wrinch said that he took the through bus to downtown on Monday in part because he thought that there would be an interesting community feel to it.
“There weren’t too many of us on the bus on the way in, so I met a few new people and we did end up walking to work together after Peter dropped us off,” says Wrinch. “Overall though, I was impressed by how quickly the bus got us there. Especially on the way back – I timed the trip from downtown to Horseshoe Bay and it took 23 minutes.”
It was on that Monday morning, 7:30 a.m run that driver Peter King encountered the first challenge to getting people downtown in a hurry.
“One of the passengers noticed a tweet from TransLink, saying they were re-routing passengers to the Sea Bus Terminal because the Lion’s Gate Bridge was closed due to an accident,” says King. “So I got on the phone and started asking if my passengers could get complimentary tickets on the Sea Bus, but it just seemed like they didn’t know what to say. Around that time, I was coming up to the Lion’s Gate Bridge and saw that a lane was open, so I took it and managed to get everyone downtown.”
On the way back, with traffic backed up all along Georgia St. and onto the Lion’s Gate Bridge, King called back to Bowen and asked for word to be put out that he might not make it back to Horseshoe Bay in time to pick up passengers off the 8:30 a.m. ferry.
“It turns out, I made it not too late,” says King. “There weren’t too many people getting on the bus from that boat, and mostly they just took the 257.”
By the end of the day, King encountered another glitch: the speed sensor on his bus stopped working. For $125 per hour, he managed to get a replacement TransLink bus so that he could keep the service running on Tuesday.
“This might affect the weight of my wallet, but this won’t affect the service,” said King on Tuesday, adding that his spare time that day would be dedicated to getting the necessary replacement parts for his bus.
Bowen Island Municipal Councillor Maureen Nicholson took the bus off Tuesday’s 7:30 a.m. ferry, and reported travel downtown to be incredibly efficient.
“I’m sold on this,” she says. “My only complaint, and I know this is something Peter King would like to address is that if this service were integrated with TransLink, my trip to Metrotown would have not cost me an extra $4.”
King says that it is his goal to see the through-bus service continued after the mid-life upgrade period, and for it to become an extension to TransLink’s service.
“A service that was integrated could have a lot more impact on the island. We could start to make major inroads in terms of parking and car use. We could start moving more people, instead of vehicles.”
