the Bus

There isn’t really much difference between commuting with a train (subway, commuter rail, light-rail, path train) and a bus except for the fact that the bus sucks. There really is no less dignified way of commuting.


I have a ton of complaints about the subway system in NYC including the disgusting homeless people, the disgusting homeless piss smell in the cars, the disgusting rats running on the platform towards the disgusting homeless people and their disgusting piss smell but at the end of the day I still prefer this over the bus. I was on the bus today and although I had a seat, I could never get comfortable; somehow I’m stuck with road-rage when sitting on the bus and unlike driving there is really nothing I can do about it. Traffic always sucks but when you are stuck in a toasty sardine-can it feels that much more horrible. I think my problem is that I’m a perpetual back-seat driver and the entire time I rush through my mind how I would get around a turn, which light I would try to hit but my bus-driver did none of them. See for this guy there is no extra pay for finishing early and this anti-capitalistic mentality totally kills me. I’m all for privatizing certain aspects of government and mass transportation is one of them, if Dominos can deliver a piping hot pizza to me in 30 minutes, why does it take one hour and ten minutes to go 7 miles on a bus?

See the conductor on the subway isn’t any better but at least I can’t tell what he’s doing and since he runs on a track I have to believe he’s limited to the speeds and times of the rest of the rail-system, while the bus-driver has some more leeway to be creative..yet he never is.

So if the subway is the equivalent of being blind-folded while some guy pokes your urethra out with a rusty ice-pick, the bus is the same situation but without the blindfold.