Wasting Bus Riders’ Time

I usually take the bus. I don’t have too. I could drive everywhere that I go. But I don’t. I want to be a good citizen and I’m able bodied. So, I walk short distances and most of the time I take public transit when I’m going someplace that’s too far to walk convenient.

The whole thing comes down to this. I don’t want to waste the time of other members of my society. Why should I take up lots of road space when I don’t need to? Why should I take up parking spaces when I don’t need to? I know that whether or not I drive doesn’t make a much of difference to the cost of road maintenance. But it does make a difference to the amount of time that it takes other people on the road to get where they are going. If I’m in a car, I’m in they’re way. If you think for a minute about the amount of ‘in the way’ going on comparing fifty people on a bus to fifty people in cars, you’ll immediately see that having busses speeds up traffic for car drivers.  In fact, the more busses, the better traffic will be for car drivers (up to a point which we aren’t anywhere near).

After reading that, I bet you’re thinking that I’m going to say car drivers should pay for more busses. I’m not going to say that. I don’t mind if car drivers want to waste their own time.  People should be free to waste their own time.

You might think I’m going to make a utilitarian argument about car drivers who cut off busses. I could say that there are more people in a bus than in a car so the bus should have priority. I don’t really buy that. Ambulances don’t carry lots of people and I want to keep giving them priority. I will say that cutting off a huge vehicle like a bus is dangerously stupid. I haven’t ever been in a bus-car collision. I have been in a car-train collision. The car ended up upside-down. The train was fine. A bus isn’t as big as a train but I still bet a car would fair far worse if it was hit by a bus than the bus would fair.

Anyway, I do have something I want to complain about. Quite recently, I was on a full bus. I’d guess there were fifty people on the bus. Traffic was bad that day. Busses were running late. The bus pulled up to a stop and a passenger waiting for a different bus complained to the bus driver that her bus was thirty five minutes late. She wanted to know when his bus was going to arrive. The bus driver didn’t knows so he called the dispatch and everyone on the bus got to wait for three minutes while he found out that the bus was indeed late and they didn’t know exactly when it was going to arrive either.

I found this answer from the dispatch to be utterly unsurprising. I didn’t think the question needed to be asked. It’s the bus driver’s job to try to help passengers. So, he tried to help her. It’s her job as a member of society not to be thoughtlessly annoying.

Here’s a plausible story of what happened. Some moronic was texting while driving in rush hour and had an accident. The accident messed up traffic and a bus was delayed three quarters of an hour because of said traffic. And so, the woman at the bus stop figured that the way to deal with some twit with a phone wasting forty-five minutes of her time was to amplify that by wasting more time: three minutes times fifty people is two and a half hours of wasted human time.

I feel like using some pejorative terms to describe the question asker but instead I’ll just use sarcasm.

Thanks. That made the world a much better place.