Stewart, I had the same experience. The 8 Fraser is the most unreliable bus you can ever find. And you won’t believe what a Translink representative told me over the phone…” sir, you have to understand, there are not two but three games downtown, so the traffic is horrible…” I am like … What????? You have *got* to be kidding me.

What I wanted to do though was program my cellphone so that with one press it would send the text – like I can press 1 and hold it and get to my voicemail. I haven’t solved that challenge yet, but settled for making it as easy as I could.

The problem I’ve found with both services though is that they only tell you when the bus is supposed to turn up according to the timetable, not when it will. The 25 I catch a lot seems to always be missing buses. The C23 on the other hand is less of a problem. They are frequent enough, or at least if there isn’t one when I need it I just walk.

Generally speaking I wish the debate about buses would move away from introducing new routes etc and more to actually making the routes that already exist, work properly. I.e. having enough buses to fit the demand and actually running the buses that are listed on the timetable!

However, we have it good in this city in some ways. Here, people do genuinely use the transit system, therefore we have earnt the right to moan. In many cities the whingers are normally people who barely recognise what a bus looks like, let alone use one!