The Bus Sucks
I don’t know how long we waited on Market before we finally caught a 71 headed south - 30 minutes? [We were supposed to be waiting on a 6.] It was odd. There were buses headed north, toward the Ferry Building, but nothing southbound. And the F was a bus. There were lots of cabs. I was seriously cooking up some conspiracy theories in my head.
Fortunately, all Muni was free last night. This coincides nicely with my belief that all city bus rides should be free all the time. I’m not necessarily an advocate of free public transit, though I could be convinced — I just know that bus rides are beneath human dignity, so forcing people to pay for a bus ride seems a bit absurd, or disgusting, to me.
My ride last night might have been the first time where I consciously thought about how awful the bus experience is/was, while I was riding the bus. Before this blog, it’s not like I ever thought about the bus, or talked about riding the bus - the indignity of it and all the rest. But last night was different. It was a little bit odd having a stranger thrown in between my legs (I was sitting), but I didn’t mind — I was already half in the bag, I’m pretty chill, etc. That said, if I was sober and it was not a holiday, etc., it might have been a different story. And it wasn’t my own experience, per se, that made me think of ‘the ride experience’ of the bus — it was the girl thrown between my legs. That is, at that moment, I thought, “I wonder what she thinks of the bus experience?” — generally speaking, of course — because not everyone gets to fall into the lap of the Adonis writing this blog post.
The bus would come to these sudden halts, and then it would jerk over to the right, and stop, and start, and go diagonal, and slow down, and jerk back to the left, or forward, or diagonally left and forward, and everyone would slam into each other, and everyone’s guts would be rearraged — it was pretty much exactly how I remembered it — it was pretty much like every other city bus ride I’ve ever been on. Riding the bus in the city is just an awful awful experience. And that could be an argument for BRT. Riding a bus that makes fewer stops and tries to go in a straight line and uses ’special docking arms’ and all that might, in fact, provide for a slightly less horrifc experience than your standard-issue city bus ride.
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January 2nd, 2009 at 9:42 am
Ok, give us a chance to convince you. There is a world-wide movement for free public transit that is based on this principle. The auto and sprawl system is heavily subsidized. Fares exist as part of this subsidy to prevent competition. When free, public transit will have more political power and service will be more frequent and more pleasant. Bicycling would be safer with auto gradually restrictable and eventually eliminated from urban streets. With growth, more light rail would replace buses. We could go on… oil wars might even stop.