Last week we brought you the story of a TransLink driver who dumped his passengers and walked off the job because some people on the bus complained about him being late.
The response to that story seemed split down the middle, with some regarding the driver as a folk hero standing up to an unappreciative public, and others calling for his head for punishing a busload of already long-suffering passengers with his outburst.
Of course, being late wasn’t the driver’s fault any more than the snow and ice was his fault and he certainly didn’t deserve to be on the receiving end of some mouthpiece’s venom.
But we’d suggest the ability to deal with a cranky and unappreciative public in a civil and professional manner is something that should be in any bus driver’s job description.
It probably doesn’t help that the public’s ability to talk to any other human at TransLink when things go wrong is extremely limited. Bus drivers are the de-facto on-the-ground public relations agents of the system.
Zooming out for a broader view, what happened Friday morning was really just the symptom of a larger problem. Our threadbare transit system has almost no capacity to respond to snafus like a few centimetres of snow.
West Vancouver Mayor Mike Smith lamented at council Monday night that West Vancouver remains poorly served by TransLink. But Smith also championed the No vote in last year’s transit funding plebiscite. In the end, the only people punished by that No vote were the people waiting for buses that wouldn’t come – both in fair and foul weather conditions.
Let’s hope in 2017 we start treating TransLink like the critical resource it is and not the outlet for our many frustrations.
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