🚀 go-pugleaf

Scott Norwood <snorwood@redballoon.net> wrote:
>Patrick Tufts  <zippy@cs.brandeis.edu> wrote:
>>Stephen Gilman <ao668@freenet.carleton.ca> wrote:
>>
>>> Long live well-managed public transit!!!
>>
>>I take it you haven't tried San Francisco's MUNI.
>
>Or the Los Angeles County bus system.  If it's anywhere near as bad as
>it looks in Haskell Wexler's latest film ("Bus Riders' Union"), then it
>deserves to die a quick yet painful death.

When I was in high school, I used to ride the Honolulu city bus system
to school and back.  Now, the Honolulu bus system back in the days of
Mayor Fasi was amazing if you were 14 years old.  It went everywhere,
and as long as you didn't particularly care _when_ you were going to
show up someplace, it could take you anywhere on the island that you
wanted to go, for a fixed monthly fee.  It was certainly a wonderful
thing to have that kind of freedom to explore as a child.

Now, at the point where this story begins, the Honolulu bus system was
beginning to replace their fleet of 30-year-old Flxable busses with brand
new Grumman Flxable busses.  (I believe that this was supposed to be
pronounced "Flexable" although Aku on KKUA-AM used to call them "Fixable"
for reasons that will soon be apparent).

Because, you see, the new busses, although air conditioned and with tinted
windows and electrically operated windshield wipers (instead of vacuum-
operated ones that refused to operate when the buss was at idle), had a 
number of serious defects.  The most serious of which was the engine
mounts, which had a most interesting failure mode which resulted in
the engine being deposited on the road.

One day, I was coming home from school on the #52 Wahiawa bus, and we
had just passed the watercress farm in Pearl City (this shows how long
ago this was).  And with a shudder and lurch, the engine fell right
out of the back of the buss and onto Kamehameha Highway.

So, the driver called for help, and while the traffic clogged up around
us, we all sat by the side of the road waiting.  This was rush hour at
this point, and most of the busses on that route were full already.
Some took one or two passengers from our group into their packed mass.

Eventually I got a bus, one of the older ones, going mauka.  And even
though I had to stand up, and do without air conditioning, I was happy
to be moving.

Then the bus broke down.

I did eventually get home, about five hours late.  My mother refused to
believe what had happened, and accused me of making up outrageous stories.
She was convinced that I was out doing something degenerate rather than
believe the truth.

And that's my public transit story.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra.  C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."