Editor:
Re: Optics for lifetime pass ‘terrible’ for TransLink, July 25.
So, I’m asked to pay $170/month for a three-zone transit pass ($2,040/year), or about 10 per cent of my humble income.
After recently getting laid off from full-time and moved to on-call at work, I figured day passes would be more cost effective: I got a fine which would’ve gone up to 45 per cent of my monthly income at my worst month if I didn’t pay within 30 days for forgetting to punch a pass one rushed morning.
Last summer, I worked a full-time labouring job and ended my work week by working two consecutive 14- to 18-hour shifts at two other jobs, with often only a three-hour “sleep” in-between and lunches at the bus stop.
Just call me a University of B.C. graduate with some youthful energy trying to get ahead in this society. My tasks included cleaning up vomit at 3 a.m., but it was no less pleasant than the jobs of many fellow British Columbians living paycheque-to-paycheque.
Those who actually work outside in the middle of the night in the mud and rain building our transportation infrastructure are not financially thanked. But they, and all us other apparent lowly people, are asked to ever-increasingly give more and more and to subsidize those who already “got.”
Now I have to read about some TransLink “board members” who are being “thanked” for their “major contribution” by doing their already adequately compensated job in which they get to wear nice shirts to work and not lift more than five pounds should they break a nail.
D. MacMillan, Surrey