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.
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.