I hate public transport! There, I said it.
I find it to be a necessary evil, especially buses. Since I off-roaded my car I have had to use the bus network at least once a week, it's a total pain in the arse. Our local system is adequate to say at best. There's a bus every half an hour but the service stops at 8pm, so if you need to catch a bus home from a night out, you're pretty stuck.
The drivers are absolute nutters behind the steering wheel, in fact I measured the speed of today's driver on my GPS, he was going 15mph over the speed limit, nice going there mate!
The cost is disproportionate to the service as well. I have to pay £3.20 to travel around ten miles, which I find extortionate, especially more so as there was a service in Wales that only asked 50p of all travelers however far they wanted to go. Believe it or not, those buses were always full.
It might be just me, but each time I have to catch a bus it seems to be during the school run. Traffic is terrible so everything is running late and the whole vehicle is full of screaming kids, all swearing and loud, it really ticks me off. I sometimes feel like I should stand up and start throwing 14 year olds out of the window of the second level of the double decker! It might not be politically correct for me to do so, but it would relieve the stress on my dwindling patience.
I also find there's always a smelly old tramp traveling on each bus, it must be a position that these people get paid for to do just to annoy the other commuters. I've never seen this job advertised anywhere but it seems to be a prerequisite to be over 60, never shave, wear ragged clothing and above all, never wash. Your body odour should have a sentience, in fact, if it is up to standard you even have to pay for an extra ticket as the stench usually takes up an extra seat. If it's not up to gagging standard on a hot sunny day then you're just not doing it right.
Conversely, I rather like traveling on trains although the costs involved are not just astronomical, they're ethereal on a cosmological and religious scale.
For me to catch a train back to Wales would cost me in the region of £60 and it takes 3-4 changes depending on which service I take. The journey takes somewhere in the region of eight hours to travel around 175 miles. In a car it costs me £25 in fuel and on a good day I can make the run in around three and a half hours. People wonder why nobody uses public transport!
However, in my future plans, this is how I see myself traveling the world. I'm determined not to fly anywhere, I want to use trains, buses or boats, otherwise I have this overriding feeling that you miss the whole point of traveling through countries you have never been to. You see more, meet more people and experience the cultures and scenery of the area.
I certainly found this out when I went Inter-railing throughout Europe in my youth. Some of the journeys were arduous, the journey from Vienna to Berlin was 26 hours on a cramped train where we didn't have a booking, so we had so sit in the baggage container, a horror at the time but looking back it was a lot of fun.
But for today my journey on the bus is over, thank the deities. I suppose until I manage to downscale my car and get myself back on the road again, it is an evil I must endure.
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