More Bus Adventures
Yesterday I had two interesting experiences on the bus.
545 bus home from work (which I took all the way into the downtown so we could go to the movie). SR520 was backed up all the way from Lake Washington to NE 40th… even up the on-ramp traffic was at a dead stop and/or inching along.
To the rescue comes our heroic bus driver! After taking >20 minutes to make it from the overlake transit center to 148th St, he got fed-up with the terrible traffic and got off at the exit! We took a shortcut on the backroads of Bellevue and ended up shooting ahead of all the stopped traffic by the time we ended up back on the highway. Ordinarily this particular bus driver causes me some grief since I often end up standing and he doesn’t follow the strategy of “feathering the brakes”.
But not yesterday… yesterday I had a seat and I was glad to have a bus-driver who drives the thing like a taxi. Everything but up-on-the-grass to go around stupid drivers who stopped in the defective 520 HOV lane while trying to merge in, etc. Good stuff! Excepting the 20+ minute slow start, we made it into the city even faster than we’d have made it on a lot of typical high-traffic days! Sweet!
14 bus home from the movie. This one wasn’t quite so ideal, but it’s a lot more typical. After JUST MISSING the 14 bus at the end of our film, we knew we’d have a bit of a wait for any of the potential buses we could catch to get close to the house (4, 14, 27, even the 3 bus would have been a possibility).
Sure enough, we had to wait 25 minutes before the first of these arrived – a 14. That’s fine, because of course it could have been much worse than 25 minutes, I suppose. But what was frustrating about this was that at the first stop-light after getting on the 14 bus, I noticed that a 4-bus was in the lane directly next to us and the 27 bus was directly behind us. Nice. 3 buses that all run together through the downtown instead of staggering them by 10 minutes to make the system flow a little better.
It would have made sense for us (10 min wait instead of 25 minute wait) and it would have made more sense for anyone trying to transfer between the routes (folks on the 27 bus would have had a hard time transfering to the 4 that was always 20 yards ahead, for instance). Ugh.
As Jodi pointed out, this is the sort of experience that makes it very hard to justify riding the bus downtown when you could pay a few $$ for parking and not have to stand around for 25 minutes at 10pm.
