TransLink faces back-to-school commute challenge

Hundreds of thousands of students are heading back to school Tuesday morning, and the transit authority of B.C.'s south coast is providing extra bus services to try to ease the crunch.

Students, as well as adults returning to work after the Labour Day long weekend, were lining up at bus stops at major Vancouver transit intersections, such as Commercial Drive and Broadway, as early as 6:30 a.m.

TransLink is providing extra bus services to the University of British Columbia, including new bus route No. 33 that begins Tuesday and runs from the 29th Avenue SkyTrain Station in south Vancouver to UBC. More-frequent bus services to UBC will be provided on routes No. 49 from MetroTown in Burnaby and No. 25 from the Brentwood area.

"The big news this morning … is the launch of No. 33, which will run from 29th Avenue Station out to UBC every 15 minutes [with] limited stops," Ken Hardie, a spokesman for TransLink, said Tuesday.

"In addition, an interesting thing that people who take the Main Street buses will notice as of this morning [is] we're servicing those exclusively with the articulated trolleys, but with all of the latest technologies, including signal priorities," Hardie said.

"What we hope to do there is move more people with fewer buses just simply by being able to control the green lights."

TransLink said the total ridership of public transit has increased by three per cent over the last year, and it will take a few weeks to see whether the increased bus services this fall are effective in handling the morning rush on any given school day.