we’re going to be down to one car for most of the month of january and we’ve been trying to figure out how to handle the hectic schedules of three people that have to go in basically three different directions on a daily basis.
about half a block down our street is a bus stop, but in the almost two years that we’ve lived there we can count on the fingers of one hand how many times we’ve actually seen a bus and two of those occasions have been in the last week. but with such an auspicious sign, i decided to go look at the schedule. not that schedules mean much to the nashville mta, a couple years ago when we were still a one car family i decided for the sake of practicality to take a bus home. it should not have been a big deal, i would get to the stop before the night schedule began and get home at some reasonable hour. the best laid plans of mice and men… i waited for close to an hour with sight of a bus and when i did see one it was off duty.
i like public transportation, if it functioned properly here, i would be the first person to stop driving. i grew up using the public transportation system in trinidad and that was mostly dysfunctional at best. when i interned in NY, it took a couple of weeks, but once i figured out the schedule, i could get from one side of town to the next with the greatest ease, moving from bus to subway and back again. in london, vic’s visit was made infinitely easier with week long family passes and one of the high points was sitting at the front on the top level of a double-decker bus and taking our own public transport tour of st. paul’s and the house of parliament instead of the extravagant grey line tours.
school reopens next week and i think we’re going to give the boy chick a shot of taking the bus home a couple days a week and see how it works out. as much as i would like to make this a regular thing, the nashville mta is far to flawed to make it practical. in a city as spread out as nashville, there are not enough routes. couple that with obligatory transfers at the central hub downtown, it makes any sort of crosstown commute within a reasonable time frame impossible.
