MetroRiderLA

The 14 has long been hailed as one the hardest to find Metro buses. Photo via Flickr, courtesy of So Cal Metro

Aside from the enormous pain in the ass a missing bus can be—the overcrowding which compounds the already annoying delays further on the route—it’s also a drain on the soul. And seeing as Holy week is just around the corner for some, I figured I’d look at all things public transit in the same light priests see sinners. Forgivable, yes, but not without some serious penance. Unfortunately, Metro, at times, acts like a godless heathen with its lack of foresight and decision making skills so I don’t feel any Hail Marys or Our Fathers are going to whip her into shape.

Instead, I’m going do something even more pointless—I’m going to email costumer relations every time something isn’t to my liking. If a bus driver passes without stopping, if a subway’s doors stop working and I’m forced to take the train all the way to Union Station and then another one back to where I had planned on going, if the intercoms aren’t working, if the elevators are broken, if the ticket machine is broken, if the ticket line is absurdly undermanned and I have to buy a day pass for an entire week, if their fancy new monitors don’t warn me not to chew gum, and of course, if a bus doesn’t show up.

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As of today I’ve now lived a full year without a car. Now that might not seem like a big deal to an eleven year old but for some reason Zach Braff 20-somethings all over are blown away; not to mention the 30 and up crowd.

Yep, the last Friday of February exactly one year ago I exchanged a red metal burden for $1900, which I was able to use to pay off one other burden, which was caused by the first burden. Now I’ve still got burdens, we all do, but one of the biggest ones is now in the hands of a 21, 22 now year old (they grow up so fast) in Burbank.

So what comes of a year without an automobile anyway? Have I gone out less? Have I been trapped by the shackles of inaccessibility? Have my girlfriend and friends abandoned me for a new guy that can drive when they need to go to the grocery store four blocks away? Well—No, I can now go out and not ever have to worry about a designated driver. No, I can get anywhere I want/need to go by way of public transit and my feet and every once in a long while, zip-car (grrr). No, my girlfriend is now pretty much car free and I just meet my friends near the deli after they finally finish parking. Simply put, things have only improved. (more…)

Photo courtesy of flickrich via Flickr.

Growing up I had a love/hate relationship with sunflower seeds. I’ve always been a fan of baseball both playing and watching so from my earliest of days I was lathering up my glove with leather softener, putting a baseball in it, wrapping a bungee cord around it and setting it by the fire. It was a seasonal ritual. Another ritual of baseball was the bags upon bags of sunflower seeds that our high school team got for free for whatever reason. I think it was to thwart the John Kruk style chew wads that were ending up all over the field and dug out.

Even though I didn’t chew I still made sure to get my bag allotment each Monday at practice and work on my sunflower eating technique. Unfortunately I found the whole process so excruciatingly time consuming to get one stupid seed out, a quarter of the way through my efforts I would always chomp and chew with reckless abandon then spit the whole mess out at once.

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Around the country the tobacco enthusiast is reeling with each and every new tax placed on their most beloved accouterments. What was once an enjoyable fashion statement is now a financial black hole. But unlike the private auto enthusiast things don’t seem to be looking up.

Even though gas prices are skyrocketing and no matter what the politicians say, will probably never drop below $3/gallon nationwide again, at least the car owner still has the extremely sleek and produced television ads with the latest in mograph technology to make even a Kia Sophia seem sexy. Not to mention this weekend is the Martin Luther King Jr. sales event—finally—and interests rates are being slashed slashed slashed to make room for the ’08’s. Because as we all know, Dr. King loved his cars.

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Or is it? It might also be your bus number written in thin blue ink on a 5 x 7 lined index card. And how does one find this pertinent information out you wonder? Well the easiest way is to stand around when an orange local bus with a local number overhead comes to your stop as you wait for a big red articulated rapid bus with a rapid number over it. Then after the “local” drives off sit with the rest of the confused would be passengers asking, “Wait, did it say 728 on that index card?”

Moral of the story being, Metro can, at times, screw you with buses that never show up or run up to an hour late, so don’t let them screw you with Papermate headways too.

Every so often while riding around this fair city one is confronted by the absolute madness of a bad bus driver. Now in all bus drivers’ defense, most are quite capable and drive splendidly to get you where you need to go. And considering that I see driving in this city a torture worse than water boarding, capable, let alone splendid, is an amazing feat. However, there is a select group of drivers that have taken a secret oath as profound and clandestine as the Illuminati.

This society of bad and terribly annoying bus drivers have the power to completely ruin your commute and, if commuting is that much a part of your life, your day. Headaches, back aches, and stomach aches be damned in the opinion of the following three groups of bus drivers. And death to those that wish to read or sleep or just ignore that they’re traveling at all, for why should those on the bus be free of the toil that is the red brake lights of Hondas, Fords, Caddys or Benz’, which the bus driver must face dead on.

The three groups can be broken down as follows: the Excessive Breaker, the Overly Eager, and the Slow Boi.

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