John Zeitler

So today I had a better Pittsburgh Transit Experience than I did on Thursday.

Let me set the stage for you. Wednesday night I got it in my head that I wanted to take the bus to work from here on out, as it was (in theory) possible. I had schedules and a fairly strong sense of where I needed to be, and at what times, in order to safely convey myself to and from work. Turns out that getting to work wasn’t a problem at all– I got downtown fairly early, was able to get a hot chocolate from a coffee shop, and was at the door to work before 7:30a. Beautiful. Getting home, however, was a four-hour-long exercise in pain. First, I waited for half an hour at the stop I’d been dropped off at for the bus to take me back downtown, only to discover that it doesn’t stop there on the way back. I instead took a different line downtown, which then became an exercise in finding out where the Port Authority moved my stop for the one line that directly connects downtown to the area near my house. It would have been very helpful for them to put up a sign saying “this stop is closed, please go X blocks that way to catch your line”. Obviously, that didn’t happen. By the time I realized where I needed to be, I had already passed the deadline for the last run of that line anyway. So I caught another line which was supposed to take me directly there, but which instead dumped me off in Wilkinsburg (about halfway between downtown and my house). This was around 6:25p; bear in mind, I left work at 4:30p. I had to wait half an hour for a connecting bus to take me to the Monroeville Mall, which actually overshot where I needed to go but (naturally) didn’t take a route that went anywhere near my house. That line then landed immediately before the connector back to my house arrived… of course, that connector took the long and ridiculously windy path, overshooting my house twice more. By this point the dramamine I’d taken at 5:30a was starting to wear off, and I was starting to get very carsick. Conveniently this negated the ravenous hunger I’d been enduring since, oh, 4:35p.

That was Thursday. Today I managed to find all the correct stops and get there on time every time. I had enough time in transit to finish a game (almost– there was one last puzzle for me to solve), no less. I left work at 4:25p and arrived at the plaza near home at 5:30p, whereupon I had dinner at the Chinese buffet. Simple.

Despite the aggravation and tension involved in catching a bus constantly, I’m probably going to continue taking mass transit to work for three reasons. The first is that it forces me to get some amount of exercise in each day; specifically, the stop near work is about a quarter of a mile down a mild hill from the office, and the interval between the stops downtown is anywhere from three to six blocks. This averages out to about half an hour on foot each day, give or take. The second is because being on a strict timetable helps me with impulse control: I work near the hobby shop that hosts GASP, and if I had my car available every day, I would pretty much be going directly from work to the shop to dump money into Warhammer figures. Same goes for games and anime; removing the easy daily access to the store reduces the temptation to spend money there.

The third reason is that 99% of the hassle involved could be alleviated if I didn’t live out in the middle of East Nowhere, and as a result my next big task is to find someplace within reasonable access of a real bus line.