I timed it. Most of that time is waiting for a transfer, yes, but getting there by car takes about 20 minutes…
There has been more than one time, where it has been raining when I got on the first bus, and then not raining anymore when I got off the second.
There’s no benches where you transfer buses and it’s supposed to be the bus center for the city. It’s an island of curb in the middle of a huge mall parking-lot. You stand there or sit on the curb for like forty minutes sometimes.
You can actually see the swirls of the wind in the plastic wrapper garbage that blows by. The area is like semi enclosed by big box stores so my theory is that it like accumulates the airborne garbage somehow.
Another reason why it takes so long is that the first stop which is by my neighborhood…
(For context my neighborhood is like an isolated suburb off of a four lane highway…)
(Except it’s a not really a highway and there are houses with driveways connected to it. I guess it’s more like an arterial road of the city or something, but if I’m remembering correctly, it doesn’t merge with a highway, it becomes one.)
You can’t get off on the first stop because it’s on the other side of the highway / street / road. It’s impossible to cross. There’s just no way.
What you have to do to not get stranded when you get off the second bus, is wait until the route cycles through all the stops in the outskirts of the city, and then get off at that stop when it’s coming the other way, on the other side of the road.
There is no bus sign, just an indent in the sidewalk wide enough and long enough for a vehicle to park. There are no benches.
Then I walk for around 2 minutes (that I’m not counting) through the suburbs to get to my house.
I always took the bus to college even though buses are slow here, because on the bus I could read (the college was the last stop) and I didn’t have to pay for parking, and it got me closer to the school than the parking was, and was free because it’s free for college students. All that added up to make it well worth the time. I didn’t have to transfer though.
The time isn’t the only consideration.
Live in the suburbs, win suburb prizes
I’ve always thought about this but if cars stopped being the primary way to get around, transports like this or ambulances could get by without all the traffic and constant forcing their way through traffic.
You can actually see the swirls of the wind in the plastic wrapper garbage that blows by.
The public library is in the middle of a commercial district, between one of the malls I talked about and a Harvey’s. You know like those micro-parking lots where it’s like an alcove of a bunch of run-down stores. It’s in there.
There’s also an A&W stranded in the middle of one of the massive parking lots beside the Walmart. It has a dirty inclined glass wall where you can look out at the city around you. I was there once. it doesn’t feel like a place you’re supposed to be at all, because you can basically only access it by driving up to it in the corner of that parking lot. That glass window is one of the places where you can see like zero vegetation, just roads and parking lots and the Walmart. It pulls off the illusion because it sits at the bottom of a hill that is covered in urban development so it looks like the city covers the entire horizon and the sky isn’t real, it looks like a skybox.
You have an artist’s eye.
The picture is from the movie American Beauty. If you look up “American Beauty bag scene” or the like, you’ll +1 your meme vocabulary.
omg that is so funny, your comment is like 15 times funnier than I thought it was.
Same thing happens here, especially since were two cities that are connected (been here 20 years and gun to my head idk if I could accurately describe the border) and the transfers can be brutal.
Thankfully, my e-bike can get me there faster. There are even safe trails to use (with some crossings).
And the tickets they give you for the transfers don’t correspond to the number you see on the bus, it’s not even on there, that’s some other system, so you just have to memorize which one is what route. First time I had to ask each of the drivers nervously if this bus went to [place I live] or not.
There’s not even a corner store where I live, and you can’t walk to one because the only connection to the city is that stretch of road. It’s almost exclusively populated with middle aged middle class white people. You don’t even see anyone living in most of the houses, because either nobody lives there or they have other homes. And like fifty percent of them have plastic turf instead of grass (which is better for the environment probably with how you don’t have to fertilize it, but still, it’s like fucking Thneedville.) I’m here, because I’m still living with my parents and dormitories or an apartment would cost me one of my lungs.
It’s almost exclusively populated with middle aged middle class white people.
Designing everything for cars, and providing only terrible bus service, is a deliberate policy choice. Not to call anybody who lives there now racist, but historically speaking, this outcome wasn’t by accident.
oh, my parents and the people around there are fantastically racist. I remember my stepmother was complaining one time about how the temperature was too hot for her grandson at his daycare, because the owners were black and a bunch of kids in there were black and Africans are used to hotter temperatures so they kept the thermostat too high to accommodate for the black children, and Canadians (as if Canadians are a race) are used to lower temperatures, and her poor “Canadian” heat-intolerent grandson was sweating in there all day.
No surprise, I just don’t want to accuse people of racism presumptively. But even here, a city with a “progressive” reputation, one of the perennial objections to having rail service to Chicago is that it would bring in “Chicago crime” (read: Black people). As if, 1. Chicago is a crime-infested hellhole, 2. people from Chicago would organize some crime-spree field trips up this way, and 3. they have never heard of Interstate 90/94. (What could possibly make more sense than to commit crimes, and then get away on a vehicle with a 100%-predictable route? Even more genius than the fool-proof water escape! /s)
I think my racist story is funnier than yours.
she also bought the same grandson a ride-able toy car, a toy police van. the three-year-old is too masculine for fisher price cheap plastic cars, lmao.
I hope to god that kid isn’t trans like me, because then they’ll be having a far worse life than even me.
People who live in places that have connected and working mass transit do not know the treasure they have.
I’ve used buses before for a while for different purposes, and while it worked if you could make the stops line up, even then I couldn’t help thinking of the time lost when a straight drive with a car was so much shorter. All because of the limited selection and long routes to try and service all the populated areas while not really being close to anything.
And heaven help you if you rely on it and there’s only a few buses a day… and you miss it.
We know.
We chose where to live based on the public transportation that was available.
Besides price, that seems like the most important factor of deciding where to live
I’ve missed it once and took a trip all the way downtown and they didn’t bother to give me transfers, so thank god I had extra bus pass papers or I would’ve been fucked.
I’m also surprised nobody is mentioning the highway driveways. There’s like a line of houses all the way down the road on both sides, and even parking lanes for some stretches of it. Idk how the fuck anyone lives there. How do you ever pull out? And the noise: there are like semis passing down that road every minute. I can even hear that road from my room when I go to sleep or just bother to listen to the ambient noise. Why the fuck is it normal in this stupid ass place to have trucks passing by suburban houses?
I’ll bet they were there when the road was quiet two lanes. Things slowly grow around them, people deal with it, sell to others who need a house in the area even if the location sucks. It shouldn’t happen, but the roads come first in a car-centric world.
It’s pathetic that buses take 2-3x longer than driving, I have the same situation for most destinations. It’s especially grueling in the darkness of winter.
That’s bad design.
We need to make roads and highways have fewer car lanes (covert existing lanes to bus-only or bicycle-only lanes. Or build light rail). Ideally Max 1 car lane in every direction.
Then busses and trains will be faster than cars.
I measure the quality of public transport / bike in a city by the average factor vs drive times. Some cities have <=1.1 like Helsinki, Den Haag, Berlin. Others are like 3-5x
The winter is the worst. The snow is barely plowed enough to fit cars and you are forced to walk in the street.
Dang I feel you. Started a new job this month and my route to work is now Bus-Train-Bus. The train part is actually really nice and only takes 30min, but the busses are so annoying because the transfer windows just don’t really line up. Like the train arrives at :34 but the only bus line that goes reasonably close to my work leaves at :30 and :50. It’s not even far (like 2km from my home to the train station and 4km from the second train station to my work), just barely far enough that walking feels like a waste of time.
I have yet to find a set of connections that take less than 1h30m in total. By car the route would take 32mins. If I take my bike instead of the busses I can get the total time down to 50-ish mins but a ticket for taking a full-sized bike on the train costs 7,50€ per day. I have ordered a foldable bike though (those are free to take on trains) and I’m hoping that it will be a good solution.
I try to petition cities to fix it. It works sometimes. Slow public transport seems to almost always be transfer times
You can actually see the swirls of the wind in the plastic wrapper garbage that blows by. The area is like semi enclosed by big box stores so my theory is that it like accumulates the airborne garbage somehow.
It’s like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, for big box stores. The Great Big Box Trash Tornado?
I have a video of like a baby dust devil made of plastic wrappers I filmed in that place, but I don’t want people to pinpoint the city I live.
You can actually see the swirls of the wind in the plastic wrapper garbage that blows by
New Jersey?! /hj
I have a similar commute time to my school, which is also about a 20 minute drive away by car. There’s an express bus that reduces the time to an hour but only runs every 30 minutes, I have to transfer once to get there, the bus to get to the transfer only runs every 20 minutes, and gets to the transfer stop with only a few minutes to spare. So if traffic is bad or several people have to take extra time getting on/off, I miss the transfer to the express and have to take the slower local bus.
I love public transit but it’s SO ANNOYING when there isn’t enough bus frequency. Missing a bus by 1 minute because someone in a wheelchair got on shouldn’t mean I lose 30 minutes of travel time.
It’s a place in Canada, I’ll reveal that much. It’s probably worse than New Jersey.
