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| Re: Epic [message #50363 is a reply to message #50361 ] |
Mon, 18 June 2012 21:54   |
EMoon
Messages: 665
Registered: March 2009 |
Senior Member |
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Sympathies for your transport problem, the failure of mechanics to call back, the lack of a loo at Muddlehampton's venue (there aren't zoning laws that require a loo in any building open to public use?)...but very glad that ringing at Curlyewe was enjoyable.
I do not understand why public transport planners think no one goes anywhere after getting home from work. It's not like roads are empty after 5:30 or 7 of whatever. On the contrary, as the hours get later, more and more drunks are out there crashing into power poles and one another. Our town has zero public transport, but the nearest real city, which has a fair cultural life downtown and suburbs out to the hinterlands (which are rapidly turning the hinterlands into a desert of identical boxes and wide streets) offers no way to get to and from the city except at rush hour. Every night in the city there are plays, concerts, movies, and so on. I would much rather take the commuter train (or even a bus) from the distal terminal (a little less than half-way from the city to here) into downtown midday, meet a friend for lunch, do some shopping, then go on to choir practice, and then take public transport from downtown back out to the back out after. It would save me, round-trip, around fifty miles of driving. But no.
And speaking of no hope, I'm going to wimp out of the choral concert this Saturday, as it involves another long, long rehearsal Wednesday night and a rehearsal Saturday morning--and I came home wiped out last Saturday just from the rehearsal. And there are Edits which are going slowly...I have no time to practice the difficult bits (of which there are many, with the music chosen.) Enough guilt is riding me already about the difficulty I'm having with the edits. (Speaking of which...I did take time off to read the Paris Review interview with Fran Lebowitz, who blithely announces she's not edited because she won't put up with it. How very nice for her.)
And now, back to work.
E
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| Re: Epic [message #50367 is a reply to message #50361 ] |
Tue, 19 June 2012 01:28 |
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 Diane in MN
Messages: 2733
Registered: October 2008
Location: Twin Cities, MN, USA |
Senior Member |
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When I lived outside Seattle, I used buses all the time, since the system was county-wide and not restricted to commuter service in outlying areas. I've lived outside the Twin Cities for twenty years and bus service has only started being visible in my area in the last couple of them, and it's commuter service only out here in the suburbs. And the schedules are, of course, a Piece of Work in the usual unhelpful manner. I have to acknowledge, though, that getting buses to run outside of commuter hours isn't going to happen any time soon unless demand really increases, and then only if people are willing to pay for it, possibly with higher fares and probably with higher taxes. Public transportation, alas, is not self-supporting even when heavily used.
"The point of books is to have way too many but to always feel you never have enough . . . " Louise Erdrich
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| Re: Epic [message #50395 is a reply to message #50370 ] |
Thu, 21 June 2012 18:34 |
Katsheare
Messages: 135
Registered: December 2011
Location: Berks., England |
Senior Member |
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| maggie wrote on Tue, 19 June 2012 19:56 |
Lots of sympathy for the buses! I have a great ability to make transportation not work even when everything is running properly - I went to see a show with a friend recently, and navigated the train fine... but then turned the six-minute walk to the theater into a 45 minute walk. That was also one of three epic transportation adventures within a couple of weeks... it takes talent, I'm telling you. TALENT.
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Ugh, sympathy to you about the 'but it's a straight line, how could you have gotten lost' walk to the theatre! My partner didn't believe me when I said I had a negative sense of direction until I got lost walking home from the store that I had walked to and was furthermore only about 6 blocks from our house. I now always make sure I have comfy shoes on.
I wonder if it's not an amount of usage issue with public transportation. There are relatively few busses around here (Berks.) and those there are are almost always pretty much empty. The trains, however, run very frequently during commuter hours (like every 20 minutes from London) and pretty freaking often during all the other hours. The people who do those websites figure that nobody will be looking anyway, so why should they bother getting the information right?
(I don't condone that attitude, but it does seem... rather humanly failing, I think.)
Huzzah for successful navigation of busses with changes and stuff! That'll show 'em!!
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| Re: Epic [message #50463 is a reply to message #50361 ] |
Mon, 25 June 2012 04:47 |
reading_fox
Messages: 22
Registered: September 2011
Location: Manchester ish |
Junior Member |
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Bit rushed and trying to catch up but ...
The KEY the BEST and as far as I'm concerned the ONLY WORTHWHILE place to look up any public transport websites is called TransportDirect (maybe with a hyphen?) it just works.
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