Bus rant

[kane_magus]

Days like today, or even this whole past week or so, make me wish I had my car out here, so that I could just give King Country Metro the middle finger and be done with it.

As I'm sure I've ranted about in the past on here, it's one thing when the buses are late, but it's worse when they are early. It's ever so rare, but does still happen on occasion, which is why I try to get to my bus stops a few minutes early if possible. So... yeah, I had just left class and was on my way to the bus stop. I'd just crossed the street and was probably less than 100 feet from the bus stop, when there goes my damn bus thundering by. It didn't even pretend to slow down. I checked my watch and, as I suspected, it was about 4 minutes earlier than it should have been.

So, I could have chosen to wait around for another 20 to 30+ minutes for the next bus, riding it for the 10-15 minutes or so it takes to get to my stop, then walking for another 5 minutes or so from there back to my condo, or I could have chosen to do what I actually did do, which is to simply say fuck it, and walk the 2 or so miles back to my condo from school. This takes roughly 40 minutes if I use the SR 520 bike path, give or take 3 or 4 minutes or so depending on traffic in downtown Redmond.

Bright side:
A) Exercise. I did just walk 2 or so miles, and I don't really get enough exercise as it is, so there is that, at least.

B) This saved me from having to wastespend yet another $1.25 of pocket money on bus fare, which I otherwise would have had to spend, given that neither the 3-month November-January bus pass, which I ordered on October 10, ever arrived, nor has the replacement which Metro claimed to be sending as of last week Tuesday arrived either.

So, yeah, while the transit system out here is usually pretty good, times like this make me wish I had my car, or at least a bicycle or something. Gah.

Comments

[alessar.livejournal.com]

Did you contact your transit authority and complain? It has to be done or the drivers won't be corrected.

[kane-magus.livejournal.com]

I posted a complaint to the customer service section of the Metro Transit website, just as I've done in the past when this has occurred. It's not the same thing as calling to complain to someone "in person", of course, which I don't really have the inclination to do at this point anyway, but it's something at least. Assuming the complaints ever actually get read by someone in a position to do anything about it, that is. As it is, this is only maybe the third time in the 3 or so years that I've been living out here that I've missed a bus due to it being early like this. If it were occurring more frequently, I'd definitely be calling them up to complain more noisily.

It's more the combination of this plus the bus pass being way late in arriving that has me cheesed off. If I haven't gotten it by tomorrow, I'll be contacting them about that again as well.

[tokoz.livejournal.com]

I vote for bicycles. 2 miles is, like, 10 or 15 minutes for me and my lovely wonderful bike, especially if you have a bike trail nearby. :D

[owsf2000.livejournal.com]

In all honesty, this Kings County Metro sounds like heaven compared to what Codiac Transit has going up here.

1.75 for fare (and keep in mind CDN is now well above USD! ^_-)

And the buses are basically 1hr apart or MORE. (on some of the routes, they'll actually stop for an hour, or have a single bus doing two routes, alternatingly, all day long.)

The only routes that seem to be every 30minutes is route 1 and 2. But that's because they run essentially the exact same route, with a slight difference with how they run the residential portion of their route. (One services it on the way towards downtown, the other services it on it's way back from downtown)

Codiac got a large government grant to expand their fleet in town (double the size) as well as run the buses til late at night (11pm - most stop running around 6pm now, with the businest 4 routes running all the way to 9:30!)

Of course, this is despite the fact that they axed the last run of the only bus I actually need to take to go to work, so now I have to start leaving to go to work a whole 2 hours before my shift begins.