Buses Not Taken

I had thought that once I was able to drive again that I was going to still ride the bus (+ ride my bike) to the office once a week. First I hurt my knee, and then I got lazy. So that didn’t happen.

I did ride the bus to JMM yesterday and today because the convention center is a short, flat walk from the bus stop. (Despite this being the JMM, I am not going to try to make a joke about localizations and free modules. Also, it has been long enough since I have thought seriously about such things that I would probably get in wrong.) One of the buses to downtown stops just in front of the 24-hour Mexican restaurant at the end of my block.

Yesterday I did not take the best bus home because the 2nd best bus got to the stop exactly when I did. While riding the 2nd best bus, a woman already on the bus got up as if she were going to get off the bus but instead was handed a small child through the door of the bus. The two of them continued riding into my neighborhood.

I told my colleague that he should ride the bus to JMM, but he didn’t. There are two types of buses that run between downtown and the park-and-ride near work. One is the regular city bus (235), which pretty much goes up and down the 15 all day, stopping at all of the transit centers along the way, including the very popular ones at the community colleges (and the one in the not-yet-gentrified neighborhood just inland from where I live). You can take this bus north or south in the morning or in the afternoon. This is the bus that I took to work. The bus that I recommended to my colleague is the 290 Rapid Express. It travels from the suburbs (where the office is located) to downtown in the mornings (only) and from downtown to the suburbs in the evenings (only). It is a really fancy bus (it has wifi!); one of my fellow riders of the regular bus called it the “casino bus.” When I commute to work on the freeway, I frequently see the casino bus—empty—on its way to bring the right people, who deserve a nice bus, in the right direction. If the casino bus went the direction that I was going, I would be more motivated to take the bus.