The community of commuters

There’s a planet, I don’t know which one, set just below and to the left of the moon in the brightening sky, and the No. 11 buses are storming the bus lane in 10 minute intervals to downtown in cold December. Waiting to cross Portage in the chill, you feel the ground shudder under your feet as the heavy buses pass.

Somewhere nearby, foundations are no doubt slowly shifting. Read this article for free: Already have an account? To continue reading, please subscribe: * Opinion There’s a planet, I don’t know which one, set just below and to the left of the moon in the brightening sky, and the No. 11 buses are storming the bus lane in 10 minute intervals to downtown in cold December.

Waiting to cross Portage in the chill, you feel the ground shudder under your feet as the heavy buses pass. Somewhere nearby, foundations are no doubt slowly shifting. You wait, keeping your feet moving; the crosswalk button is merely a suggestion that the traffic lights will get around to considering, eventually.

Morning is breaking over the roof of the Portage Foodfare. A special series examining the state of Winnipeg’s public transportation system Read the full series . It’s cold and dark, and the bus route that runs most frequently is coursing by. If you’re a bus rider, you know the one: it’s the “SORRY — NOT IN SERVICE.” It’s the route that exists to break your heart on the darkest of mornings and the coldest of evenings, in the pounding rain and cold wind.

You see the shape of a bus in the distance, heading towards you, and you can’t make out the number to see if it’s yours. It passes. It isn’t yours. The only thing worse is watching the lights of your bus pull away from the curb before you can get to it. In the early morning pedestrian wasteland, I often think I should carry a pack of cigarettes, just to have them at hand.

I don’t smoke. But it’s the No. 1 question you’re asked at 6:32 a.m. when someone stops you as you’re rushing to catch the 6:37. I wish I could say, “Hey, take a couple.” Instead, I always pat my pockets as if I mislaid an imaginary pack somewhere, shrug sadly and head for the bus stop. I love the bus.

I hate the bus. The bus has 10,000 stories, both inside and out, and a front row seat to every one of them. I wonder if it was always that way, if lives and loves and fears played out on the Winnipeg Street Railway Company’s very first 1882 horse drawn trolley, or if the regulars on Streetcar 596 fled, clutching their brown bag ham sandwich lunches, when the car was set alight during the 1919 General Strike.

Were bus passengers on their way to meet lovers or to flirt with the female streetcar crews that took over when men left to fight in the Second World War? Were there nervous bus seat minutes travelling to visit relatives in hospitals? I wonder whether passengers have leaned against every single window on every single bus, streetcar and trolley that ever ran in Winnipeg, trying to grab their last few minutes of sleep.

I imagine all that happened in the past, and far more salacious things, too. We tend to studiously launder our thoughts about people in the past, believing ourselves the daring modern ones. Back to the bus, and the things that happen on it now. Transit is a movie. Transit is a modern version of a newsreel, everyday life unfolding in conventional, awkward, even confusing ways.

Here’s one particular trip first, to test the limits of the absurd. Cruising down Main on a crowded summertime No. 15, I was standing near the front in the sleepy heat when a woman — wearing a giant cross and with sparkle eyeshadow painted in deep half circles under her eyes — got on the bus and slumped into the first seat.

She had a life raft of reusable shopping bags with her. She fell asleep almost instantly, and one after another, the bags toppled over with the stop and go of the bus. Everyone was blossoming sweat in the heat, shining on foreheads and darkening shirts, all of us welcoming the warm breaths of air from the open top windows.

In the woman’s bags, I could see the ranks of empty two litre pop bottles. Then I saw the wasps. Plenty of wasps. Some stagger crawling, some flying in that sugar drunk full on stupid way that means they are just itching to sting someone. Anyone. No offence required. Luckily, I was off that bus two stops later, and then onto a crowded bus across the Louise Bridge — probably the next bridge to follow the Arlington Bridge into the shut down ranks of Winnipeg Monuments to Indecision.

The bus was so packed that, any time a passenger wanted to get off, six other passengers had to get off first to make way and then get back on again. There, I had a front row seat to the oddest of disputes: one woman insisting she knew that a passenger only inches away was a city hall staffer who hadn’t helped with a complaint, while the accused steadfastly maintained that she didn’t work at city hall and her interrogator was wrong.

The bus was overheated, the one sided discussion was overheated, and when you’re sitting in those front three seats with your back against the side of the bus, as the accused was, there is no escape from being berated by someone only inches from your face. The only option is to get six other riders to make way and leave the bus three stops early.

I did, thinking the screenplay for Wasps on the Bus would intrigue Alfred Hitchcock, while Franz Kafka would have enjoyed the premise of a misidentified bureaucrat trapped like a pinned butterfly and surrounded in the “autobus proletariat.” Most of the time, though, the Winnipeg experience is like public transit everywhere — except here, almost universally not quite what it could be.

If it had a physical state, it would be “tired.” The same female robot voice has the same trouble with “Maude” and “Boyd” every day, and every day, it’s the bus lottery: a nearly new vehicle this time, or a back rattling, squealing, shock absorber less collection of parts that are barely attached? In some ways, the transit service seems like a metaphor for Winnipeg as a whole – things get done, but to a C+ level, with no improvement immediately expected or even imagined to be possible.

Peggo Transit payment cards take 15 times longer to download a new payment than your average seal takes to eat, digest and excrete a fish dinner. (OK, it’s usually 48 hours to process a payment. Seals have quick digestive systems.) Navigo, the Transit trip planning system, will bravely keep you standing in the rain with a promise of a bus that’s arriving in seven minutes, six minutes … then 38 minutes, as your expected Transit chariot has somehow been plucked off the route and diverted into the heavens.

Truth is, the “go” at the end of each of those services is a misnomer, an aspirational promise oft unfulfilled. Transit could be safer, cleaner, more on time, more up to date. It could learn from the best practices of other transit systems — plan for light rail, be more efficient, accept more modern methods of payment.

Maybe I’ve been here too long already, soaking up the Winnipeg vibe that, municipally, we’re not allowed to have nice things. Punching the numbers from my water meter into the phone because the city can’t afford new, remote read meters. Watching independently scheduled road projects gridlock whole parts of the city because of a lack of cohesive construction co ordination.

Seeing the still standing wreckage of burnt out buildings six months after fires occur. Watching a sidewalk plow trundle down the street a full week after a few centimetres of snow has fallen, grunting and pushing up a thin wake of torn sod. Getting used to short term patches, instead of long term fixes.

But still, we ride. There are regulars, semi regulars and occasional users in the ridership community. Roughly 157,900 people got on Winnipeg buses on June 18, 2023, around the time I started taking the bus to work. (That number is a curious one: it’s extrapolated from the 20 per cent of buses that have sensors to count individuals getting on board, but that’s just boarders — including passengers who might transfer one or more times — being counted each time they climb the step on a sensored bus.

And the numbers always end in a decimal — 157,918.7 people boarded the buses on June 18, 2023, and 166,975.2 on April 16, 2023. I’m not even sure how that’s possible.) My personal Transit numbers are far lower: 15 to 20 people on the bus on the earliest trip. The lady with nine different coats gets on at the same stop most mornings.

If her matching hat has a pompom, a pompom of the same colour is attached to the zipper of her purse. I admire her consistency and her fashion sense. And I admire the way she leaps up, folding up the front seats, as woman with sleeping baby gets on the bus at McPhillips. The 20 something plasterer, white smears on his steel toed boots and Carhart overalls, always sits in the row directly in front of the back door — and always falls asleep.

That’s the same plasterer who woke up loudly singing along to his headphones one morning, startling himself more than anyone else. We all did our commuter best, the rest of us, studiously examining the pressed metal backs of the seat in front of us as if nothing had happened. The three huge Eastern European workmen, almost certainly a father and two sons, each with a neck more muscular than my thigh.

The younger two sit together, the father on the other side of the aisle, talking in tones that make you think they’re discussing other passengers. They got on the bus every afternoon for four weeks; then that job must have ended and their new work took them elsewhere. Transit could be safer, cleaner, more on time, more up to date.

It could learn from the best practices of other transit systems: plan for light rail, be more efficient, accept more modern methods of payment. The man in the orange stocking cap. The skateboarder who always stands outside and finishes his smoke before getting on the bus, the bus waiting at the beginning of the route for its official start time.

The back row sleeper who once even brought her own pillow. The most seasoned of commuters manage to awaken exactly at their stop, as though some small part of their brain, a tiny cortex conductor, stayed awake while they slept, attuned to the sequence of upcoming stops. My bus is a small village, even if the height of our communication is a nod of acknowledgement now and then.

We’re not alone. The transit community has been subtly recognized that way in other places. In two letters to the editor on a single day in late November, different authors confirmed their authenticity with the words “As a Transit rider myself…” and, “As a car owner who bused to work for most of my career…” You need established bona fides to talk the transit talk.

Every now and then I drive to work, maybe once a month, and I realize I’m more alert about the world on the bus than when I’m driving. You don’t have to watch the road, you get to watch the people, inside and outside your oversized conveyance. Riding the bus in the dark, small tableaux unfold and then disappear.

A police officer taking something out of the trunk of his cruiser while another man sits on the frozen ground, his back against the rear wheel of a van. A speck of colour in that snapshot from the brightly lit combined LottoMax and 6/49 sign, promising incredible jackpots. The bus shelter billboard sign above Sargent Avenue that has questions about “YOUR PEE,” which is lit by headlights and then gone before I can figure out what urinary answers I’m supposed to be supplying.

The huge pyramid of crushed appliances at Logan Iron and Metal, clawed heavy equipment reaching in from above. There are short films as well as snapshots, moving and unexpected windows into strangers’ lives. One morning, a woman, tall and large in nature and voice, came into the bus and took up all the oxygen immediately, the regulars shifting sideways in their seats, pressing against the side of the bus under the windows as if trying to sink into the metal.

Anything to be less obvious. She was talking loudly into her cellphone, asking a nurse about her husband: “He came in last night by ambulance. With an overdose. Just want to know what his condition is now.” Everyone else only able to hear her side of the conversation, studiously feigning indifference.

“WHAT? NO. NO. NO. STOP THE BUS. LET ME OFF THIS BUS.” She was at the back door, pounding it with her free hand. We hadn’t even driven the span of two stops yet. Everyone on my side of the bus watching as she crossed in front and angled through the intersection, wandering into William Avenue as cars skidded to a stop to keep from hitting her, cellphone still pressed to her ear.

Me, feeling small, wondering if people were really told over the phone about their partner’s death. Once, at the very back of the No. 71 at Aberdeen, a young couple became amorously entwined in ways truly gymnastic. All summer long, we passed the homeless man sleeping in the doorway of the closed and up for sale Thistle Curling Club.

He’s tall enough to always be bent at the knees and tenting his blanket to fit in the tight sheltered entryway, lying there in the low light of morning every single day until he vanished and was never there again. The Thistle’s still there, still for sale. I still look for the sleeper. Every day.

Sometimes you’ll board an empty bus that smells like it’s coming off a five day bender, courtesy of an already offboarded passenger, and stale cigarette smoke, old smoke, emerges from the weft and weave of other passengers’ clothing. Spilled coffee, spreading across the floor forward and back by the motion of the bus, draws Rorschach inkblots for you to interpret.

You just shrug your shoulders and accept the old adage “this too shall pass.” One of the things people who don’t use transit raise most often with me is danger on the bus. There are incidents — more on some routes than on others — and I’ve certainly been afraid, not because of a definite threat, but because of the unpredictability of people generally, with mental health issues and substance abuse clearly playing a role.

But it’s more violence around me than directed at me. In summer, I was accosted at my stop by a young man who was looking for a light for an already lit cigarette. He was frenzied and jumpy, my antennae aligned to sense threats. His friend was a bigger guy, one hand holding a hardhat with his gloves tucked into it.

Concrete streaks on the hat and on his jacket. He was quieter. He watched his friend, who was walking in jerks and staggers, muttering incomplete sentences, his waving lit cigarette providing punctuation. The big guy, apologetic. “He doesn’t do this often. His girlfriend broke up with him, and he’s (messed) up, so I’m making sure he’s OK,” the concrete worker says.

Then, quieter, “I’m supposed to be at work now. I’m going to lose my job.” Another morning, deep in the downtown, there’s yelling outside the bus. Yelling has a way of sharpening the senses, making you focus. One lone man, railing at the brightening sky, arms akimbo, hands raised high in fists, shouting words that make no sense.

Our regular bus driver is taciturn, a big square man who rarely speaks. He simply closed the door, preparing to pull away from the curb. The angry man started punching the side of our bus, right in front of the back door. It wasn’t until I got off at Mountain Avenue that I realized the side of the bus has an advertisement with two goofily grinning morning radio hosts, and that they were apparently and inexplicably the target of the mystery man’s rage.

The one time there was trouble on the bus, it was a drunk man who got on the wrong route insisting that the driver take him to Broadway. The man started pulling the cord to make the bus stop at every stop, the easiest way to rage against the machine. (Bus drivers must hate the bell, must hear it in their sleep.) Transit police were waiting three stops later.

Two officers got on, huge in their neon green reflective jackets. It took time, and connections were surely missed, but the officers calmly talked him down. You could feel the relief as the doors closed behind him. I looked over my shoulder — breaking the universal unwritten transit law — and made direct eye contact with a passenger on the other side of the bus who had been closer to the troublesome traveller.

“I was afraid,” she said quietly, three of few words ever spoken to me by another passenger. And so was I — but only for a brief period out of months of transit travel. Examples of everyday common courtesy far outweigh the scenes that shake my nerves. The risks get smaller as more people pay more to use transit and the system improves to meet the needs of a growing customer base.

At least, that’s the way it works in theory. Maybe that theory is a pipe dream. Caught in the now, I revel in small victories. I’m happy enough just to see the orange numbers on the front of my bus as it slows to a stop, knowing I’ll probably get to work on time today. Granted, I have to remember to refill my Peggo card today so that the money will be there next week when I need it.

It’s an imperfect almost functional transit system in an imperfect almost functional city. I wonder if it will always be that way. It’s time to board. My little community awaits. Russell Wangersky is the Comment Editor at the Free Press. He can be reached at Russell Wangersky is an editor, columnist and author who has worked at newspapers in Newfoundland and Labrador, Ontario and Saskatchewan before settling in the geographic middle of the country..