Let me start by saying that I used to hate the bus. I live in Seattle, and moved here after living a blissful car-free four years in Chicago. In Chicago, they have a wonderful public transportation system. Oh, how I miss the El. (If you don’t think it’s wonderful, you really need to move to some city with subpar public transpo for awhile.)
Anyway, when I moved out here it took me a couple months to get over my disbelief that there was, in fact, no rail system at all. Just the bus system, which at times is woefully inadequate. And depending on where you need to go, it can actually be more expensive than driving. At the last building I worked at, it cost me $4 per day to take the bus. I was only spending about $15/week on gas. You do the math. Also, I disliked the inconvenience of having to figure out which bus route(s) to take, when to go wait at the stop, and in some cases, how to get to the stop.
However, my new building is much farther away from home. AND, my employers have recently issued us free bus passes. This eliminates the cost problem (yay!) and also makes taking the bus a lot more pleasant. I will elaborate.
On a short bus trip (let’s say 15 minutes or less), you don’t really have time to do anything but sit on the bus. It’s not long enough to fish out the book you’re reading and settle into it. Before you’ve even finished a few pages, it’s time to start looking for your stop and putting your stuff away. Pointless. And of course I’ve already mentioned that short trips on the bus aren’t cost-effective (although that question is now moot with my awesome free bus pass).
However, on a long bus trip (approximately 35 minutes) like the one I have now, you have more than enough time to do some reading. Hell, I can read an entire magazine in 35 minutes sometimes. So that’s nice. And the first week in the new building, I drove home from work, and the commute was a total nightmare every day. Hmm, which is better, spending 45 minutes in crawling stop-and-go traffic, or spending a leisurely hour on the bus reading my library book? I can’t believe how much more reading I’ve been getting done since I started taking the bus.
And maybe the best, and most unexpected perk, is that because the bus schedules are so lame here, I am forced to catch the 6:52 AM bus so that I can catch the 7:35 bus that takes me to my actual building. (The 7:35 is the second to last morning bus on this route – I’d plan to catch the last bus, but that would leave me no margin of error if the first bus happened to be late.) So that puts me at work around 8 AM – ridiculously early, you might think, but actually it’s great. Nobody else is here yet, so I have at least an hour to settle into work, check my email, get my cup of Earl Grey, and just have some peace and quiet before everyone else starts showing up. It’s really nice.
So that’s why I now love the bus. I just wanted to share.
