By Glen Ess (The Cascade) – Email
Transit is an oft-cited source of frustration among students like myself. I don’t drive, and the weather during the academic year isn’t conducive to walking or biking — my two favoured forms of transport — and so I have to take the bus to and from school. The fear of missing a bus, the frustration of a slow one, the concern that something so removed from my own control may result in arriving late for a class: these are all thoughts that go hand in hand with taking public transport.
These frustrations are such a common experience for bus-taking students that a friend of mine once wrote a paper on BC Transit and what, in his opinion, they could do better. If memory serves me right, he got a good grade for that paper, too.
But these issues don’t just make commuting to campus a hassle; they’ve also ensured that I avoid taking any courses outside of UFV’s Abbotsford campus. I’m already going crazy over busing within Abby; imagine how angry I’ll get if I had to bus to Mission or to Chilliwack! Despite the presence of the handy shuttle that takes students from Abbotsford to CEP and back, I still maintained my exclusive relationship with Abbotsford. But recent revelations have made me reconsider this.
For the first time, I rode the shuttle. It’s a simple, basic little bus, and it takes roughly half an hour to complete its journey — a surprisingly relaxing journey. Each has wifi, so I happily sat there, laptop open, clicking away as we drove through the farmlands that separate the two campuses. It wasn’t as crowded or as noisy as all the other buses I’ve had to take. And it didn’t have to stop every two blocks, so there was no anxiety induced by losing precious minutes to someone taking a long time to board. Most pleasant of all was the absence of obnoxiously loud adolescents, music blaring from their phone speakers (not headphones, never headphones), constantly bragging that they “totally smoke pot man,” and that they could “down, like, a bottle of vodka in no time, dude.”
Yes, I know I sound like a fuddy-duddy. But who among us wouldn’t like to have a less stressful commute to class?
That’s not to say the shuttle is a perfect service. Nothing ever is. There are some problems with riding the shuttle. Things like the odour of manure that dominates the farmlands the shuttle passes through, the relatively rough ride, how the schedule could be made a bit more efficient, the driver’s choice of radio station. These are all things that I felt detracted from my first-ever shuttle bus experience. But they were minor inconveniences, and overall, the experience may just lead me to broaden my UFV experience by taking a class or two at CEP in the future.
