Angrily commuting

I started my morning reciting insightful declarations like ‘fuck this bullshit,’ shouted down the street while I waited for the bus. Another cold snap fell and of course the buses run later the lower the temp dips. As I type this, my fingers ache after twenty minutes standing in the subzero, and the feeling has just started to come back to my toes. (Twenty below with windchill. Again.) I stood and stared in the direction the bus was supposed to come from, the seconds crawling by, and tried to remind myself that it’s not the driver’s fault. Lacking someone to blame generalized my irritation. I don’t know whose fault it is that the bus on my route is frequently fifteen to twenty minutes late, especially on the worst winter days, and not knowing who to be mad at makes me mad at everything. The sun’s too bright. The wind’s too biting. The ground’s too hungry as it sucks the warmth from the bottoms of my feet. And don’t get me started about motherfuckers in tall SUVs that get my hopes up because from a half-mile away look like they might be a bus. You people are terrible.

It doesn’t seem that complicated to me: we have a dangerously intense winter, every year there are awful arctic days. Commuters waiting for the bus are standing still exposed to the weather, not to mention being late to work. So put more buses on the road on cold days. And that means fund public transportation better. I’m pretty sure the people who are to blame for the current state of public transportation are not bus riders themselves, and at the moment I hate those fucking people. I just wish I knew their names and faces and the details about why transit works (or, fails to work) the way it does, so I could personalize that hatred.

In general large impersonal bureaucracies have this anger-diffusing effect. No one identifiable is to blame. Everyone deals with a small piece of an issue, and all those dealings add up to problems that no one person is to blame for, and no one person has to hear about, so that the people on the receiving end of the problem can’t even give a piece of their minds to someone who deserves it. Sure, I could call up the public transit customer service line and be rude to someone in a call center, but what’s the point? Part of being a decision-maker is having the ability to make sure no one has your phone number, and part of working in a call center is not having any decision-making power. That’s like a law of nature.

Part of what’s so stupid about the poor state of public transportation is that taking the bus can be really awesome. The bus is as fast as driving and it’s cheaper. I get an extra twenty minutes reading and writing time each way, at a minimum, as long as I get a seat (and with more buses on the road the buses would be less crowded). Better funded public transit would be more widely used public transit, which would reduce traffic congestion and air pollution and - you know what, fuck it, never mind. Public transportation is good and it’d be better if it was better funded and we’d all be better off and everyone knows this. At least everyone who isn’t a dipshit and there’s no point in addressing points to dipshits beyond “hey, dipshit, shut the fuck up.” Unfortunately the stupid fucking reality is that the dipshits are running the show.