I'm finally starting to wish I had a car again.

Saw a sign on the bus, and just doubled checked it with the Metro website.

1) They're raising the fare yet again. *sigh*

2) They're doing away with the PugetPasses, meaning I now have to get an ORCA card. *double sigh*

I didn't want to have to get an ORCA card. With that, I now have to worry about making sure the bus driver has the fare set to one-zone every time I get on/off the bus, so that I don't get overcharged for a two-zone fare (which is a very real possibility since the 266 going into Seattle in the morning and coming out of Seattle in the evening is a two-zone fare if you ride the whole trip, but I only ride it from Redmond to Bellevue in the morning and back again in the evening, which is just one-zone). Very annoying. But if I'm going to get an ORCA card, I'd better do it now while it's free, because as of Feb 1, 2010, they're going to start charging $5 for them (apparently in addition to whatever value you put on the card itself). Also, another reason I need to go ahead and do it now is because they won't be selling any more PugetPasses after Dec. 14 at all. The only bright side, I guess, is that I won't have to buy a new PugetPass every month anymore, for what it's worth. I just have to keep this ORCA thing charged up with credit or whatever. *weary sigh*

So, yeah, they're once again charging even more for inversely proportionally crappier service.

Oh, and while I'm ranting about the buses and crappy service... they put up a new time table on the pole at the stop where I get on the bus on the way home from work. They've never had a time table there before recently. And, of course, the times on this time table are completely different than the times that the Trip Planner gives for that same stop and those same buses. The times on the new time table on the pole are far more inconvenient for me than the previous Trip Planner times (which I'm guessing are now out of date). Actually, I got to looking at the time table on the sign again, and it just says "Bus So and So departs from Blah stop at these times", not that it was to arrive at that particular stop at those times, so it's not as bad as I thought. (But I had made a point to look explicitly for something like that before and didn't see it, or at least just didn't notice it. Oh well.) Not, of course, that this really matters, given that the buses never show up at the correct time for either of those time tablesthe Trip Planner schedule, at least in the evening. *deep inhale* *huge sigh*