An employee at Burnaby Transit Centre found a bus token among his father’s memories of his time as a driver at Oakridge Transit Centre in the mid-1960’s. He knew that Jack McKenna has an association with us, so he asked if Jack could find out about the token. Jack sent me the accompanying photo. I had seen one before but had no idea about the history.
Whenever I get a request to delve into transit history in Vancouver, I immediately turn to Michael Taylor Noonan, Rob Chew and Angus McIntyre who are all interested and involved in the collection of archives that we have at the museum. Angus drew Dale Laird into the conversation, and we ended up with an interesting tidbit about the bus tokens that circulated at that time.
There will probably be a newsletter article in the near future as quite a bit of history was discussed. I’m only giving you the “tip of the iceberg” here. Some of my information in this blog is from the discussions that followed and I may not have all the dates correct.
In 1959, BC Electric, which operated the transit system, decided to modernize by installing Grant Fareboxes (aka Grant Money Meters) in the buses. These new fareboxes could count the coins as they were deposited by assigning a different sound for each coin denomination. Along with this innovation BC Electric introduced bus tokens that could be purchased at a discount. There were only two types of tokens: one for regular adult fare and one for students that could only be used during school hours.
In 1965, BC Hydro became the operator of the bus system and they wanted to review the idea of fare zones and concession fares. At that time these blue plastic tokens were introduced. You can see a very small letter “C” on the token and those tokens became the first concession fare for children. More about the age restrictions and the cost of the tokens in a later TMS Transfer Newsletter article.
My question was “why plastic?”. They were a bit like poker chips and made no sound when they were deposited in the Grant Fareboxes. They also didn’t fit in the driver changers. They were sold in a small paper bag with four tokens. Was it because the fareboxes couldn’t be programmed with a special sound for a 3rd bus token?
I was able to report back to Jack McKenna that the plastic blue token was from 1965 and that it was for a child fare. It was very interesting to see the email discussion among our four historians. They uncovered a lot of memories of what it was like as a driver handling money while BC Hydro experimented with fare zones and concession fares over the next decade into the 1970’s.
