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So today I had to do some errands. Per usual, I had to take the bus there, and to be honest that is a big pain in the ass. While I am lucky to live somewhere where the bus passes by near my house, it doesn’t help when the bus is as this infrequent as it is. It’s pretty normal to have these 30 minute headways which make it a massive pain in the ass if you are unlucky enough to miss it. It is not a serious system that you can rely on to get around, sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. And this is on a good day: On certain days, there are times that the bus gets delayed by half to one whole hour, which is something I can confirm because this actually has happened to me.

And then this means that people that live here want to get a car instead. The car is admittedly comfortable, and you can listen to music while you drive, while the AC is on. And then you forget everything that is good when you encounter how fucking shit everyone else is at driving. I don’t know what it is with deserts and drivers, but I swear to god the heat fucking makes everyone drive like an asshole. And it shows on crash statistics. Cyclists are being run over left and right because there is absolutely no place to accommodate them at all. We keep building this 8 lane monsters in the middle at the city, and if we had more money, half of downtown would be demolished to build an interstate style freeway, and then they would demolish what little was left to fill them up with parking lots.

What about the city council? They keep ignoring the problem. Just kick the can down the road. Put Band-Aids like building painted bike gutters or poorly designed protected bike lanes and build underpasses and overpasses and raised intersections and wonder why traffic stays the same. Meanwhile public transit is left to rot in the corner, forgotten and underfunded. We keep using 7 year old buses that should’ve been out of commission 4 years ago. They often break down, their engines catch on fire, or are simply too small to manage the crowds that still use public transit. Instead of doing what the rest of North America does and use wide aisle, low floor buses, we keep using these awful high floor, narrow row buses that suck for public transit and sucks if you are disabled. Bus drivers are poorly trained and often exceed the speed limit, do dangerous maneuvers and end up crashing so often it has become a local meme.

To sell you just how bad it is, I want you to picture this. Imagine that you are some guy that has to go to your college that is around 8 or 9 kilometers away. It is too far to walk and you don’t own a car. You wake up at 5 am because you have a class at 7 am, and the professor is an asshole that will mark you absent even if you arrive only 5 minutes late. So you wake up, skip breakfast, and run towards the nearest bus stop. The time is now 5:40 am.

You check the bus app to see where the bus is at. There is only two buses on this side of the route today, and it takes 20 minutes to arrive. The time is now 6 am.

lug’s note: so we have this shitty app called [redacted] which is pretty much intended to let people see the current bus locations, since there is no established timetable. Imagine like Google Maps, but worse. I call it the bus app because saying it’s actual name would pretty much doxx where I live lmao.

You hop on the first of two buses you need to take. The bus is overflowing with people, and the bus driver tries to fit more people in, safety rules be damned. The poor overloaded bus finally takes off, and keeps getting stuck in the morning rush hour. It takes something like 12 minutes to get to the second bus stop. The time is now 6:12 am.

You check the bus app again, and see that you just missed the bus and now you need to wait for the next one. It is fucking 20 minutes away at best. So you sit there scrolling on your phone while you listen to music that you really not in a mood to listen to.

The bus finally arrives. The time is 6:32 am. You now have at least 28 minutes to get there, if traffic is not shit (spoiler alert: it is). It is equally full of people, and you have to make yourself fit. This bus has no working air conditioning, and it is summer, and the temp outside is a kinda warm 26C. Inside, the temperature is probably a good 5 to 7 degrees hotter, which makes the bus ride very very oh so very uncomfortable. Every time the bus stops, someone gets off, and you have to get out their way so they walk past you, while at the same time, trying not to bother anyone that is sitting down. Repeat this until you get to the last bus stop, while there is nothing but a 7 minute walk ahead of you. The time, now 6:55 am. You run towards the classroom, and you barely make it. And then you have to do this all over again to go home, and tomorrow.

This was and still is my experience with buses here. There would be days that I would miss the bus just because the bus driver didn’t want to stop to pick me up. Other times, the bus would get stuck in traffic to the point that there would be a 40 minute delay, and you’d end up missing one hour of class. I had so much problems with arriving on time that I am surprised I wasn’t expelled on tardiness grounds.

I think the saddest thing is that even in a car, driving those same 8 km would take me something like 35 to 40 minutes depending on how awful the traffic is. And being inside a car in a traffic jam is miserable. You have semi-trucks with trailers trying to merge to do a turn, there are often traffic lights that change so fast that it is impossible to cross them unless you are literally on the stop line. There is this one traffic light that I know of, which lasts on green for barely 5 seconds. Meanwhile on red? Over two minutes. This kinda makes you reconsider the bus to be honest. And don’t get me started on people trying to drive to downtown. The whole downtown area was originally designed somewhere in the 17th century for horse carriages and with small one way streets, which pretty much turns downtown into bottleneck central. If you want to see true hell, try parking downtown during Christmas season. You will never forget it.

And meanwhile the city keeps growing, with the last city census reporting a population of nearly a million people. There are no plans to expand or at least add more buses to the currently failing bus system. There is no plan for trams, light rail, no metro systems, not even plans to add more buses to the current bus fleet. But sure, we have money to spend on horrible battery power buses, which would been money better spent on regular diesel buses. Since public transit sucks, people come up with ways to get around the bus: rideshares, taking up debt to get a shitty car, collective taxis, take your pick. The thing is, no city can handle a million cars driving at the same time. Rideshare apps know that there is a transit crisis, and then go and price themselves accordingly. And collective taxis are awful and it sucks to ride in one. I kinda wish that they would at fucking least go and fund protected bike lanes and specific bike ways, but considering the awful weather (40C is a pretty common temp to see during the summer) and the fact of building it would actually require doing something, it would prob. be something that would never happen. But one can hope.