Ridin the Bus or Van City Blue Miata Gets Political

Before I could transfer the insurance from the wounded Miata back to the non wounded Infiniti I had to go to work, so with no car I had to take the bus. Not having ridden the bus for a long time I made a few observations:

1 - It takes too long. Normally by car in the morning it takes about five to fifteen minutes to get to work, twenty minutes in the afternoon with traffic. It took an hour by bus. And I had to wait in the rain. Ouch. Even with right of way and bus specific lanes the thing is slow.

2 - The bus company has a weird sense of humour. On the bus stop sign there's a number and if you call it and give the stop number, a robot will tell you when the next bus will be coming. This must of cost a fortune to set up. The funny thing is, that it tells you this is an estimate only, so it actually tells you that it's useless. And it was; my bus came nowhere near the time it estimated. At least it was way earlier rather than later. If you didn't ride the bus and if you weren't charged transit taxes on your gas (the highest in Canada) to pay for these "services", this would be kind of funny. Oh another kind of funny thing, a robot on the bus calls out the next stop in case you don't like looking out the window; I hope that cost like a million dollars.

3 - You have time to think on the bus. This was the nice thing. While the bus droned its way from stop to stop I had time to reflect on what I had done. Basically I'm a very lucky bastard. I could have spun out and hit another car or lamp post or human, and that would have been end of story. After all suspension pieces are relatively cheap compared to body damage and insurance premiums. So I should count my blessings and stop being such an idiot.

4 - There are no really hot girls on the bus. If you look at photos from a few posts ago about my trip to White Rock you'll notice that in the one passenger seat of the Miata was a really hot girl. I noticed that in not one of the twenty or so seats in the four buses I rode today, was the same. The bus just doesn't attract hot girls, the Miata does. What the bus does attract is lots of people that looked sickly and downtrodden. Not a judgement but an observation.

I guess I've learnt two things from my brief brush with public transit: 1. I love my cars, I really really love everything about them. 2. As a society money spent on talking robobusses, traffic calming, and shiny bus stops so tourists say Vancouver is pretty, would be better spent helping people who ride the bus by necessity, be able to ride that bus by choice.

Oh wait I learnt three things: Slow down, a bit. Well actually: Don't power slide in traffic.