Who rides the bus? I do! I do!

[kickaha]

Well, due to an amazing bit of stupidity on my part, I don't have a parking permit for campus for next year. (Done missed the signup deadline, I did.)

So, I'm looking into alternate forms of transportation. Like the bus. Yay.

Unfortunately, the Triangle area of NC doesn't exactly have what I'd call 'mass transportation'. They try. They really, really do. They try everything, a little bit here, a little bit there, and nothing cohesive or organized into a whole.

After searching online for the various bus systems' schedules and routes, however, I found that I can grab a bus in Raleigh near NC State campus, and end up on UNC campus in Chapel Hill about 75 minutes later. It's a 45 minute drive, and I have to walk across campus from my current parking spot for about 15 minutes anyway, so it's not *horrendously* long. Besides, now I can read while I commute... haven't been able to have that luxury since using the Metro in Seattle. (*sigh* Now that's a bus system... second only to perhaps NY subways in terms of getting people from here to there pretty darned efficiently. To those of you living there thinking I'm nuts, move elsewhere. Anywhere. Then move back, and appreciate that while Metro ain't perfect, it's really rather nice in comparison to just about everything else out there. I'd *kill* to have a Metro system here.)

So this will be interesting... I'll feel like an honest to god student again. :)

Comments

Metro's fine, as far as I can tell.

[byrdie.livejournal.com]

But then, I've never lived anywhere else. I mean, the bus system I rode on in Hawaii was really cheap, but I only took the bus a handful of times. I've been on Bart and Max, and they were okay. The buses I rode in San Francisco were a tad scary.

I've also taken Community Transit up here and man, it bites in a way that Metro just doesn't. A bus failing to run on a Metro route has never left me stranded, but Community Transit has. The buses are clean, the seats are comfortable, and the drivers are friendly, but that's probably at least in part because they don't have to work the sucky shifts that are so convenient for everyone else. C.T. seems to assume that people work an 8 - 6 schedule, for the most part, and don't really commute much otherwise.

I keeping hearing excellent things about the London Underground and the New York subways, but I've never been on them. I don't think I'll ever really be able to compare systems until I've spent at least a month -- if not a season -- trying to regularly get around on some other one.