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.
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.
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.