May the 4th be with you – how we celebrate Star Wars

May 4, 2021
|In What's News
|By Zach Kiedaisch

May the 4th be with you – how we celebrate Star Wars

May 4, 2021
|In What’s News
|By Zach Kiedaisch

TransLink's "May the Fourth Be With You" banner

Happy Star Wars Day! It’s an awesome time to be a Star Wars fan with all new TV series like The Bad Batch, The Mandalorian for us to watch with new shows Ahsoka and Obi-Wan Kenobi on the way. Here at TransLink, we’re known to celebrate our fandom just about as hard as anybody through costumes and fun bits of social media content. Let’s dig into some of the best Star Wars content we’ve made over the last few years and show off what we have in store for today.

Our Greatest Hits

The SkyTrain network map with places in the Star Wars universe replacing station names.

Our crowning achievement as Star Wars fans, the Inter-Galactic SkyTrain map. This project was in the works for over a year, having been originally planned for 2018 and released in 2019 for May the Fourth. From the shores of Kashyyyk where we were worried about the droid attack on the Wookies to the deep underground levels of Coruscant where we have to worry about Bounty Hunters galore, we had a ton of fun making this piece. It was well received too, the official Star Wars twitter account retweeted it and it was picked up by a bunch of local news outlets.

That’s one dapper Stormtrooper. Last year we had to adapt everything about our business and being able to make light of the situation through some work-from-home attire certainly made the situation a little more fun. Stormtroopers may not be able to hit their targets with their blasters, but they nailed TransLink operations. Hats off to CMBC’s Customer Information team who look after @TransLink on Twitter and more, who created this and a lot of the May the Fourth content you see here!

Question: How do you keep customers happy when they’re calling into customer service? Always answer the phones with a Wookie battle cry so customers know their complaints will be taken seriously. In all seriousness, any excuse to dress up as a Wookie and hang out at the TransLink head office is reason enough for us. Going around the office and goofing around, imagining life with an office Wookie was a ton of fun, just make sure you let them win in Holochess.

Finally, we enlisted the power of cartoon Darth Vader to help spread awareness on the dangers of tapping your entire wallet instead of your compass card. Not even the Sith want to see their customers get double charged for transit.

This Year’s Festivities

We made sure to get the day started off on the right foot by welcoming travelers to our new Inter-Galactic RapidBus class transport vessels and ensuring they know we’ll be communicating throughout the day.

Then we had to make sure we took the full power of the TransLink Rebel Alliance to zap the dreaded planet COVID-19. Our special operatives C3Po and R2D2 stole the plans for the Death Star and due to the power of the evil planet, we repurposed the weapon to fight for good!

Of course our friends and colleagues with the Metro Vancouver Transit Police had to get in on the fun too! It’s pretty rare to see the Evil Galactic Empire and their Stormtroopers team up with the TransLink Rebel Alliance so the fight must be super important.

Bus SkyTrain