Talking Out Of Turn

I would love to know why there was a pack of cards (hard to see here, thanks to my dreadful cell phone camera) scattered across the grass and the seat at the bus stop yesterday afternoon.

Bus Stop with Cards, July 2008

Wednesday morning, I got up late, and didn’t make it to the Park-n-Ride in time for the bus I wanted (the Highland Express which would take me all the way to Emerson Park, from which I could grab a light rail all the way to Shrewsbury and then be one bus and one half-hour from work).

Instead, I got the next bus, which meandered through the city until it got to the Civic Center, from which I was able to hop on the light rail. Boy, I can’t even count how many stops there were. I had to watch carefully to be sure that I got off before the Civic Center… and I missed, got off at the next one, and then walked to the train from there.

Other than that, Wednesday actually went pretty well. I was at work on time, rather than fifteen minutes early. No problem. I drove the car home, so I could be sure to make it in time for church.

Thursday was the grand experiment. No safety net; I didn’t even drive the car to work. I made the Highland Express to Emerson Park (note to self: getting there at 4:45 still leaves time to go get a sausage biscuit before the bus leaves at 5:15), got on the light rail to Shrewsbury, and then hopped the bus to work from there. Two hours, fifteen minutes, or the minimum possible time in transit. The only way to do better would be to minimize the wait for the bus in Shrewsbury somehow; that’s always 10-15 minutes, but there doesn’t appear to be anything I can do about that. Fifteen minutes early for work.

At this point, I have successfully made it to work three times, and never successfully made it home. Twelve one-way trips is the break-even point for a monthly bus pass for me, or six round trips. I’m one-fourth of the way to this experiment being worth it.

Now, the trip home. To be happy with my margins, I need to get to the Civic center before 5pm; that will leave me three chances to catch a Highland Express. The trip in was completely uneventful; the light rail is so much faster than the bus! I got to the Civic Center at 4:35, thinking that I had plenty of time to catch the 4:50… and then I saw the Highland Express drive by me, in much the same place it passed me on Tuesday, headed away. How could it be fifteen minutes early? I was very frustrated by this, and Twittered as such.

Still, I now had time to really find the bus stop. I walked to the Kiel Auditorium corner of 14th and Market and looked. Here was a bus stop, the only one on the block, and it was marked as one of my county bus stops as well as the St. Louis Metro sign. This seemed like a likely place for it.

While I stood there, fuming because now I would have to wait until well after 5, I saw a Highland Express go by on the other side of the street and about lost it. After all this, they couldn’t count that as a stop, could they? But gradually I noticed that the bus couldn’t have gotten into the far right lane, and therefore it couldn’t have stopped there. That wasn’t the stop. I finally began to get over my worry that I was going to have to call Tracey again.

I started looking carefully at the buses going by, so I could get some idea of the order in which they came. And then, miracle of miracles, there was the Highland Express, on my side of the road, in the far right lane. I hailed it, it stopped. I got on. I checked the time… 4:50pm, just turning to 4:51. Wow. I hadn’t missed the 4:50 after all.

And I was home free. No more changes until I got out at the last stop. I finished the book I had started that morning on the bus, and let myself fall asleep. I didn’t fully wake up until we got on the highway that the Park-n-Ride is on.

But before I fell asleep, I called Tracey, just to let her know that she didn’t need to come get me.

Success! By the end of Thursday, I had five one-way trips, and two of those counted as a round trip.

Tip: don’t give up. Just because you can’t figure it out today doesn’t mean that you won’t ever figure it out.

On the other hand, you have to decide if it’s worth it. I mean, the best possible time, as measured on the way home last night, was again two hours and fifteen minutes. That’s a minimum of four and one-half hours on the road. Add in the time waiting at two bus stops (not counting the Park-n-Ride time), and it comes out to five hours, plus the eight hours of work I have to put in. Thirteen hours, fourteen if things don’t go quite as planned.

That’s a long time to devote to your work every day. That’s seventy hours out of your week, or nearly half of it. 168-70=98. Now factor in decent sleep, say eight hours a night. 98-56=42. That’s forty-two hours out of a week that you won’t be asleep or working or going to or from work. Now figure in morning ablutions (42-7=35). Now figure in church (for me, that’s six hours a week, or 35-6=29). You now have 29 hours/week to be a spouse and parent, to talk to friends and family, to eat meals.

The only way that this is going to work is to either compromise on the bus riding, or to redeem the time spent on the bus. Use that to talk to people on the phone, to study for church or Bible study or for yourself. Maybe get a video iPod, if you just gotta watch TV. I don’t know. I don’t much enjoy watching TV without other people. Maybe it’s time to cut back on that.

Hey, it’s not like I’ll be seeing Doctor Who again any time soon.

At the end of the month, I’ll try to remember to report on how the grand experiment went, and how much money I saved doing things this way (and how much time I spent on it).

Update: a week has 168 hours. Duh.

Tuesday morning, I walked four blocks to the hospital near my house, where the Highland EZ bus stop is. And I waited.

After about twenty minutes, I looked carefully at the bus stop sign, and realized that it said that I needed to call for a ride, so I did. At this point I discovered that this bus wouldn’t run until 7:30. It was about 4:45am at this point.

Tip: read the bus schedules. Read all of them. Read the fine print. Give that fine print time to sink in.

Now remember, my car is still at work. The Park-n-Ride lot in Highland is more than a mile away from my house, and it’s cold. So, I took my wife’s car and drove to the Park-n-Ride. There, waiting for me around 5am, was the Highland Express, and it was the one that would take me straight to a light rail station! This was good news.

From here I was able to hop a train that got me all the way to Shrewsbury, or well over three-quarters of the way to work. Now I had to find Bus 11, which would take me right in front of work. Next problem: immediately a Bus 11 showed up, but its destination was the Civic Center; that is, it seemed to be going the wrong way.

Suddenly I was plagued with doubt. Is there a chance that the sign was wrong? Or that I was misinterpreting it? It didn’t seem likely that source rather than destination would be imprinted on the bus. I let that one go, and then waited, and waited, and waited. And eventually I called Tracey to ask her to double-check on this.

As I waited, I walked around the bus stop at the foot of Shrewsbury MetroLink station, and realized that there were blue poles in the ground, with labels. Two said “11,” one also said “Civic Center Stn,” and the other also said “Meramec College.” Bingo. I figured this out right about the time Tracey told me that one should have already been there. Within a minute a bus marked “11 Meramec College” hove into view, and I could finally be fairly sure that I was on the right track.

Next problem: you have to tell the driver where to stop. He’ll only stop at bus stops. Thankfully there was somebody with me on the bus who was also stopping there, so she activated the “stop requested” line by pulling it, in plenty of time for the driver to pull over. I was across the street from work, but that’s OK; the alternative was to wait at least ten minutes for him to go to the college and circle back. Not going to do that.

Tip: If you’re going to make a mistake in pulling the line to ask the driver to stop, stop early rather than late.

You don’t know how far he will have to go after the stop before he can stop again. Better to have your goal in sight and have to walk a little farther than you had planned, then to have to double back several blocks, particularly if you’re already late.

All told, that trip was about 2 hours and 15 minutes. Not too shabby, overall. I’ve spent more time than that when I hit rush hour full-on, but not usually.

For the trip back home at the end of the day, I thought I’d experiment a little bit. This wasn’t a good idea, because I still hadn’t worked out the details of catching the Highland Express in St. Louis on my way back home, but I figured it couldn’t be hard. I decided to take the bus all the way instead of taking the light rail, to see how much slower it would be.

I boarded Bus 11 before 4:30; in fact, I got to the stop just as it was coming over the hill toward me. Better timing could not have been achieved.

It took an hour and a half to get all the way to the Civic Center again. We were stopping practically every other block, all the way down Chippewa. It was miserable. But I didn’t doubt that I would still make it to the Highland Express.

Finally it got to the Civic Center (which I would have reached at least half an hour sooner had I taken the light rail), and I started working my way up the street to the corner of 14th and Market, which is where I thought the Highland Express would be. I could find any signs indicating that that bus would be there, though. I wasn’t sure what to do. Suddenly it dawned on me that I didn’t know what side of the street it would be on. After some thought (not enough), I got on the side opposite Scottrade Center, and was confident that I could run to catch the bus if I could just flag it down. Then I waited.

Thankfully the Express buses from Illinois are green, as opposed to the white and blue buses run by Metro St. Louis. I was looking back and forth for the bus, to be sure I didn’t miss it. Then, suddenly, I was overtaken by fear again. I checked the schedule.

It was 6:00pm, and the very last Express would stop there at 6:05pm. I watched as two buses crossed 14th Street, but neither stopped nor turned down Market. Should I have been over there instead? I didn’t know.

I called Tracey to verify. Indeed, that would be the last bus. While I was talking to her, the “14X Highland Express” turned onto Market… on the other side of the street. I frantically flagged and waved my arms. No matter. It stopped at a red. I ran for it. The light turned green, it kept going, and I stood there, realizing that I had once again missed the bus, and had no chance of catching a bus to Highland any more.

I was going to have to rely on Tracey again, except that this time she didn’t have a vehicle either; I had used her van to get to the Park-n-Ride.

She suggested that our friend and fellow churchmember Val could drive her to the lot, then she could take the van and come get me at Shiloh-Scott. I agreed. I grabbed the light rail to the end of the Illinois line and got to Shiloh-Scott a little after 7pm. By the time we got home I had been out of the house for nearly sixteen hours, and the trip from work to home was three and a half, counting the drive from Shiloh-Scott to Highland.

Mission #2, failed. No more experimenting tomorrow; I would take the light rail. But I would be driving home anyway, because I couldn’t yet trust the system to get me to church on time for the Bible study on Wednesday nights. Phooey. So, I guess we’ll pick this up on Thursday.

Monday afternoon, I walked out of my building and took my first tentative steps toward the world of public transportation.

And watched my bus drive away. Missed it by about seventy seconds.

Tip: don’t trust the schedules.

Unless you’re at the beginning or end of the line, the bus will not be on time. And unless this is a station or some sort of Very Official Stop, the bus won’t stop for you unless you can get their attention. Getting there a little early is always a good thing. Most lines in my area, however, have a bus come by every twenty minutes or so.

And sure enough, twenty minutes later the next bus comes by… on the other side of the four-lane highway.

Tip: be on the right side of the highway for your bus.

This bus was my alternate, my Plan B, and I missed it. But that’s OK, because:

Tip: there will almost always be another bus.

And when I was about to despair, there it was again: Bus 11. Now, the next choice: do I take it to the nearest light-rail station, or do I take it all the way to the Civic Center and try to walk to make it to the Highland Express?

Tip: if you aren’t somebody who can think on the fly about multiple bus and train schedules, then arrange multiple schedules beforehand and print them out or write them down.

For every stop have at least a couple of Plan B’s. OK, I took Bus 11 to Shrewsbury; do I want to get on a train to the Civic Center, Emerson Park, or Shiloh-Scott? Have at least a couple of ways home, and get it all on paper; don’t trust that, because Bus X stops at Station Y all morning, that it will also swing back through there every time it passes through in the afternoon. Public transportation schedule makers are sadists and like nothing more than to cause people to feel like they might have to live at the bus station. When they grow up they want to be airport administrators.

Those of you who are mathematically inclined might have noticed that having two Plan B’s for every stop will produce a tree with 2^x possible locations at which you may end up (where x is the number of stops in one proposed route to get home). You don’t have to do that; converge when possible. However, it’s good to end up with a couple of different penultimate stops in your planning. You have to be ready to route around damage (whether it’s water main damage or your own brain damage).

Don’t fret because this sounds complicated. I’m describing this for people who need rules and systems in unfamiliar territory. Maybe you can just go up to the bus driver, smile, and ask questions. Some of us can’t, and we have to do homework instead.

So, I get on the bus, and thankfully my eye falls immediately on the card stripe reader for passes. Get a pass if you can do it and if it makes sense financially; they’re a lot easier to deal with. No hassle about getting them validated, or having exact change. You need exact change if you’re not going to use a pass or prepaid ticket of some kind; either that, or you will just have to resign yourself to losing money. The driver can do nothing about this sort of thing. I ran my card, it beeped, and I sat down in the first seat I saw.

Tip: if you’re going to be on a while, move toward the back.

Why? Because the front of many buses is for the handicapped and infirm. Rather than having to get up later, just get out of the way now. Etiquette seems to be to fill up the front when there are no seats without immediate neighbors in the back, though.

First time on the bus? Keep an eye on your surroundings. You may have to do the unthinkable: pull the cord and ask for the bus to stop. Don’t worry, it’s not hooked to the brakes; that was a Lucy episode about a train. In my town they want you to signal a block before your stop, to give time to get over and get parked. Pulling the cord gives the signal to stop at the next stop for you. Sometimes they can arbitrarily stop for you; it depends on traffic, the street condition, the shoulder, and so forth. Otherwise it won’t be until the next bus stop sign. Most of our streets have them every 2-3 blocks, so that’s not so bad.

Don’t fall asleep: odds are, nobody will wake you up. They will look at you with pity and leave you to snooze your way to the main station.

Don’t bring food or drink; it’s probably not allowed, and even if it is, it’s rude. Everybody around you will either want what you have (and not say anything; people on buses in my town seem to be pretty polite, all things considered), or you’ll slosh your Aquafina all over them. And nobody wants that. Gum seems to be OK if you’re not annoying about it. Blowing bubbles is out. Chaw is right out.

If you brought something on the bus, keep it under control, whether it is a little human being or your overstuffed Cisco Networkers backpack with a laptop, two years of insurance paperwork, screwdriver, sonic screwdriver (yes, I have one), Vise-Grips, spare ethernet cables, spare 10Mbps hub, three outdated Knoppix CDs, and E. E. “Doc” Smith paperback. (I don’t read much Sci-Fi lately, but I thought I’d go with something fun to read on my scary first couple of trips. Geerhardus Vos will come next week.) Don’t let it lean on other people, or wander around the bus floor, or get caught in somebody’s wheelchair spokes. You don’t know who on the bus will be Dr. Banner the noted radiation scientist, just waiting for something to tick him off.

Bus drivers don’t think it’s funny when you try to ride for free by using said sonic screwdriver on the bus pass reader, by the way. I don’t think any of them watch Doctor Who. I can’t imagine what would happen if you brought a toilet plunger onboard and announced their extermination, but somehow I think that might be worse.

In warmer weather (which yesterday was), women will get on the bus wearing shirts that, er, stretch the words on the front horizontally a bit. Resist the urge to try to read the words, guys. You don’t know if the other guy they got on with is their husband, brother, or some other guy wondering what her shirt says. But you don’t want to find out the hard way. Make a covenant with your eyes. There are plenty of good moral reasons not to be doing that but I am focusing on self-preservation at the moment.

My choice soon enough was this: light-rail through a small part of town, or bus? The bus had stops. The light-rail did too, but those go a lot faster. I opted for the light rail.

This is not automatically a bad idea by any means, but I had already diverged at this point from the plans I had made beforehand. Sure, I would get to the Civic Center faster, but I was now opened up to the temptation of completely walking away from my schedule and trying something else, thinking that somehow I now grokked the whole system. (How odd; Firefox knows that “grokked” is a word.)

Tip: make no assumptions about lines you haven’t studied carefully, unless you find a map for them.

I decided that I would be making such good time that I would just stay on the light-rail until Emerson Park, when I could catch the last Highland Express bus. If that didn’t work out, then surely there would be another bus I could grab…

Then I got to Emerson Park, and I had missed the Highland Express by over half an hour, and there were no buses from my county transit system, because I wasn’t in my county. Oops.

I ended up riding to the end of the line and realizing that, indeed, there were no buses to connect me to my home, or even to another bus stop that I could connect to home. I was done. I had to call Tracey to pick me up.

Mission #1 failed: we spent money because she had to come pick me up. Not nearly as much as driving out to get me at work, but probably as much as it would have cost me to come home in the car.

But Tuesday I would make it work: bus service from door to door! That was the plan, anyway.

The problem:

We moved in August to Highland, Illinois. Love it. Great town, great people. Nice house. Generally affordable. The downside? I work in Kirkwood, Missouri. 47.5 miles away, according to Google Maps.

At current gas prices, I pay about $240/month for the privilege of driving to and from work each day. That’s not counting the 450 miles/week and over 22,000 miles/year of wear and tear I put on my car. That’s an oil change more often than every other month (and I don’t have the screwjacks or the dexterity to change my own oil anymore). That’s a new set of tires every couple of years, realistically. My car is paid for, but still, at this rate I’ll have to get a new one in a few years. Not counting new car payments and major repairs, I’ll end up shelling out over 5% of my gross pay for the privilege of driving to work and continuing to get paid. If we use the AAA value of $0.56/mile depreciation of a car, I’m actually paying closer to 23% of my gross to drive to work. (Does 56 cents/mile seem insane to you? Because it does seem a bit high to me, but it’s probably assuming that I buy new cars and trade them at between 30-50,000 miles.)

(Is this sounding like a Dave post? Sorry, go there for the financial advice, come back here for snarkiness and Calvinism.)

The first obvious answer is to carpool. Two problems: first, that means I have to keep a relatively regular schedule, but the nature of my work is against that, and second, I have to know somebody somewhere near Highland or at least on my way. I work with a few Illinoisans but they keep more regular schedules than I do.

Second answer is public transportation. A monthly pass for all public transportation (buses, light rail, etc.) in my area costs $60. Right there, in gas alone, I have saved 75% of my money. If we use the AAA numbers, I have just regained 20% of my gross income.

Wow.

At what cost, though? The shortest bus+lightrail route is about 2.5 hours; the shortest drive I can reasonably expect, if I miss rush hour somehow, is an hour. So assuming the best for both, I have just added 150% to my drive time. Wow. Five hours’ commute plus eight hours’ work is thirteen hours, leaving me eleven hours for sleep, time with the wife and kids, Wednesday night Bible study, and the like. At worst, I could go from three hours’ round trip to six hours’ round trip. So make that ten hours for sleep etc. If I got the sleep I really needed, I’d have to get up, shower, shave, etc., go to work, come home, eat dinner, and fall into bed within an hour of getting home.

But man, would it be worth it, to regain the lost 20% of my income?

Maybe.

So, the experiment begins. I’m going to see how often I can use public transportation instead of driving to and from work. I will usually leave my car at work (the nature of my job is such that I might need to drive during the day; that’s slightly more likely than my having to come in late, and if I do that, I can usually borrow my wife’s vehicle).

First I have to figure out the schedule. But I’m already in trouble.

See, I don’t live in Missouri; I live in Illinois. We have a different system for buses than Missouri does. Thankfully I can buy one monthly pass to cover both, but nobody will stitch the timetable together for me; I have to do that myself.

Second, I live on the absolute outer limits of the bus system. No bus drives out further than the Highland Express.

The Highland Express will take me all the way to downtown St. Louis (which as you can see from the map is about two-thirds of the way to work), but it won’t drop me off at any single point at which I could pick up the exact bus I need to take me the rest of the way. At best, it’s a walk between the two. At worst, it’s a connecting bus, or the light rail.

Don’t get me wrong, I like the light rail. And the buses aren’t bad. It’s the scheduling that kills me. That, and my awful secret.

I don’t know how to ride the bus.

It’s true. I am bewildered by the rules, the abbreviations, the schedules. Bus 11 goes from the Civic Center (which, as far as I can tell, isn’t a Civic Center, but is Scottrade Center, which was Savvis Center, which was Kiel Center, which is where the Blues just kept on biting it last season) to Meramec College, and among its ins and outs it drives right past my building. But can I get on a bus that claims its destination is the other side of the route, and trust that it will wrap back around and take me to the side I want? Maybe, maybe not. If I take the light rail, and catch Bus 11 in the middle, which one do I take? Will it be labeled correctly?

How come there are only two times in the day when the Highland Express stops at a light rail station in Illinois? Why can’t it stop there every time, or not at all?

And why the dickens don’t the light-rail conductors speak English? I mean, they claim to speak English, and what I can make out isn’t inflected too much. But they turn from coherent speakers into glossolalian freaks when they get in front of the burned-out microphone and the corroded sound system. If they’re talking directly to you, you can clearly hear them say that they want to see your ticket or pass. But if they’re talking into the box, they might as well be from Betelgeuse. Does this stop at Emerson Park or at Shiloh-Scott? The answer? “Zhamerskark.” Wait a minute, this train can’t go to Norway! Stop at once and let me out!

And what are the rules for eye contact on the bus? I’m facing somebody across the aisle; is it OK to look over their head and out the window? If I look at the floor, do they think I’m eyeing their purse? If I look forward, I’m staring straight into somebody’s hairnet. Can I do that?

Is it rude to talk on the cell phone? What about the Bluetooth handsfree device? Where in the world do I look to indicate that I’m not talking to anybody on the bus, but to somebody in Highland, the town I desperately want to see again before I die of shame because everybody knows I don’t belong here, I’m not good enough for the bus!

I will try to share useful tips and things I learn as my experiment unfolds. I haven’t really been successful yet; I count success as not calling Tracey and asking her to look things up on Metro’s website, and not asking her to pick me up because I ended up at the end of the light-rail line and there are no buses running anymore.

Yes, that was last night, thank you for asking.

Update: Ack! This is my route! A water main break? Diversion!? What does that mean?

I mean, there’s just one link, followed by another, followed by another…

OK, bad joke. But obviously all actual content here is getting swallowed by occasional links and brief commentary. Why is that?

I’ll let my co-conspirators tell their own tale, if they like. In my own case, TIWIARN (This Is Where I Am Right Now):

1. I’m teaching Wednesday night Revelation studies at church. Oh, and Men’s Sunday School. Oh, and I’m preaching next Sunday, and again two weeks after that.
2. Our wonderful insurance company decided to cancel our homeowners insurance without a clear warning because we didn’t have a porch railing up. Tracey and I did the front porch last weekend, and the back porch will be done this week sometime, probably at the expense of sermon preparation time. It’s either that, or do it anyway later, and get new insurance.
3. The fun of my physical condition progresses. However, to stave off unwanted advice about what to do about it, I’m not going to talk about that anymore here.
4. I’m trying to memorize 1 Timothy. For some reason I can’t get past 1 Timothy 1:3-8. Why do you think that is?
5. I have to get ready to upgrade this blog to Wordpress 2.3; all my plugins aren’t compatible yet, but I have hopes that soon they will be.
6. I am behind on updating the sermon website (two weeks behind, at the moment).
7. I am working on configuring my new computer, which I have had for over a month and still don’t do much with because I haven’t had time to customize it to death. In short: HP P4, erased Vista, installed Debian. There’s a shock, hm? The surprising thing is how very useful Linux is on the desktop right now.
8. We (the family) are playing what I think is a very fun game that I will likely not talk about here. Maybe I’ll blog that someplace else if I get time to write that much.
9. Extended family upheavals; more I cannot say right now.
10. I’m trying to figure out how public transportation works in St. Louis, well enough to start using it regularly for work. That’s more difficult than it sounds; I live on the outskirts of the bus lines.
11. I’m supposed to be kicking the tires of a new hosting solution for Triablogue. I haven’t done much on that, for reasons given above.

That’s my excuse. You’re lucky I can keep up with the links at the moment.