A Matter of Balance

Yesterday was one of those days that really seemed light on positive qualities and indeed heavy on negative ones.  This, of course, is the kind of judgment that one might make in a country whose per capita income is at least $30,000.  Which is to say, there are plenty worse things that could be happening in a person's life, even if you live in a country with a per capita income of at least $30K.

I mean, it was Mother's Day and I'm a Mother so on my day, things ought to go a bit right.  We began the day by getting an early start in order to get on the 10:20 a.m. ferry to come back to Point Roberts from the Sunshine Coast.  It seemed likely that the major Mother's Day traffic would come after lunch, at which point all the Mothers would have been fed.  A 10:20 ferry would be safe even if the Mothers were all going to brunch.

Alas, although we were there in plenty of time, other people were there in even more plenty and we were Car #7 not to get on the ferry.  (Is it worse to be Car #1 not to get on the ferry?  We've been that car once before and it surely seems worse.  But it really doesn't make sense: after all, #1 or #7, you're all still not on the ferry.)  And where you are instead is hanging around the ferry terminal parking lot for a couple of hours, which is pretty much like hanging around any other parking lot for a couple of hours.  Cold in cold weather, hot in hot weather, but yesterday was just medium, so there's that in its favor, but there's really nothing else in its favor.

After the two hour wait, we entered the 12:30 ferry satisfactorily.  And drove the long route around Vancouver.  Somewhere down hear Marine and Argyle, we were stopped at a stop light to make a right turn onto Marine.  And, we looked and all that and made an appropriate right-on-a-red-turn.  Except that two teen-age boys who couldn't see around the corner made an sudden angled run into the pedestrian crosswalk just as we turned.  They couldn't see us, we couldn't see them... until we made the turn.  Of course we could both have seen one another had they entered the pedestrian crossing from the corner, but there we all were.  We weren't going all that fast, of course, but Ed made a very quick stop, which resulted in the three12-foot boards which were tied to the roof rack making a sudden forward exit, so to speak, landing immediately in front of the car in the street.

The boys run off across Marine, I jump out of the car and try to wrestle the three boards on to the side of Marine (with the help of a gracious young woman pedestrian), while Ed tries to get the car backed on to the side of Argyle, since he can't turn because the woman, the boards, and I are right in front of him.  And he's got cars behind him.  Oh, yikes!  It was just a quick adrenaline rush, but it could have been dreadful and if that woman had not helped me with the boards, it would have been worse.  And Ed hopes that those boys' mothers are reading this and will advise them to get their access to the pedestrian crosswalk at the corner and not ten feet into it by angling from the sidewalk past the intersection, IN THE FUTURE.

And then we got back to Point Roberts, turned on the hot water heater, and found that that precipitate action rewarded us with a collapse of the hot water heater's integrity of surface, and for the next 8 hours we were on our hands and knees, getting water off the floor and out of the carpet and out of the water heater, mostly using sponges and towels.  And so those were the three great unpleasantnesses of this Mother's Mother's Day.

On the other hand, this is what the garden looked like from the kitchen window upon our return.  The sight of the garden made me think that, on balance, it was a very good day.

Ferry Dangerous?

The ferries in B.C. in the summertime are not much fun. The schedules change so I can never keep track of when they’re leaving; they’re desperately crowded almost all the time; you have to get there two hours early or wait two hours when you come on time and they are already over-loaded. It just doesn’t do much for me.

Nevertheless, once you are on the ferry, there is little excuse for sitting in the car below decks throughout the forty-five minute ride. And yet, that is what we often do. It’s an almost 2-hour drive to get to the ferry and still we stay in the car for another 3/4 hour as if we had been glued there. I am reminded of the old phrase, ‘If you are tired of London, you are tired of life.’ If you are tired of looking out at the incredibly beautiful sights of Howe Sound from the upper ferry deck, you are tired of something, certainly. Mostly, I’m just tired of riding on ferries or, more precisely, of being confined by ferries. Too much an American to be entirely pleased that I cannot leave if the ferry says I can’t..

So there we were, the two of us, lightly drowsing in the car on the 4th deck. (The 4th deck means you are above the water and indeed we could look out the side of the boat and more or less see some water. But it’s not what you’d call a great view and it’s not light enough for me to easily read in the car.) Most of the cars around us—indeed perhaps all the cars around us—were empty, their passengers not yet being tired of life or ferries, or perhaps just in need of food and drink. And then two guys came up fairly near the car and started poking around and talking in such a way that we could easily hear them. One was in his mid-forties; the other younger, maybe 30-ish, with a notebook in which he was busily making notes.

My first impression was that the older guy was a ferry employee who was taking a (younger guy) safety inspector around to check various stuff. At the end, I’m not so sure of that. Ed’s view was that it was an older ferry mechanic taking a new employee around to show him the ropes.

Anyway, what he’s showing him and what the younger guy appears to be writing down is about the rust condition on the boat. The older mechanic is outraged by the amount of visible rust. ‘And,’ he pointed out repeatedly, ‘If you can see this much rust in the open, you gotta know that there’s even more of it behind the walls here where you can’t see it. And even more on the lower decks where you can’t see it.’

Does he think it’s dangerously rusty? I don’t know. Ed and I are looking at each other, rolling our eyes, feeling like we're in some George Clooney thriller. The two guys move around, inspecting more rust, inspecting more deficiencies. Finally, they are standing just ahead of us, looking at the fire door. The older guy points out that in the last refit, all the fire doors were serviced (not the word he used, but I can’t remember it specifically), but that within a few weeks, they were back to their old state. ‘This door,’ he says. ‘This door is not being held open. It’s supposed to go into a magnetic hold, but it’s not anywhere near it.’ He demonstrates this by pushing the door shut without detaching it from the magnetic hold, which it is obviously not attached to; then reopening and finally lifting the door upwards so that it can reach the magnet. ‘This door,’ he says with a very serious tone, ‘is simply holding itself open.’

Something about the despairing way he said this made both Ed and me burst into laughter. The mechanic guy turned, saw us there, winked at us, rolled his eyes, laughed, and guided his younger guy up the stairs.

I can’t decide to be alarmed or relieved. Just a moment on a ferry, of course. But then I asked Ed, ‘Was the mechanic guy wearing a life jacket? All the time during an ordinary ferry crossing on a perfectly calm day?’ ‘Maybe it was a down vest?’ he offered. Maybe, but the temperature that day was 85 degrees, so probably not. Maybe just a guy who knows when to be prepared.

Investors

I ran into some conversation about a ferry from Point Roberts to Bellingham the other day. Seems the B.C. Ferries Corporation (which is a private corporation, much to the chagrin of many residents of the Sunshine Coast) is selling off some older ferries as a result of closing down the Albion ferry in Maple Ridge and of the new very large ferries soon to appear on the coastal ferry routes. Maybe Point Roberts could buy one of those ferries and run a little route back and forth to Bellingham was the idea.

Of course, Bellingham has no particular known interest in running a ferry across that route. And none of the ferries that was advertised could dock at the P.R. marina, but the idea of a ferry is perennial in Point Roberts. All you have to do is bring it up as a topic and people start talking about what a good idea it would be to get somebody to do this project. The somebody might be the state or the county, but the somebody isn’t usually Point Roberts, I have noticed.

So here’s a thought experiment, as the philosophers say: if the people who think it would be a good idea to have say a water-taxi (that could transport perhaps as many as ten foot-passengers/crossing) can raise $1,000 each from five hundred Point Roberts’ residents as investors, then there would be a half-million dollars of investment capital to get something the size of a water taxi going. A half-million would mean, I’m guessing, that it was fairly well capitalized, and the investors could all count on a nice little yearly profit if such a profit chanced to materialize, or some of their money back if it weren’t all needed over a several year period. And the real thought experiment here is whether 500 Point Roberts residents, who stand to benefit by this innovation both practically and financially, would be willing to ante up the investment funds? And if not, how good an idea is it really?

Incidentally, the digitalis/foxglove is blooming all over the place--in our yard, it's over 5 1/2 feet tall. There's a plant that knows how to do its thing.

Discussion or Shouting Match?

When the B.C. Ferry Corporation changes its schedules and policies, ferry riders usually feel that something is being done against them not for them. They frequently protest, although the effects of those protests have not been particularly noticeable. The Ferry Corporation is busy appointing citizen advisory panels and the like, but they pretty much seem like window dressing. Nevertheless, after the most recent cuts in the schedule, 300 or so people up here turned out to object strenuously not only to the reduced number of sailings but also to the ever-rising prices and surcharges.

And then B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell went on the TV and announced that there will be a one-time $20 million increase to the ferry budget in order to restore those ferry sailings that were being removed and to reduce the cost of ferry crossings by a considerable amount. Well, that is pretty amazing, no? Of course, the fine print is that these awesome changes will be in effect for December and January, periods when there is massive vacation travel on the ferry. Well, maybe not so much response to local outcry. Maybe more of a response to an as-yet unannounced upcoming election?

That’s what the local newspaper editor suggests. He also suggests that everybody ought to be grateful for Campbell’s gift, even if it is motivated by political calculations. I’m struck by my reflexive resistance to his argument. Since it’s reflexive, of course, it’s suspect. Have we become so weary of political action that we can’t imagine there is anything coming out of politicians’ mouths that is oriented toward the public good? Always working to their own interests, not ours? Can we imagine that an action could simultaneously serve their interests and ours, or that it could just serve the public’s?

I don’t have any answer to that. And that is part of the anti-government tendency of our times. We riders can, of course, enjoy reduced ferry costs. But what if they are held low just long enough to get these people re-elected, at which point the costs are increased from what they previously were? Or, alternatively, what if there really isn’t any reasonable way to reduce the costs of ferry transport and this $20 million gift is just a way of postponing some other day of reckoning, a day they don’t want to talk about because the public is too uninformed to accept it?

I am inclined to this last thought because I have been reading historian Andrew Bacevich’s new book, The Limits of American Power. Bacevich argues that the U.S. has come to the end of its economic, military, and political influence in the world (and he is writing a year or more before the current economic free-fall) because it has refused to accept that there are limits. A big part of his argument is that the U.S. has for decades put off the day of reckoning with respect to our dependency on foreign oil because those governing didn’t believe citizens would accept the bad news that they might have to do without some things or pay more for some things, if the country was to prosper in the future. No, we wanted cheap oil and we wanted it now and forever.

So, I’m thinking: what if there is no way to maintain cheap ferry traffic in B.C., at least not without giving up something else that is also important? Should the public and the government be talking about those tradeoffs and exactly what they are? Or should they just be talking about how the interest group identified as ferry riders is always trying to get something for itself and the interest group called politicians is always trying to get something for itself? Well, the ferry riders certainly can’t talk about tradeoffs if they don’t know what they are. And the government? Well, if they know, they’re not mentioning it. Maybe a folie a deux: those never end well.

Isolation Times Two

Isolation calling. In Point Roberts, the border is the isolating factor. The border keeps me at home because the mere possibility of border problems often leads me to not bother to go there unless I have to. Of course, it’s an inclination that’s pretty easy to get past. On the Sunshine Coast, it is the Ferry Corporation that is the isolating factor. Although the Coast is on the Canadian mainland, it is like living on an island because there are no roads that lead to here: water crossing only. I assure Ed that, in an emergency, he can paddle his kayak over to the mainland and he can strap me to the side, the way you’d strap a slain deer onto a car.

At the Point Roberts’ border crossing, my concerns are about the latent hostility toward individuals. By contrast, meeting up with the B.C. Ferry Corporation is a sublimely impersonal experience. You’re just a number to them and a profoundly uninteresting number, I’d guess. They decide when they’re going to offer you a ride; they decide the cost; their buildings, their roads, their ships: take ‘em or leave ‘em. You got a problem with that? Sorry. Their mission, they say, is ‘to provide safe, reliable and efficient marine transportation services which consistently exceed the expectations of our customers, employees and communities, while creating enterprise value.’ It’s the enterprise value that seems uppermost in their mind, though. The expectations are clearly not the big show.

Right now, people up on the Coast indeed have a problem with all that because they feel a tad hostage to the Corporation’s idea of its mission. The Ferry Corporation, which used to be a Crown Corporation—i.e., a government agency--was privatized in 2003, and now finds that this run is not sufficiently rewarding from an economic perspective as a steady operation. It finds it more interesting in the summer when the tourists line up to come here than in the other seasons when it’s just the cranky locals. I guess their theory is that we should all just stay put up here and not be wanting to go to Vancouver. It’s a variation of the Whatcom County view that everybody in Point Roberts knew what it was like when they moved there, so why are they complaining? Similarly, you knew when you moved to the Coast that ferries didn’t run every hour, so why are you complaining?

The current unhappiness is a result of the Corporation’s decision to eliminate two sailings a week—one early Sunday morning and one on Saturday evening-- which it assures us is actually not a problem because they will add to sailings in the summer and somehow it will all add up to the same number of yearly sailings. They complain accurately that these two sailings--which have been provided for many, many years--are underused. Of course they are thoroughly used by the people who use them. Perhaps those users could encourage more of their neighbors to go to Vancouver at 6:20 Sunday morning. Probably not. In any case, it appears that it is the tourists, not the residents who will benefit here…the tourists and the Ferry Corporation, of course, which will sell more tickets in the summer.

The underlying problem is that many people on the Coast think the ferries are a part of British Columbia’s highway system and the Ferry Corporation thinks it is running a transportation business, sort of like moving containers around. You get the same kind of disconnect down at the Point Roberts border where Homeland Security sees itself as in the cops and robbers business, while the residents see the border folks more like conductors on a bus whose job is largely to take tickets and help out in an emergency. The way to avoid problems with them both, of course, is just to stay at home once you get home. Once you get used to the isolation, you might like it.

Which Way Up?

B.C. Transit or B.C. Roads or whoever in the B.C. government is responsible for signage on the highways simply never fails to disappoint. The agency seems to have a relatively random policy for highway exits: sometimes the sign is before the exit, sometimes right after, so it is never quite clear where or when you should exit if you don’t already know how it works. Because the Olympics is coming to Vancouver in January of 2010, barely a year from now, there are lots of new roads with new signs, particularly in the area to the north and west that leads to Whistler where much of the snow-based competition will occur. Also in that area is the Horseshoe Bay Ferry Terminal, which is the place to go if you want to go to the Sunshine Coast and Roberts Creek. And indeed that is where we were heading today.

About a mile from the terminal, there was a standard rectangular metal road sign indicating that there was a new routing for the ferry terminal. Okay, that’s good. And then there was a sign that said something like ‘ferry terminal and village to the right,’ which is also good, and we went right. And then, not so good: there was one of those signs that change, using light bulbs or LED’s or something. It showed the words, ‘Ferry Terminal,’ followed by a new sign that showed a right-pointing arrow. Okay, but that was immediately followed by a new sign that said ‘Village,’ followed by a new sign that features a left-pointing arrow sign. So, logically, you get: Ferry, go right; Village, go left. But it says that logically only if you come in at the right moment. It can equally well say, ‘left-arrow, ferry terminal; right arrow, village.’ Four instructions, but since they are not numbered on the sign, they can be read as 1,2,3,4, or 4,1,2,3, or 2,3,4,1, or 3,4,1,2. You have two choices to go right to the ferry terminal and two to go left. Go, sign designers! So many more opportunities before January 2010.

Ferry Commerce

Well, who would think that shopping on the ferry is a good idea? I think it is a very bad idea, and as a result I never buy anything on the ferry past the ferry ticket. It always amazes me that people pour onto the boat for a 45-minute ride and then immediately pour themselves even further, into the food concessions, looking as if they had spent much of the day just waiting for the moment when they could buy ferry food, most of which appears to come sealed in plastic wrap.

This last trip, however, all that changed for me. Arriving on a very hot day, I looked through my purse for a tube of chapstick which I always carry. However, because of a recent airplane trip to California, I had been required to remove the dangerous chapstick from my purse and had subsequently failed to restore it. So there I was, on a very hot day with very dry lips and no lip balm. I needed balm, so I went to the ferry store, knowing I would be overpaying for the object. Looked all round, could find no lip balm. Then, just as I was leaving, I saw a few tubes behind the cash register. The closest one to me was ‘Bert’s Bees' Lip Balm,’ so I took the package, knowing it was even more expensive, as a niche item. My reasoning was that since I was going to overpay anyway I might as well overpay for something allegedly worth overpaying. I gave the cashier a $10 bill and she gave me $3 and change. Awesome! That’s world class overpaying, I'd say.

Since, because of the trip to the ferry, I had not had my afternoon cup of coffee, I decided to blow the rest of the ten dollar bill on a cuppa.

‘Where are the short cups?’ I ask the cashier in the coffee bar.
‘Short?’ she replies. ‘What do you mean? You mean small?’
‘Well,’ I answer, ‘the sign says short, medium, tall, and grande.’
‘Really?’ she answers. ‘Well, the small ones are here.’

It is $1.89 for my very short cup, I’d guess under 8 ounces. Which means I’ve got a dollar yet to burn, but there is nothing on the ferry, I suspect, that costs only a dollar. I get my very short cup and fill it, inquiring as I pay where I might find the cream. A little old white-haired lady—even older than I am--comes up to the register as I leave, asking whether she can have a refill on her coffee. The cashier looks amazed that anyone would even ask such a question. ‘No,’ she replies with perfect equanimity and as if it were a decision made personally for (or against) this woman. ‘No, you cannot have a refill.’

The little old lady accompanies me to the cream/milk/cup-lid/napkin table and proceeds to fill her very short cup with cream. Aaaah! Ferry Corporation-1, Little Old Ladies-1.

Ferry, Ferry Bad

In the midst of a five-day heat streak, we shift ground to the Sunshine Coast, which trip includes a picturesque ferry ride on a picturesque ferry. It is picturesque, but I grow increasingly irritated with the fact of having to go anywhere via ferry.

When we moved here, the ferry was never a problem: there was lots of room for cars so you didn’t have to come way early, and you could buy and use discount ticket books easily. Nowadays, not easy at all, summer or winter. First of all, the traffic to the Sunshine Coast has increased dramatically but the number of ferry trips has increased very little. Second, the price of the ferry ticket has increased regularly and considerably and they no longer allow you to buy books of tickets at a discount. Instead, they have devised a system by which the ferry corporation sells you a debit card that must always have a value of at least $75.00. Which is to say, they always have the free use of $75.00 worth of your (and everyone else who uses the card’s) money.

When you use the debit card, they give you a receipt that is almost incomprehensible, stating as it does what they are charging you and what surcharges they are adding, and what discount you are getting for using the debit card, but nowhere stating what is the basis for these charges/credits. And then you get a second receipt that tells you the balance on your debit card after all that has happened, but does not tell you what was on your debit card before all that happened. Which means you have to keep track of it yourself with the receipts from last time. Isn't electronic information supposed to make things easier?

It’s not that it’s incomprehensible, actually. It’s just that you are in a long line of cars just before this transaction takes place. Then you are expected to drive away immediately without even having a chance to look at the receipt. By the time you get that chance, you are sailing away, far away from the place where that financial transaction took place. Regularly, when I talk about this with people I know who use the ferry, the conversation slides around to the topic of whether the ferry corporation is actually cheating us in some way during this transaction. That is remarkable, I think. I don’t know any other institution which automatically is thought to be cheating its customers in ordinary transactions. At least I don’t think it of any other institution. The ferry corporation, doubtless, thinks all of this is a step toward efficiency, but what it is, is a giant step toward distrust, as well as obscurity, which is to say the opposite of transparency. Where we cannot see, we are likely to think something nefarious is going on.

So now we have a ferry corporation that doesn’t provide good service and that we feel is cheating us. How good is that for PR? Up here on the coast, there is a feeling that ferry service ought to be treated as part of the highway system. The logic is strongly with that position, as far as I am concerned, although I could doubtless be easily out-argued by those who say, ‘Well you chose to go there, you know.”

The idea that we should all bear the consequences of our decisions is an interesting part of public policy discussions nowadays. Sometimes, it seems appropriate to me, mostly not, and that is because we seldom make decisions whose consequences we can understand. People decided to move to the Sunshine Coast. Were they supposed to know that in the future there would be a large population growth and that the ferry corporation would make no effort to respond proportionately to that? Should those who moved to the exclave that is Point Roberts (I love that word, exclave) have realized that an attack on the World Trade Center or some comparable building would lead to a very difficult border? Seems hard to make that case.

Certainly I never thought about/anticipated either of those things, but with the great wisdom of hindsight, I could conclude that, when contemplating a move, beware of isolated locations. Best to stay in New Orleans, say, or even Los Angeles. Who could blame the residents of those places if, say, there was a hurricane or a major earthquake that changed everything?

Crossing Wide Waters

Last month, when some residents of Point Roberts offered some complaints about Whatcom County’s lack of generosity/financial fairness toward the Point—complaints published in the Bellingham Herald—the Bellingham readers of the Herald complained right back: ‘What did you think you were getting into when you moved to that beautiful but isolated place?’ The implication was that isolation explained everything lacking, and that beauty made up for everything lacking.

Today, I am in Roberts Creek, up on the Sunshine Coast, and the local paper is filled with complaints about ferry service, and the only way to get here is on the ferry because there is no continuous road up the West Coast of British Columbia. It would appear that the B.C. Ferry Corporation’s response to complaints about prices is pretty much, ‘What did you think you were getting into when you moved to that beautiful but isolated place?’

The ferry business is all about the price of oil nowadays and the Corporation wishes to increase the fares regularly on the basis of the rise in oil prices. Seems reasonable, but those in the beautiful but otherwise isolated place are of two minds, of course. Those who make the commute to Vancouver regularly pretty much did not have regular and multiple surcharges to the ferry fare (or unfare, as it appears) when they moved to this beautiful but isolated place. And many people who don’t make the commute regularly but depend upon tourists doing so are worried that the tourists won’t be willing to pay ever more to come to this beautiful but isolated place. What is to be done by a community when forces way beyond its control threaten its economic stability? Maybe it’s like the news of a bad diagnosis: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and, finally, acceptance? I’m not sure whether we’re at anger or depression, but we’ve gotten past denial, anyway.

I guess we will see in the next few years. Things will change because change is inevitable and although it is good for some people, it isn’t always good for everyone. Change has winners and losers. The Sunshine Coast has been rolling right along on a development boom for the past five years or so; housing prices have skyrocketed, development has boomed, traffic and commerce have both increased. All that was good for some people; but the ferry fare increases, not so good, perhaps for the same people and perhaps for different people. The increases in rental prices, not so good for the people who didn’t own property that appreciated dramatically. When we bought a house here 18 years ago, the highest rental price around (according to our real estate agent) was around $1,000 per month, but now, according to the local paper, it’s almost impossible to find anything for under $1200/month. People want to stay here, want to hold on to a life they had, but maybe they can’t do that anymore.

We have very probably crossed some wide waters in these past few years. And the fare has risen considerably, even in this isolated and beautiful place. It feels like a fortune from a Chinese fortune cookie: ‘A journey will offer benefits against you.’

Confusion Rains

Tsunami update: If there’s a tsunami, don’t go to Canada. Go to the Firehall where you can play bingo. Upon our return to Point Roberts this May Day, we find yet another tsunami evacuation route sign. Unlike all the others I tracked down, this one sends the frightened native uphill to the high ground, which isn’t all that high, but is at least higher than 60 feet. (Wikipedia says that Point Roberts’ altitude is 0 feet and Tswwassen’s is 134 feet, so the high ground in Point Roberts is probably around 120 feet, I’d guess.) None of the tsunami evacuation signs actually make clear where you are heading or how you would know whether you’ve gotten where you are supposed to be going, but that’s what this regular update is to do for you, i guess. Go to the firehall or to Drewhenge, or to the sheriff's station, or to my house: all on high ground.

Vancouver Island Update.
After the trip to Vancouver Island, I got to thinking about why Victoria is the capital of British Columbia instead of Vancouver. From this century, or even the last one, it doesn’t really make any sense. But it turns out that Victoria was the big time before Vancouver was, and that Vancouver Island was its own province for quite a spell. It was combined with British Columbia as a single province (1866), and 5 years later, Victoria was was made the capital of this new province.

Victoria was only 28 years old at that point, but it was Western Canada’s oldest city and its largest city. And, since boats were the mode of transport at that point, having the capital on an island made more sense, perhaps than having it somewhere else with a smaller population and even less history.

Nevertheless, it doesn’t make a lot of sense that you can’t get directly to Victoria, which houses the Parliament and the provincial Capitol building, from Vancouver. The only direct ferry to Victoria comes from Port Angeles, in Washington. Vancouver ferries will take you far north of Victoria (to Nanaimo) or 20 miles north of Victoria to Swartz Bay. Is this any way to run a province? It’s as if they put the capital of Washington in Olympia and then put the big airport in Seattle. Oh, wait; that’s just what they did do.

Strange Transit

Having to rely on ferry boats to get you the rest of the world as well as get you to the rest of the world is a very strange way to live. The Sunshine Coast is on the mainland of Canada, but there is no continuous road up the west coast, so you drive a ways, then take a ferry, drive a ways further, take another ferry, etc. But most of the ferries on the West Coast go to the Gulf Islands and Vancouver Island and, in the U.S., the San Juan Islands. One can imagine how they were settled originally when there were many people—the fishermen of the world--for whom boats were as ordinary as wheelbarrows. It’s not hard to see how they would have gone to the islands and stayed there because the fishing was good and the islands are beautiful and it wasn’t as if the places they came from had high levels of amenities: no city water, no sewers, no electricity, no phones, nothing more than they would find on a beautiful island.

But now, it seems stranger. Many of the small islands do not have good water sources or hospitals, e.g., and, although the ferries do bring an endless array of consumer goods, it is not quite like being in the city. So, when I yesterday made the 1 ¾ hours ferry trip to Vancouver Island on a Spirit Ferry (which holds 470 cars and over 2,000 passengers, and makes the trip every one or two hours, 11 times a day), I was surely thinking about what it was that compelled so many people (Vancouver Island has about ¾ million people, and B.C.’s capital city, Victoria, is located there) to move someplace that was so difficult to get to. Of course, many of the people are just vacationing or visiting there from Vancouver, but it is a lot of to-ing and fro-ing going on, a lot of money involved in running the ferries (which are not, of course, treated like roads that one drives freely on) and in using the ferries. It costs $56 each way for one person and a car to take the ferry from the mainland to Vancouver Island (Tsawwassen to Swartz Bay). The distance is only 27.6 miles. Imagine paying $56 every time you passed the 28 mile marker on a highway: I doubt if anyone would have ever been thinking that living in the suburbs was an interesting idea. Or going on a driving vacation was a viable plan.

Depending on a ferry to get you somewhere is a viable plan even now only if the ferry is available to take you. This week, when we came down from the Sunshine Coast, we arrived in time to catch the 10:20 ferry, but the 10:20 ferry could not get its electrical system to work properly, so there wasn’t a 10:20 ferry. The next ferry would have been the 12:20, but it’s the same ferry boat, so unless it got repaired, it wasn’t coming either. And there is no alternative. You just sit in the terminal lot, hoping that the repair will happen sooner rather than later, but you have no way of knowing what will happen. Imagine going out of your driveway of a morning not knowing for sure whether the highway will be open. Very strange.

In 1960, B.C. Ferries had only two boats; 48 years later, they have 38 vessels, with two more even bigger ones coming on line this year. Obviously they make it work, the government, the ferry corporation (which is kind of a private/public one), and the passengers, but relying on boats to get you where you need to go just seems strange to me. I don’t come from a fishing family, obviously.

We've Got Traffic!

Yesterday, we migrated northward on the regular schedule. We time these trips exquisitely so that there’s just enough time to do whatever Ed needs to do at Home Depot for the remodeling experience and then to get to the ferry landing about 10 minutes before the ferry departs. We have, of course, previously scheduled the trip on a day with relatively low ferry traffic and at a time when Vancouver street traffic is at a low-ish point. Except in the middle of the night, there is no real low point in Vancouver traffic because Vancouver long ago, based upon what was happening to Los Angeles, decided that keeping the traffic bad would limit the number of cars that people would try to bring into the city. This has not entirely worked except for the ‘keeping the traffic bad’ part.

Vancouver has expanded considerably in recent years as Canadians finally realized that greater Vancouver is the warmest part of their country. Though no Florida, B.C. generally and Vancouver particularly have attracted a massive migration from Canada’s more easterly provinces, especially as the Vancouver economy has exploded with its port/trade connections to Pacific Rim countries. From the west, which we also sometimes refer to as the Far East, large numbers of Hong Kong residents migrated here back when Hong Kong was turned over to China. With these population pressures, Vancouver real estate is now priced like Beverly Hills real estate. That means that people have been forced farther and farther outside Vancouver proper for affordable housing, and it has surely increased traffic formidably.

Even up here on the Sunshine Coast, we feel the impact of Vancouver expansion and traffic. When we first came here 16 years ago, you could arrive 8 minutes before any of the ferry departures any day, any time, at the terminal on either side and expect to drive right on board the Queen of Whatever you were getting that month. But now, no time in the summer and only Tuesday through Thursday in the winter (and not always then, depending upon regular holidays) can you count on not being told to wait two hours for the next ferry to come. Spring and fall, depending upon the weather, is iffy on Thursday and Monday, but Tuesday and Wednesday are okay. The weekends might be okay, depending upon the time and the direction you're heading: they’re coming here on Friday and Saturday, and leaving here Sunday and Monday, so you want to be going in the opposite direction.

But it’s not just people coming up to vacation or weekend. There were precious few people who commuted to Vancouver from the Sunshine Coast 16 years ago. Now, there’s an amazing crowd for that trip every morning and they are coming back every evening, all week long. Mostly, they don’t take cars (which would involve about $50-$60 per round trip). But all these people who are going to work in Vancouver are people for whom it was cheaper and less time-consuming to live here and take a 45-minute ferry ride plus another 45-minute bus or van ride from West Vancouver to downtown than to drive from up the Fraser Valley and pay a bundle to park in Vancouver. Something about that city planning really didn’t work.

The car-discouraging part of the city planning also meant that the City Parents refused to allow any freeways through the city. So all traffic is routed through city streets. There is a kind of beltway (but it’s only partial) that we take to the ferry, thus circumventing much of the street traffic but that works only if you don’t need to go into the city at all and are willing to drive, as the crow flies, a considerably longer distance.

So, Vancouver city planning has resulted in impossible street traffic and impossibly high housing costs for Vancouver. And for those of us just north, it has resulted in jammed ferry terminals, too-rapid expansion in population, and too-quickly-rising property costs. In addition, we get a different kind of traffic problem. The Sunshine Coast has, as its main and only thoroughfare, a 40+mile two-lane highway with (currently) a total of about six traffic lights along its length. You want to make sure that you don’t plan to make a left turn onto that highway when the several-hundred car ferry traffic is making its progression up to the next ferry terminal. So whether you are planning to take the ferry or not, you are always best to be thinking about what the ferry is doing.

Yesterday’s drive? Because of careful planning and no unforseen events, an excellent trip.