Tag: buses

T is for transportation: bus, bike

At least a couple times a week, I see a guy bearing right at me.

Early in October, I needed to get back from my hometown of Binghamton, NY back to my home in Albany in order to see The Color Purple at Proctors Theatre in nearby Schenectady. I stopped at the nice newish transportation hub in Binghamton, which had been spruced up a whole lot since I last took a bus out of Binghamton.

Unfortunately, it closed at 9:45 p.m., and I was there at 10:30. Worse, when I got online, I discovered that the bus I wanted, which leaves at 4:15 a.m.(!), was sold out.

Still, my friend got up at 3:15 to take me to the bus station; now THAT is a true pal. A bus heading for Syracuse, north, but a couple hours west of Albany, shows up around 4:15. The last time I needed to buy a ticket when the station was closed I would buy it from the driver.

Apparently, the procedure now is that he holds my ID, drives me to Syracuse, and THEN I buy a ticket for the trip I’ve already taken, and get my ID back. Then I buy a ticket for the bus from Syracuse to Albany, which was showing up at 6:30, only a half hour after I arrived; cool.

Syracuse has an even nicer transportation hub. I could have caught the train from there, if necessary.

I liked this: a young woman was heading back to college in western Massachusetts from Rochester, west of Syracuse. Unfortunately, she overslept and missed her bus. Fortunately, her father drove her the nearly 90 miles from Rochester to Syracuse in the middle of the night. She was very appreciative.
***
When I ride my bike, I ride along the right side of the road, the way I am supposed to. At least a couple times a week, I see a guy bearing right at me, because he’s going on the left side, usually going the wrong way on a one-way street to boot.

Almost every time this happens, he yells, “You’re on the wrong side!” To which I yell back, “You are incorrect.” Short of throwing page 91 of the New York State driver’s manual, which reads, “Where there is [no bicycle lane, bicyclists] must remain near the right curb or edge of the road or on a right shoulder of the road, to prevent interference with other traffic,” there’s not much I can do.

For ABC Wednesday

Smoking and transportation

She thought she was finally being booted off for her transgression.

break-cigarettesSome months ago, Mark Evanier wrote about the bad old days, when smoking allowed on most airplanes. He linked to a New York Times article, What Flying Was Like Before the Smoke Cleared, which was terrible, especially for the flight attendants.

I wrote in this blog some years ago: “Airplanes used to have smoking and non-smoking sections. I remember sitting in row 22, the last non-smoking row. Wouldn’t you know that the smoke did not have the courtesy to go back from row 23, but instead wafted forward?”

Still, here’s a story about a smoker I did feel just a little sorry for:

It was in the early 1990s. My then-Significant Other and I took the bus from Albany to New York City for the day. The 7:30 departure back to Albany, then on to Montreal, was so busy that the bus company needed a second bus, which we got on.

About 20 miles north of New York City, the bus driver, while continuing to operate the vehicle, yelled back to the passengers, “Is someone in the bathroom?” The SO and I were sitting three rows from the back, and I hollered back, “Yes.”

“Is someone SMOKING in the bathroom?” My ultra-sensitive nose knew that someone had lit up somewhere near me. I didn’t want to rat out anybody, yet he was clearly seeking confirmation of what he already expected. “Yes,” I replied.

The bus driver pulled over on the side of the New York State Thruway, and walked towards the back. By this point, the woman in the loo had come out and returned to her seat.

He walked up to her and said, “There’s no smoking on this bus!” She said nothing.

“Do you want me to let you out here?” She replied, in a distinct French Canadian accent, “Oh, no, no!”

We get to Albany without further incident. But then everyone was supposed to get off our bus, with those traveling north of Albany getting on that first bus that left NYC.

The smoker did not understand; she thought she was finally being booted off for her transgression from a couple of hours earlier. No, they just needed one busload to go from Albany to Montreal. I’m not sure HOW she finally figured out to get on the other bus.

THAT smoker I ALMOST felt sorry for.
***
The Great American Smokeout is today. Tobacco undoubtedly contributed to the deaths this year alone of our friend Bonnie, actor Leonard Nimoy, and many others. Chewing tobacco killed baseball Hall of Famer Tony Gwynn last year. The sooner one quits, the better.

“TMI, mommy!”

“Mommy, everybody on the bus can hear you!”

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License.

As someone who takes the bus at least part of the way to work most days, I am regularly reminded why I hate listening to other people’s cellphone conversations, and why some public conveyances thankfully ban the use of those contraptions.

I’m sitting across a woman and her daughter, about ten, give or take a year, on the CDTA (local) bus. The mom is on the phone talking to her friend, and I’m not paying attention, until she says: “Do you know what I really hate about Eddie*? He comes into the bathroom when I’m trying to pee and s###!” Then she goes on about how, when she closes the bathroom door, he pounds on the door and demands to know what she’s doing in there. And she repeats her intentions.

At this point, the daughter says, “TMI, mommy!” She actually used the initials, rather than “too much information.” But either the mom doesn’t hear her or feels the need to continue with this important telephonic conversation.

The girl is sitting right across from me and looks at me with this exasperated gaze. I give her the “what can you do?” shrug. She says a little louder, “Mommy, everybody on the bus can hear you!” This was probably true.

But the mom continues. She said, on her phone, just before I got off, “You know, we were going to get married today. Well, THAT’S off!” And I know TMI, so I nod affirmatively to myself.
***
Sidebar: I went to the Tulip Festival on Mother’s Day weekend. As soon as he sees me, the guy at the CDTA booth immediately knows me by name. The one thing he noted is that, in my LAST blog post about CDTA, I mentioned a crazy woman on board. I’m sure he’ll love this one as well.

*Not his real name.
Thanks, XKCD

The “no time to blog” blogpost

Our office may be moving back downtown.

This is how I know it was a busy autumn: this year will be the first in a decade that I did not donate blood at least six times, only five. To be fair, I DID actually go down to the Empire State Plaza (the Egg, for you Albanians) back in late October but could not get into the building. As it turns out the Governor was holding a booze summit and so I couldn’t get to the regular donor site, though I had time before my dentist appointment.

I seem to have taken off a lot of days from work in November, one for Hurricane Sandy, one to take the daughter to the ER, one to go see Wicked, two because my wife was having two minor surgeries and my daughter had a half-day of school, two for Thanksgiving, a half-day for a doctor’s appointment. As Yul Brynner regularly said, “et cetera, et cetera.”

The local bus company changed its routes, and I found myself waiting an hour for transportation that was never going to come.

The Daughter is going to bed later AND getting up earlier, cutting into my wife’s prep time for school, my blogging time, and both of our sleep times.

I performed in two different choir concerts, plus attended a Friends of the Library event, a comic book show, and did the usual stuff such as raking. Then Sunday past, attended TWO concerts.

Since it’s a low content/energy day, let me tell you the latest rumor at work: our office may be moving back downtown, I’m guessing around May, since we moved almost eight years ago in that month. I currently work in Corporate (frickin’) Woods, this soulless suburbany place with no sidewalks, and the drivers motor around it as though there are no pedestrians. Save for a bank, it has none of the amenities that downtown offering, such as going to the post office or a store or a restaurant, or MY bank, or my eye doctor or my dentist. I’d be taking off far fewer days if we were downtown. It takes me two buses to get to work now, but it would only take me one if we were back in civilization, with no fewer than six different buses that could get me from downtown to within three blocks of my home.

A real blog post manana. And the next day. And the 8th…

I saw someone on Facebook pass along the suggestion to send Christmas cards to “A Recovering American Soldier” at Walter Reed Hospital. PLEASE DO NOT DO THAT. As this Snopes.com report explains: “In these times of heightened security, mail from strangers to unnamed soldiers must, for everyone’s safety, must be discarded unopened.” You CAN send cards via Holiday Mail for Heroes, a Red Cross project, but it must be postmarked by December 7, or it won’t reach its intended destination either.

According to the NY Times, Bazooka, creators of Bazooka Joe gum, will be getting rid of their famous comic strips.

Getting to Work Has Just Gotten Tougher

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.

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