The 99 B-Line began service 23 years ago, on September 3, 1996. It was Vancouver's first "express"…read morebus, meaning that it stops at only select stops, so in theory it's "much faster" than a regular bus (in reality, it's only a little bit faster, depending on traffic, and in the evening, it's better to just catch the #9 if it's going to be a ten minute wait for the 99).
The B-Line runs along Broadway between Commercial-Broadway Station and UBC, stopping at Clark, Fraser, Main, Cambie (where you can transfer to the Canada Line), Heather (the stop for the hospital), Granville, Arbutus, Macdonald, Alma, Sasamat, and Allison Road, although the Fraser and Arbutus stops weren't added until December 2009, despite those streets being major connections to busy bus routes. (And before the Millennium Line branch of the skytrain was built in 2002, the B-Line went past Broadway Station, as it was then called, stopping at Boundary Road and various stops in Burnaby.)
Compared to the other bus routes in Vancouver, the B-Line is great; it runs on weekends and evenings, and the service is now fairly frequent, although in spring 2011, they didn't have early morning service going to UBC on weekends -- I know this because I had my microbiology final exam at 8am on a Saturday morning (a double "fuck you" from the school), and there were NO bus routes, the B-Line included, that could get me to school more than 10 mins before my exam -- if it wasn't late -- which is not enough time to run from the bus loop to the exam, let alone take a much needed piss after a long bus ride.
However, because the Broadway corridor is such a busy route, and the B-Line connects with the skytrain, the crowding on the bus is horrible. Back in the mid-2000s, I had to take the B-Line to work, and I regularly had to wait over half an hour and five buses just to be able to get on a bus at Commercial-Broadway Station, because there were so many people waiting to get on.
I fortunately no longer take the B-Line on a regular basis, and I never have to take it during the morning rush hour. But on the occasions I do take it, it's still quite crowded most of the time (like today when I was going to class), and people are often rude assholes. It's still an unpleasant bus to take because of the crowding, but due to a lack of other alternatives (such as an express bus running on weekends down 41st Avenue, another extremely congested traffic corridor), it's a necessary evil.
I can't wait until the new skytrain line is built along Broadway, even if it only runs to Arbutus and not all the way to UBC (something that should have been done 15 years ago). The 99 B-Line is a great concept, but it doesn't work well because of the high volume of users and the traffic congestion along Broadway. But it's better than the #25!
[Yelp collections: Planes, Trains, and Automobiles]
