The Capital District Transportation Authority, the bus service for the Albany/Schenectady/Troy, NY area, has instituted a major revamping of its buses in Albany. It’s not just changing a few schedules, it’s dropping some buses and adding others.
For me, taking the bus to church has gotten easier when we have an early service; the first bus is now 8:04 rather than 8:52.
On the other hand, getting to work, starting tomorrow, has gotten a whole lot more difficult. I pretty much laid it out here. There might be one or two other options, but these involve the daughter leaving for school much earlier than has been her habit.
The other fact is that the bus to Corporate Woods won’t be going by my building, but rather I have to walk down this curvy road in the morning, and, worse, walk up this curvy road, where vehicles go terribly fast, at night, with no sidewalk; when it’s been snowing, that’s potentially dangerous, especially the way the Brinks trucks barrel down that road.
Something else: CDTA has gotten rid of some of the bus stops in order to increase fuel efficiency. One of them is about 20 feet from our front porch. I’ll miss it for nostalgic reasons. When I was taking the Daughter to preschool, we would often run to the stop just ahead of the bus a block away.
I know it’s not cost-effective, but how about a cab on icy/snowy days? Better to spend a few bucks on a ride home than risk injury or worse, Roger.
Well, it may come to that. the problem with the cabs, besides being expensive, is that I have found them unreliable.
I used cabs a lot after my car was wrecked in 2005; I remember the unreliability pretty well. I got into the habit of staying on top of them — I’d call early and say what time I wanted to be picked up. If they weren’t there on time, I’d call and ask where they were. If the answer wasn’t “they’ll be there in five minutes” (or less), I’d cancel and call another cab company. Only two or three times did this really make me late getting home (a half hour or more), but usually — 95 percent of the time — the cab was there on time, impatiently waiting for me if they got there five minutes before I got out of work (and had asked them to be there).
Carpool? I don’t envy your situation at all. Sounds very inconvenient for everyone.