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.
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.