This is another post for folks who live in Los Angeles but it may apply elsewhere…
Have any of you folks taken the bus anywhere lately?
You remember the bus…that thing that took you to school before you had a car? The long vehicle you rode with other people on it? If you don't know what I'm talking about, rent the first Speed movie from Netflix. It's an extremely realistic depiction of how it is on an actual Los Angeles bus.
Seriously: Up until late last year and not counting free shuttles, I hadn't been on a bus for over thirty years. I didn't even know what it cost to ride a bus in this town (answer: $1.25) and if it had occurred to me to take one somewhere, I didn't know which bus to get on to go anywhere I might want to go.
But lately, I've bused it a few times, usually when I had to go somewhere where the parking was impossible. Also, I had a little minor surgery a few weeks ago…nothing critical, nothing important. But it was one of those procedures where they don't want you to drive home, which means I couldn't drive there. So I took a bus there and had someone pick me up afterward. The trip there was a lot easier than I would have imagined. (And the same bus goes past the place where I take my car for servicing. When I've had to leave it there, I've taken a cab home, then taken a cab back. The bus will be so much simpler, to say nothing of cheaper.)
Los Angeles also has these things called Dash buses, which cost 25 cents to ride. If I need to go over to Cedars-Sinai Hospital — and I occasionally do — I can walk one block from my home to where the Dash will pick me up and take me where I need to be in not much more time than it would take me to drive over and find a place to park. That's not even getting into what you spend to park at Cedars-Sinai if you drive there. It's about the same per-hour cost as being a patient at Cedars-Sinai but the amount isn't covered by Blue Cross.
What has made this revolutionary new mode of transportation possible for me is that I discovered the MTA website. I guess most transit systems across the country have something like this but I was unaware of them. They have a form where you enter the two locations between which you need to travel and their database tells you how to get from one place to another and on which bus(es). I entered a number of places where I sometimes go and realized that with some of them, a bus might be easier than taking my car, hassling with traffic, finding a parking place and paying for that parking. (It was twelve bucks the last time I parked in the medical building where my doctor is located. There's a bus that goes right there.) It's also environmentally better and while I'm not doing it for that reason, when I do take the bus I intend to say it's because of that.
If it's been a long time since you've taken a bus anywhere, you might want to take a look and see if it's easier than you think. It can also be fun. On the way in for that minor medical procedure, I got to talking with a lady who was wearing a jacket with the logo of the Rio Hotel in Vegas. She said she'd just gotten back from that town and I asked her how she did at the tables. She said, "Let me put it this way. Before the trip, I used to drive to work in a Mercury Marquis." I laughed all the way into surgery.