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The Magic
Bus
The only problem with Vancouver’s
buses? We need more of them
By Tyee Bridge
THE STARS ARE STILL OUT as Dave Asselin
crosses Hudson Street under the Arthur Laing Bridge.
Two new trolleys glide out of the Vancouver Transit
Centre. Asselin lives in a condo kitty-corner from the
centre, which makes his morning commute to work about
two minutes on foot. Some days he does the 3:57 stand-by,
also known as the “3:57 throw-up,” and wakes
up at 3 a.m. to cover the first dropped shifts. Today
he’s not in until 5:30, which has given him time
to brew a thermos of organic coffee.
A big guy with a reddish-grey moustache and a Coast
Mountain vest studded with union and safety committee
pins, Asselin is a 49-year-old former Canadian Navy
officer. His father was a Member of Parliament who used
to commute 400 kilometres to Ottawa, returning to Sherbrooke,
Quebec, to spend weekends with the family. Asselin joined
the Navy in 1980, after getting a biology degree at
the University of Ottawa. During his six years in the
service, he was attach-posted to the United States as
a navigator for Arctic and Antarctic maneuvers aboard
the USS Ohio, a 560-foot Trident nuclear submarine.
“We were doing little games up there with the
Russians. The captain would say, ‘Put me on top,
near the Pole,’ and we’d come straight up,
crash right through the ice.”
For the last 17 years he’s plied smaller craft
as a Vancouver transit operator. He can eyeball a 60-foot
articulated bus through angled construction zones with
four inches on either side. Experience brings perks
along with technique: as a senior spare-board operator,
Asselin gets his pick of the routes left by sick and
vacationing drivers. Today he’s assigned to the
25 UBC-Brentwood, which delivers students from the Millennium
Line to BCIT and from the Nanaimo SkyTrain station to
the ivory towers over Wreck Beach. A nice route, he
says, with a decent amount of allotted running time.
No stress trying to make your stops on schedule.
Our bus is parked on the far side of the VTC yard by
the north arm of the Fraser, where a tugboat is drifting
downstream with a gravel barge. Sunrise makes gold wisps
of cloud over the airport. Bus #V3230, one of about
1,300 in the TransLink fleet, is a 15-year-old New Flyer
diesel, with a capacity of 77 passengers. Clocking an
average of 70,000 kilometres a year, it has over a million
clicks on the meter. It’s still running well—Asselin’s
“pretrip” tests everything from pull cords
to air brakes—but it’s due for replacement.
Asselin hopes the replacement diesels will be less eventful
than the new trolleys. He was one of the first drivers
to blow the whistle on the power-steering failures of
the Winnipeg-built coaches. “You’d be driving
along with a full standing load of 70 or 80 people,
going through an intersection where the light was turning
amber, and then your power steering locks up,”
he says, taking a sip of coffee. “Not good.”
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"The bus
begins to fill up with students, most isolated
by iPod earbuds or poring over textbooks, but
conversations start up among people who were,
a few stops ago, strangers."
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We take the scenic route out to Brentwood,
along Joyce. As the empty bus warms up—the tires
will soften in about an hour, he says, making the ride
less bumpy—we get a dawn vista of clear blue sky
and North Shore mountains. It’s one of those Vancouver
moments when regional gratitude wells up, a solid argument
in favour of roomy and efficient transit. We’re
cruising along gaily, not stuck in gridlock, and all
is right with the world.
Before we pick up our first passengers, Asselin describes
the less sublime side of life as a bus driver. Once,
after picking up a woman and her mother on Hastings,
he had to slam the bus to a halt and help keep the young
woman, in the midst of a grand mal epileptic seizure,
from hitting her head on the steel stanchions. On Kingsway,
not far from Mount St. Joseph hospital, he administered
CPR to an elderly heart attack victim, and last year
he was called in to “defuse”—counsel
and calm—the driver who struck and killed a young
basketball star from North Vancouver. (The driver was
exonerated, and the stricken family stated publicly
that he was not to blame for their son’s death.)
Asselin’s most nerve-wracking experience came
on a trolley run near Main and Hastings years ago. “I
picked up a bunch of people, and one of them was a guy
in his mid-twenties wearing a black leather jacket.
He gave me no fare, no change, showed me nothing, so
I called him back. ‘Fare’s a dollar-fifty,’
I said. He came back up, opened his jacket to the side
and said, ‘I don’t have to pay, OK?’”
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