Poetry in motion: TransLink ending popular Poetry in Transit program in 2027

TransLink is pulling poetry off of its buses. Vancouver’s popular Poetry in Transit program has been cancelled.

TransLink told Postmedia News that “significant financial pressures” were behind the measure, despite the program being entirely managed and funded by Books B.C., formerly known as the Association of Book Publishers of B.C.

Asna Shaikh, Books B.C.’s program manager, said they received notice from TransLink in February that the program, which runs from September to September each year, would end in 2027.

“It caught us by surprise,” said Shaikh.

Although they hope the program can be saved, Shaikh said they haven’t been able to get any information from TransLink about whether there is a chance to save it.

Since 1996, TransLink has provided interior ad space on buses to 10 poets annually. Their work is printed on a card that goes in what would normally be an ad space. They also provided space in 10 bus shelters for posters of poetry. After their year on TransLink, the poems move to other transit in B.C., with a total of about 500 circulating throughout the province annually.

“We have had a difficult time trying to have a conversation with them about this, but the message from them is that they will be unable to provide us with the advertising space after 2027,” said Shaikh.

Books B.C. ran the annual poem selection process and paid for and printed the poem cards. TransLink provided $265,000 in “in-kind” support by donating the space in buses and 10 shelter spaces for posters, but didn’t give any money to their organization or the poets, said Shaikh.

What is being lost? Moments of curiosity, surprise and invitation like those in Heidi Greco’s poem Promises, Promises: “I will ride my red motorcycle into your heart/crash land my feelings all over your doorstep/fling scented pink petals across your front lawn/kiss you like pancakes for breakfast.”

Goodbye to all that.

Greco, whose work has twice been featured on Metro Vancouver buses, said a couple who saw the poem on a Vancouver bus contacted her to say they used it for their wedding vows.

News that the program was being killed by TransLink came shortly after Poetry in Transit’s founder, Sandy Shreve, died in February. The timing made the cancellation even more gutting for B.C. poets.

“Shutting it down now feels like a spiritual slap in the face,” said Greco.

Shreve, a well-known poet, brought the idea to then-B.C. Transit CEO Mike O’Conner in the 1980s. Both were inspired by poetry in New York’s subways, and London’s Poems in the English city’s Underground program. O’Conner embraced the idea and in 1996 Vancouver became the first Canadian city to feature poems on public transit.

Greco is among a group of poets rallying now to have the program reinstated, asking anyone who has enjoyed the program to sign their petition on change.org.

Organizers point out that while TransLink and B.C. Transit are citing “budgetary constraints,” ad card spaces on buses are often unsold, so any increase in revenue would be strictly theoretical. In 2025, Pattison Outdoor Advertising announced it had won the contract to handle ad rights for TransLink, but TransLink told Postmedia the decision to cut the program was its own.

“Nobody doesn’t like this program,” said Elee Kraljii Gardiner, Vancouver’s poet laureate. “Even people who don’t like poetry, liked it. Looking at a poem is like looking at a puppy, you can’t hate it. It’s not doing anything wrong.”

Kraljii Gardiner, who had a poem printed on a bus in 2016, said the program did many special things, from engaging with a poem’s “proposition, its language, its strangeness, its beauty,” to providing “benchmark moments” for B.C. poets.

When her poem appeared, she got messages from her kids’ friends, who snapped selfies next to her poem, and from community members she had met in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside when she ran a Thursday writing collective at the Carnegie Centre.

“The poem was reaching people who might not normally be poetry readers,” said Kraljii Gardiner. “Vancouver is notoriously a beautiful city. Vancouver is also a cruel city in its inequity. Very few places allow us to experience art without payment or art without constraint. Poetry in transit allows both the inconsequential and studied engagement with poetry, when one is least expecting it.”

In Work of Rain, the poem she had on the buses, she wrote: “To survive here/is to navigate a water-pruned cartography/We arrive at destinations flattened by run-off, tell ourselves, it’s not so bad.”