Games to Play on Transit #15

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.