Banff Bus Run-around
Banff is about 4 km²in size, with one main road running through it; linking up with a line of smaller roads and thus forming a rough oval through the town. It should be straightforward to cover this territory with a simple bus service.
The local council is proud of Banff’s ‘small town charm’ and proclaims in its advertisements that everything is just a ten minute walk away ‘at most’. It takes longer, actually, when you have blistered feet.
The conference hotel—out of town—is about a forty minute hike from our accommodation. However, it’s just along the main road, which swings to the left after the bridge, turning into a wide arc towards the Fairmont Banff Springs Hotel, where it ends in a roundabout right in front of the convention centre.
This morning, I took a look at the map. There is a bus stop right in front of our hotel. We could just jump on board and…
Wrong route.
If you give a chimp a crayon and let it draw random lines on a map of Banff, it could do no worse a job than the town planners have done.
It has got to be on purpose.
Instead of following the main road around, the bus from that particular stop turns right opposite the youth hostel next to the bridge and goes up Sulphur Mountain Road to the gondola and hot springs.
Actually, that route suited me today. While I hobbled into town for a sumptuous breakfast of blueberry pancakes with maple syrup, I decided that I would do the gondola. The sun was shining, it was our last full day and I had missed out on the gondola ride when I ran out of money at the hot springs.
So I hobbled onwards, to the Youth Hostel, and looked for the bus stop there.
Wrong route.
WTF?
I consulted the map. It transpired that there is no stop on the road opposite the hostel. The bus just zooms right past the entrance and onwards to the convention centre.
The receptionist advised me to go further along the main road, take the number 4 bus back into town (a half hour wait) and then transfer to number 3 (presumably after another wait) to come back up the same way but turning into Sulphur Mountain Road this time.
Wouldn’t it be quicker just to walk?
It would be, if the gondola base wasn’t half-way up the mountain. And if I didn’t have blisters.
I dragged my bleeding feet back into town, cussing at a driver who waited for me to cross a junction—as they all do—but then decided to accelerate after all.
(I always try to wave the drivers on, but none of them ever get the message. A car will approach in slow motion and, when the driver spots you by the roadside, slow down even further. It takes longer to cross the bloody roads here than it takes for the rest of the walk. It would be best just to walk out without looking at the traffic, like the locals do. But I read in the paper that somebody was hit by a vehicle the other week. Incredibly, being over-cautious can lead to accidents.)
Anyway, I was in no mood for games this morning. I told the bloke to “fuck off“, and bugger me if he didn’t slow down for a moment before driving on. I thought he’d get out of his 4×4, crowbar in hand, but road rage seems to be an alien concept here.
Still, I could feel his gaze on my neck. When he turned around further up the road, I quickly dove into a shopping mall.
He could still get me. Banff is a small town: everybody knows everybody else. They may come for me later.
I eventually found the temporary bus stop (construction work has closed a number of stops on the main avenue, making the situation even more complicated than it already is). This stop was the famous route ‘Transit Zone’. It turns out that the time tables are designed to allow for quick transfer between the two buses, if you can reach the other stop half-way up the road on the opposite side in about 1 minute.
At least, that was the theory. In practice, the number 3 turned out to be late.
It was due forty minutes after the one that had passed me as I was standing on the corner of Sulphur Mountain Road, looking for the non-existent bus sign.
It was twenty minutes late. By the time it finally pulled up, half the day had passed.
I should have taken a cab. But then, I’m spending all my spare cash on tips.
More about that another time (perhaps).
Tags: Banff, Buses, Canada, Public Transport, Travel, Tag Index
Denni
April 4th, 2008 at 02:04
We always had good luck hitching rides in banff as well.
Not sure I’d feel safe hitchhiking in many places, but for some reason in banff all the locals were laid back enough it worked out well.