Tuesday, May 6, 2003
The 8:30 AM bus was about 5 or 10 minutes late. We got to Quintara and 25th and the driver, an extremely large black woman, stopped the bus in the middle of the street, unbuckled the suitcase strapped in next to the driver's seat, and got off the bus saying that she had to go to the bathroom. There's a small office building on the corner. She disappeared inside, and we waited. And waited. It was about 5 or 10 minutes before she returned. When she got back to the bus, I could hear that she was talking to someone trying to get on the bus. She wouldn't let the person on, saying that it wasn't a legal stop. The bus was already stopped for the past few minutes in the middle of the street—it would have been no effort for her to say, "Okay, come on in." I couldn't see the person trying to board because I was sitting too far away in the back of the bus, but I could hear her. The person asked the driver if the driver would wait for her at 24th—the next stop. The driver said that if she was there when she got to the stop, she'd let her on, but if she wasn't then she would have to wait for the next bus. She shut the door to the bus, started the engine, and took off. It was then as the bus passed that I saw that the woman trying to board the bus was an elderly woman with a cane, her hair white like cotton. As we approached 24th, a woman sitting near me on the bus called out to the driver, "Hey, would you just wait for her?" And the driver said to her, "Would you let me handle this?" and then muttered something about "you gotta teach 'em" and "otherwise they'll never learn." I watched with wrenched pain on my face as the elderly woman half-ran and half-strode as best as she could with her cane the full block of Quintara between 25th and 24th trying to catch the bus. The driver did indeed wait for her, but it seemed as though she did so only to teach her a lesson by delivering the moral after she boarded. After the elderly woman boarded, they exchanged a few more words, and then the issue was left alone. I rode the rest of the way to 9th and Judah feeling sick to my stomach about the utter lack of compassion I had just witnessed. This was the same driver who in the past I'd seen completely miss picking up an elderly Asian couple because the bus stop is at a location that allows parked cars and the couple probably did not want to wait standing in the street. (Every other driver has seen them every time.) This is the same driver who wouldn't let us out at 8th and Judah because it wasn't a legal stop, but then 10 seconds later make us all get off the bus at 9th and Judah—before the turn and at a location that wasn't a legal stop—because she had to turn right to go to the bathroom. This is the same driver that several times in the past I'd seen forget to make the bus kneel for elderly people and not pull close enough to the curb so that people would have to step in to the gutter then back up to the curb to get to the sidewalk. I've been mad before at the daily injustices that Muni delivers, but this event disturbed me. I've chatted with the woman on the bus who attempted to intervene. She has a cellphone, and she frequently calls Muni to complain about the service. From talking with her, I know that she has called many, many times to complain about our route—usually it's busses late or busses simply not showing up. She's called so many times that I feel it wouldn't do any good for me to call. After all, if they've heard all her complaints and service is still like it is now, would one more person really make a difference? Somehow I doubt it. What can I do? What can I do? I ran in to her on the way home. She had shown up at 9th and Judah at 6:15 PM. I got there right before 7:00 PM wondering if I missed the bus that usually comes at the top of the hour. She told me that the 6:30 bus had not shown up and that she called Muni and they told her they were planning to send a bus right over. At 7:15 PM it still had not shown up, so she called them back on her cellphone. After several minutes of them checking, they determined that the driver who had been told by a supervisor to change routes to Route 66 disobeyed the orders and was still on their route. We were told there would simply be no Bus 66 for the rest of the night. We had just missed a Route 43 which would have taken us to Forest Hill Station where we could catch the L train to our neighborhood. We waited and talked about the events which had transpired this morning. Another 10 minutes and we caught a Route 44 to Forest Hill Station. By the time we got home, it was 8:00 PM. I joked with her: "Hey, you got home within 2 hours—not bad for Muni, huh?" This trip is normally 15 or 16 minutes. Her trip today took 105 minutes. Me—my trip took about 400% longer than normal because if the 7:00 PM bus had shown up I would have been home by 7:15 PM.—At work I spent pretty much the whole day creating a statement of work for the PharmD student database on the web project. Slice of pizza by myself for lunch. Dinner at home by myself: leftover chow mein. Patrick went to a reading with Aaron Jason: Michael Lowenthal and Scott Heim read from Avoidance and Mysterious Skin.