Marine Drive Skytrain Station Bus Terminal
Observing is an essential tool for evaluating a social phenomenon. By observing a bus terminal, passengers can provide an observer with practical information to understand the characteristics of the environment. In this case, the observer will rely on smell and hearing to analyze, express, and define those stimuli in words from the perspective of urban geography students. The connection to nature and the busy life of people will also be analyzed.
The SkyTrain system is relatively the best utility to maneuver around Vancouver. It runs on clean energy sourced from the hydroelectric dams in British Columbia, Canada. The system is albeit a source of noise pollution for those people living near one of the high ground lines. However, they are not as loud as the older railway systems in major cities in North America, such as New York and Chicago (Lupick, 2018). Nonetheless, the noise is irritating to some residents near the SkyTrain lines, which has prompted Translink, the owner, to take the necessary measures.
The smell in the SkyTrain is mainly due to the odor of the passengers. Notably, the smell is overpowering, especially during the hot, rainy weather. The smell is similar to that of wet dog on the rainy winter days. It is caused by the mixing of people’s clothes with the heaters in the station that generate a pungent smell (Wonko, 2018). In particular, passengers sweat when walking to the station to board the train. Then their sweat mixes with that of other passengers to make a concoction of body odor. During summer, the smell is particularly strong.
The SkyTrain stations initially did not have tactile for blind passengers at is various stations. Nevertheless, Translink recently announced its plan to install tactile walking surface indicators (TWSI) as well as signage and braille for bust stops throughout its network. TWSI exists on the edges of the station’s platforms. Also, tactile pavers have been installed at every bus loading and stopping stations, and bus bays. The TWSI pavers are textured and, therefore, detectable underfoot by people with visual impairment. Thus, they serve to alert blind passengers of roadway hazards and indicate the areas where the door of the bus will open.
Supplemental tactile signage and braille have been installed onto all bus stop posts in Metro Vancouver. These signs will incorporate identifiers of signals, such as “BAY” or “STOP,” stop ID number, customer service number, and bus route number. This utility will provide relief to passengers with visual impairment of the challenges of clarifying they are at the Skytrain station and finding the correct stop (Chan, 2019). Mainly, this will eliminate the current trend where most blind passengers ask the bus driver or other passengers to find their way through the station.
The spatiality of SkyTrain includes the proximity of neighborhoods to the individual station types. Notably, 86% of single-family property listings are closest to elevated SkyTrain stations than underground stations, high but covered stations, street-level, and underground partially elevated stations.
SkyTrain uses a moving-block automatic train control system that facilitates short headways and fast-changing capacity relative to demand. An alarm system fitted throughout the entire network detects intrusion onto the tracks. The peak frequency is every 2 minutes over the segments in two ways. The single line least rate is every 8 minutes. Zone-based single tickets facilitate up to an hour and a half travel time by any combination modes in conjunction with other ticketing modes. Zone-based single tickets are an integral part of the public transport operations.