Here in Seattle you pay as you enter traveling toward downtown and it’s pay as you leave going away from downtown. So when you are headed out of town the drivers want you to exit through the front and pay your fare. This is generally not a problem unless you are on a very crowded bus and stuck in the back. Most of the drivers will open the back doors and you just go to the front and pay or show your pass. Every so often you get a driver that is either an asshole or a stickler for the rules and won’t open the back door. It sucks. We only shout “back door” if we’re heading into town and the driver doesn’t notice someone wanting to exit.
Last Saturday I was headed downtown about 9pm and when I got on it was nearly empty. As we get closer to downtown it is filling up and I start to hear a loud voice. It’s an accent I can’t really place but this man is telling everyone how he is from Sweden, just got to Seattle from Vancouver, is gay, lost his friends, and please don’t beat him up for being gay. He is very intoxicated and if it wasn’t obvious enough he informs us of this every couple of sentences. Someone jokingly asked him if he won any medals. He perks up and says he won gold. As he exited the bus - nowhere near his stated destination- he turns and yells to every one " I won the gold! And I got to come to the United States! And I won Gold!" He then grabs the hand rails and kicks his legs up. We gave him a round of applause and then he grabbed his box of whatever and stumbles off into the night. I hope he got back to Sweden in one piece.
Reason # 124124179879 I will Never Move To Winnipeg:
Last summer a friend of mine was taking a Winnipeg city bus in the middle of the day, wearing a skirt and flip-flops, since it was summer. As she was standing there on the crowded bus, minding her own business, she noticed her leg was getting wet…and first thinking it was drip from the air-conditioner, she looked around.
And a grubby, homeless man was peeing with abandon pretty much in every direction.
I work in an industrial park, the busses there… that stench was HORRIBLE. You’d have most men who were okay, not great but not sickening (ie they were clean when they started work and now they smell only of a hard day’s work which isn’t necessarily bad) and then there were the others. The ones who smell like they haven’t bathed in a week of Sunday’s and now they are on their way home after adding another dimension to that layer.
I drive to work now, that was one factor in me deciding to get my license.
I don’t know if this worse than the annonymous groping, but it certainly has a pretty hig ewww quotient. A friend of mine with long dark hair was on a packed train (again in New York.) After she arrived at work she went to the ladies’ room and discovered that someone had ejaculated on her hair.
I’ve been riding the bus here for 11 years. I’ve seen fights, drug deals, soft core porn, all kinds of public grooming, even had to tell a driver what turns to make. I’ve never seen anyone yank out their willy and pee or ::shudder:: wank on it.
I’ve never had any trouble at all on the NYC subway system (and i’ve used it in every borough except Staten Island), but some of the stories on HollaBackNYC make you realize that there are some pretty gross people riding the trains.
This is the case in Pittsburgh, too. I think it’s a messed-up system, personally.
I also kind of wonder what would happen if someone got on one of our buses heading out of town and realized they didn’t have the fare. In a system where you pay when you get on, they just don’t get on. I’m not sure what happens in our system, though.
You would be hard-pressed to use the subway system in Staten Island. Sure, there’s the Staten Island railway running end-to-end, but that’s not ‘officially’ part of the subway.
People just shrug and say “sorry, I don’t have my fare.” Most drivers don’t give a hoot, but occasionally you will get one who will take you to task about it. I see it a lot downtown when people want to go a couple stops past the ride free area. I always enjoy the folks that go through a huge act of searching through their pockets and bags for their transfer or pass. Just get off the bus already and don’t waste our time. Gah!
Good grief. The poor fellow was that worried about getting attacked by bigots in Seattle? I’d always thought - perhaps wrongly - that Seattle was one of the friendlier places in the Union. Cosmopolitan, liberal, plenty of granola to be had by all comers. It’s to our shame that there are still parts of the country where a gay person would reasonably have to worry about this - but Seattle isn’t one of them.
This guy was extremely wasted but in good spirits. Indeed, he was told several times that no one would beat him up but that he should maybe quiet down and not tell every stranger he met that he was drunk, from out of town and lost. Several people even offered to take him to his hotel. If you know the Seattle area he got off on First and Denny but was staying at the W.
If you are downtown and pull out a map, three people will stop and offer to help you find your destination.
I was in the first car of a train when it hit a child. The window was splattered with blood.
I made submissions at a coroner’s inquest following a bus crash caused by a nut wrestling with the driver and rolling the bus.
Our planes (two of them flying together) were shot at while flying in and out of a reserve. (Technically, the was not public transit, for the flights were charters.)
We had a landing that was so bad that for a brief moment as the plane bounced I looked out the window toward the end of the runway.
I was on a plane when the video player caught on fire. This was the same flight during which a flight attendant repeated kneeled on my lap while reaching into the overhead luggage compartment, and was the same flight during which many people had the shits.
The lights were shut off and we were locked in a radial arm of an airport and forgotten overnight while waiting for the return flight following the fire incident.
I was on a train that missed its turn and had to back up for a couple of hours.
I was on a city bus that hit a car going the other way on a narrow street.
One of my school mates stole the inter-city bus we were riding on.
I observed and reported a train derailing.
I boarded a bus while I was carrying two briefcases, and immediately accidentally sneezed in the face of a woman who was wearing too much perfume. She apologize while she wiped the goo off her face, so I assume that she realized that she had overdone it with her perfume. Of course I apologized as well.
A nut urinated on the bus seat beside me.
I spent a day and a half on a train sitting across from a native child tugging at her younger brother’s crotch and chanting “Timmy, Timmy, Timmy, Timmy” all of her waking time.
We were served something on a plane that might have been soup, a desert, or a finger bowl, but no one including the flight attendants knew.
Twice I have observed the flight crews of my planes trotting through the airport over an hour late.
I was on a commuter train that broke, so after a couple of hours of waiting on the train, I called the train company’s lost and found department to report a missing train, They took the call seriously.
Why yes, whenever possible, I drive rather than take public transit.
I’ve only rode public transport for about a year just before I got my license. On about every other Saturday a couple of friends and I would ride the bus across town to the mall and just kind of hang out for half of the day.
One time as we were heading back home on the bus a fight broke out in the back. It wasn’t very crowded so the fight kind of roamed around. Shortly after it started the bus driver pulled over and everyone just got out and waited for the next bus. While we waited though the fight continued inside the bus and in a few minutes the cops showed up and arrested the two guys.
The worst though was another Saturday and we were heading to mall in the early afternoon and again the bus was sparcely populated. There was a homeless looking man in the back by himself. About halfway to the mall it started to smell like pee. So we were snickeering to each other and one kid bends down to look back and under the seats and says loudly, “OMG he peed on the bus.” We got off at the next stop to catch the next bus but the bus the guy peed on kept on going.