O O Ø O O O O
The Mighty 3
After work I make my way down to Fourth Street West to pick up my bus: the Mighty 3, the Dion. There are five stops between where I intersect its route at 17 Avenue, and where it turns onto Elbow Drive at the Mission Bridge. I can sight north down Fourth Street and tell if a 3 is in proximity, and thereby judge if I have enough time to storm my way to the next stop along its route.
I do this because I prefer walking to standing, action to waiting.
By doing so, I suffer the following consequences:
I increase by a small amount the chance that I may miss the next bus, getting caught between stops as it whistles by. To date this hasn’t happened, but in 2½ years I had one close call, so I can’t discount the possibility completely.
I incur additional damage to the lifts of my shoes. On any given pair of hard soled footwear, I consume between one and two lifts per year, at a cobbling expense of $20 per replacement pair. If I walk this much—or drag my feet this badly—then the nine blocks accountable to the stretch of Fourth Street between 17 Avenue and Elbow drive is probably a diminishing fraction, but the wear is real and must be acknowledged.
By picking up the 3 at a later stop, I allow other bus riders to board sooner, taking up available seats, the valuable currency of transit riders everywhere. The flip of this negative is that the closer the 3 gets to the Elbow River, the fewer downtown-to-uptown commuters (lazy wusses) there will be remaining on the bus, often freeing up seats for long-haul riders like me.
My final observation is that I get home absolutely no more quickly than if I would have waited outside Bob the Fish, unapologetically watching pay-per-view Flames games through the bar windows.
Yet I can’t resist the compulsion to walk down one more stop, to spend my idleness getting just that small amount closer to home. I may have achieved nothing, but at least I kept putting one leg in front of the other, getting somewhere before my unchanging final destination.
Maybe this is a neurosis, or maybe this is a metaphor.
Evan Spence
December 4, 2007
OOØOOOODCCCXLX
December 5th, 2007 at 11:26 am
I quite enjoyed this one.
December 6th, 2007 at 3:24 pm
On the plus side:
You get more exercise. If exercise is part of your daily routine, this frees up time later on for other activities. If you miss the bus, then you get even more exercise!
You aren’t stuck inside the bus as long, thus reducing the probability of any bus-related accidents, fights, or hostage situations.
Walking circulates more blood to your brain, allowing you to think better. Use this time wisely.
December 7th, 2007 at 9:04 pm
I tend to participate in the same game when driving, as I have no public transportation options from my little city to the jerkwater burg where my company’s office lives. I’ve found several ways home that avoid highways altogether. I find these longer routes handy when the highways are clogged. It’s probable that it still takes longer on the back roads than it would had I just sat in traffic, but the sensation of forward progress is what appeals to me.
Back in my days in San Fran, the powers-that-be (when they weren’t busy trying to equip panhandlers with credit card readers to ease mooching) decreed an upgrade to the MUNI trains. It failed. The new cars were too big for the tracks and wore them unevenly. The new software was incompatible with the old cars, many of which were still in service because there were too few new cars. Trains would drive off by themselves as the conductors stepped out to use a restroom because of software glitches (and proving to everyone but the union that the conductors were redundant). Backups lasted hours. My 40 minute commute grew to 2.5 hours or more. To complicate things, the old cars weren’t air conditioned, relying instead on open windows and movement for cooling. Unfortunately, all cars ended up stuck in the middle of tunnels for up to hours at a time. The cars were invariably packed to the gills because so many people were waiting for the delayed trains. It was a fine recipe for heat stroke and mass murder in those summer months. One day we resourceful passengers got fed up and pulled the emergency release. We opened the doors and, en masse, walked the tunnels to the next stop and back to the surface. I walked 10 blocks to work from that stop, not that far, rather than get on an overcrowded bus.
Not sure that the train story has much to do with your post, other than the “sometimes it’s better to walk” theory.