You need to be at Camosun at, say, 10 am, so the first thing you do when you wake up is check the bus schedule to see which bus you’re taking. You pack all your books, food, computer, and anything else you’ll need for the day. You race out your door and get to the bus stop, only to find the bus is either late or, mysteriously, came early. Now you’ll be late for class or be forced to take a taxi.
Honestly, this has happened to me so many times, and I hated every single one of them. It’s the worst when I have to call a cab because I can’t be late; for us students, this is a big expense and is not something we include in our monthly budget.
I don’t have a car and I don’t want to have to buy one soon, so this means I’m stuck with public transit. A bus being late or being early is not an uncommon occurrence. It’s something that needs to be looked at because I’m pretty sure that even people who have cars prefer to take the bus just so they don’t need to pay for parking, not to mention for environmental reasons.
Then there are students who live in Langford, Sidney, or other neighbouring areas far away from Camosun. They’re always suffering with the bus schedules; there just aren’t enough busses to those areas. The last busses there are not late enough so if the students miss the last bus they have to either crash at a buddy’s house or take a cab (which, again, is expensive).
I realize it’s a big expense, but we simply need more busses to areas further away from campus and they need to be on time. It’s okay when they’re late once or twice but when it gets to the point that you have to add in your schedule the possibility of the bus not being on time, it’s a problem.
So, here are my five ideas for improving public transportation in Victoria:
1. We could have more busses running on certain routes that are always late or early.
2. The BC Transit app could be improved so it will let us know in advance when the bus will be late and find a different, viable route for us.
3. The closest routes to the bus routes that are always late or too early could have more busses running. So, if our regular bus is late, we have a backup of another route that would be there shortly, and it’s, hopefully, not too long of a walk to get to the other bus stop.
4. The busses that are early could stop at one of their regular stops and wait until it’s time to leave that stop.
5. We could have more busses running later at night to areas further away from campus.
These are just some ideas that I think would improve our commute problem. Let’s hope the bus situation gets better, because we need to get to class on time, and because I don’t want to buy a car any time soon.